What I wish I knew about Going Viral 20 years ago

The size of your vision determines the size of your success. Yet most of us still chase short term likes, quick views and immediate gratification on social media. Now in this video I will teach you how visionary creators turn simple ideas into multi million and billion dollar empires. You'll discover the critical mindset shifts needed to move from chasing trends to building something extraordinary. It is not just about visibility, it's it's about maximizing your impact. So are you ready to dream bigger, create smarter and truly leverage the power of social media? Let's start here. I want to do an exercise with you. So take a deep breath and then close your eyes. And with your eyes closed, I want you to imagine standing on a stage and this stage is in a sold out Stadium with 100,000 people hanging on your every single word. How would you approach that moment? What would you say? What would you do with that many people paying attention to what you want to tell them? Now I want you to visualize your last social media post. Imagine delivering it to that same sold out stadium. How would it land? What would you do differently to take advantage of that opportunity? Now open your eyes. The reality is social media gives us that stadium moment every single day. That is the power of these platforms. Now if any of you are having anxiety about I can't talk to that many people who am I or I don't want to stand on stage. Well, let me share a little bit of a tip with you that I learned from Taylor Swift when I worked with her early on in her career. One of the most amazing things about Taylor that made her so successful is that she understood that social media is not a one to many platform. It is a one to one platform. So if we think about when we engage with social media, we're on the couch, we're in the bed, we're on the bus, we're on the train, we're consuming it by ourselves. We're not sitting in a movie theater all watching social media together. So if you have that anxiety, like I couldn't talk to 100,000 people. When you're designing content, just design it for one person as if you're thinking about the single person on the other side of the screen. It's a one to one communication platform. So I want to give you a little bit of background about myself and where I started. So you know that question that you always ask young kids about, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? Well, the funny thing is my answer would change every single time based upon the last movie I Watched. So if I watched a movie about a firefighter, I would answer, I want to be a firefighter. If it was about a detective, I wanted to be a detective. It was about a baseball player. I want to be a professional baseball player. I loved movies so much. I was completely captivated by them. I love movies so much that once I grew older and it was time to go to university, I. I decided to go to film school. So when I finished film school, I decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue a career of film. And this was back in 2005. And like everybody else, I had to start at the bottom. I had to make coffee copies, deliveries, basically doing the grunt work for the first movie studio that I worked for. And I really wanted to break through. I wanted to connect with the studio executives, producers and directors because I wanted to get into that creative process. I didn't want to be making coffee for people my entire career. So when those higher ups, those people that I wanted to connect with, asked me, brendan, why did you move to la? I would tell them, well, I want to be a film producer. And the reality is I could see everybody's eyes glaze over because I was just one of a million people. So I knew I needed to find a better hook. I needed to find my personal hook point to be able to stand out and forge the. Those connections. So what I did is I took a step back and I started to analyze all of the people in the office, like, what was stressing them out, what was exciting to them, and what was the interesting thing that I saw was that every time we finished a movie, there'd be a sense of anxiety and stress that would come over the studio office. Why? Because we invested tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content, and then we were going to invest tens of millions of dollars more to market that piece of content. But the movie industry is completely different than any other industry. You don't have years or decades to build brand awareness around a company or around a brand. You literally have months. You have months to get hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this single piece of content. And if you don't, you it's utter failure. You could lose tens of millions of dollars. So that's where that sense of anxiety was coming across. So while I was this production assistant moving from set to set, doing all these deliveries and coffee and things of that nature, I was watching these young creators on my phone and my desktop that were creating content on these new things called social media platforms. And they were Connecting with millions of people, literally from their bedrooms, using nothing but more than a webcam. Again, this was in 2005, 2006, so I literally had a front row seat to media distribution. Now, a lot of people saw this as a novelty, and I don't blame them, because at the time, you know, social media, it wasn't really a real thing. At the time, it was a platform for people to post karaoke clips or cat videos. But I saw a massive opportunity where. Where these people that were creating content were able to connect with millions of people around the world, literally from their bedrooms. So with this in mind, I started to kind of strategize the first social media strategies for movies, because, again, I was looking for my hook. I was looking for my hook point to really provide value to the people that I wanted to connect with at the highest levels. So back in 2005, when I started, MySpace had 25 million users. They were the biggest player in the space. Facebook only had 6 million, and YouTube had 8 million. So this is a far cry from the 5.2 billion people that use these platforms today. Now, in 2006, when I was working for the first movie studio in my career, YouTube had made a jump from 8 million to 20 million. Again, this is, you know, a big difference between what it is today, where there's 2.5 billion people using YouTube. But at the time, in 2006, we had this movie coming out called Crank with Jason Statham. Now, this movie was a bit small in terms of action movies, so the budget on this was only $12 million. Now, to some of you, that may seem like a lot of money, but if you think about, you know, action movies, they're typically starting at at least $100 million and going up from there. And that doesn't even include the marketing costs. So needless to say, we needed a way to really stand out and make a difference because we didn't have $100 million plus to make this movie successful. And again, at this time, there were no such thing as YouTubers. There was no such thing as an influencer. There was just simply people using these platforms to create content and post content. So what I noticed is there was a group of people that were having a lot of success on this new platform, YouTube. They were generating millions of views to creating content through their phones, their web cameras, and things of that nature. So what I did is I decided to go to the head of the studio and I said, hey, there's this new platform called YouTube. I want to connect with these people. That are creating content and have them engage with actors from the movie to help promote it. And the executive's like, eh, Brendan, I don't know whether I want to do this. This seems a bit risky. I don't even know what this thing is called YouTube. And I followed up, I said, well, what if this costs you no money at all? $0.

And.

And there's only upside. He's like, okay, well, we can try it. So what I did was I made a list of the top people on YouTube creating content, reaching millions of people. And I simply created a DM and DM them and said, do you want to interview a movie star Now? I had like five or ten of the biggest ones at the time respond. And I had them do fun little videos and engage with actors from the movie. And this small little thing generated millions and millions of views and awareness for this small movie to the point where it had a huge box office success based upon the budget that they put into it. Again, this is back in 2006. There was no such thing as an influencer. There's no such thing as a YouTube creator. So in a sense, this was the first ever influencer campaign on the platform YouTube. And it made the movie a wild success. So from this one strategy, we were able to generate millions and millions of views and awareness around the movie, and it made the movie a wild success at the box office. Remember, the budget on the film was just $12 million. It ended up grossing $42 million at the box office, at movie theaters. But that doesn't even include the tens of millions of dollars that were generated from DVD sales and streaming rights. So this put me on the map of the top people in the industry from this campaign. I was now taking meetings with, with the heads of studios, with directors, with actors. Even Jason Statham invited me to his house to help him craft his social media strategy. But I didn't stop there. I wanted to continue innovating from this first influencer campaign, from this first success. So around this time, Fox decided to acquire MySpace. And they acquired MySpace for over $600 million. And I wanted to understand, well, how is MySpace worth that much money? How is Fox going to recoup their investment? And what I noticed was that at the time, none of these platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, they didn't have their own social media ad platform. So Facebook ads didn't exist. YouTube's TrueView didn't exist. None of it was there. So MySpace at the time was just making money off of third party advertising platforms. So they were Just putting banner ads on these MySpace profiles. If you remember back then. So they were getting like $cpms, which is super low. It's like 10 to 20 times lower than what these platforms make today off of advertising. Now if you remember back to MySpace, MySpace was all about self expression, meaning that you could customize your social media profile, you could change the colors, you could change the content that's featured on there. And what I noticed was people were taking their favorite ads, they were taking a movie trailer, a Nike poster, a product poster, whatever products they loved, embedding it on their profile, telling all of their friends, I love this product or service, you should check it out too. So it was the first stage of real peer to peer influencer marketing. So I ended up building a prototype of that technology with funding from the head of one studio and and license it to mtv. And with mtv, we started doing a lot of test campaigns again around this concept of what influencer marketing would ultimately become. And we did test campaigns for mtv, Comedy Central, the video game, Rock Band, Country Music Television, VH1, Yahoo, Vice magazine. And all of the data was amazing in terms of the click through percentage, the amount of people that were clicking on ads, these versus traditional banner ads, it was 10x the level of engagement. So from there, from this success and this new relationship with mtv, based upon this first ever influencer technology campaign, my career started to take off. So over the past two decades, I've had the pleasure of working with personalities like Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Katie Couric and companies like Fanatics, Yahoo, Skechers, Ikea, and today I am the CEO and founder of Hook Point and we specialize in helping people just like you break through with their message. I've taken the past two decades of my experience working with the biggest brands and companies in the world and breaking down what drives their success and how it can be applied for people like you. Now you may be thinking, Brendon, it's great that you've done this for Taylor Swift or Rihanna, but what does this have to do with me? Well, if you stick around, I'm going to show you an example of somebody starting with no social media experience and only 2000 followers that became a household name. So the campaign that I'm most known for is the premise of my first book where I generated a million followers in 100 countries in less than 30 days. So that became the title of my first book, One Million Followers How I Built a Massive Social Audience in 30 Days. And that book was so successful, it allowed me to publish my second book, how to Stand out in a three second World. And my latest book, the Guide to Going Viral. Now, these three books all have a single mission and that is I believe there's people all over the world like you that have the ability to transform it in a positive way. They just need that helping hand. They need the strategy, they need the insight, they need the experience. And that is why I brought those books to the world, is to help people like you stand out at the highest levels and have their voice be heard so that we can all work together to transform the world in a positive place. And if you stay together till the end of this video, I'm going to give you the opportunity to grab a free copy of my new book, the Guide to Going Viral. So over the course of my career, all of this experience has shown me that social media, it is more than a tool, it is a platform for building something truly extraordinary. Now this is something that I have lived by for the past 20 years and it's been proven with my career and the success that I've had with top clients all around the world. Now, most people, when they come to me, most clients, they're really focused on short term wins. They're focused on Brendan, how do I get my next client, how do I sell my next product, how do I get my next brand deal? But the reality is focusing on short term wins is limiting you, it's limiting the potential of what you can achieve on social media. So that is why today we are going to explore how the size of your vision equals the size of your success. We're going to break down what real world examples of creators who turn influence into multimillion and billion dollar businesses. We're also going to break down why you need to reverse engineer your business before you start chasing views. And we're going to cover a mindset shift that is absolutely needed for you to win at social media so that by the end of this video you will know how to dream bigger, create smarter and maximize your impact. So I get asked this question all the time, Brendan, what is the ROI of social media? So ROI means what is my return on investment? They ask if I invest time, energy into social media or if I hire your company, Hook Point, what is my expected return on investment? And the truth is it just depends on the size of your vision. These platforms are not just about short term monetization. These platforms are built to allow you to create something truly extraordinary. So, so today we are going to make a switch. We're going to stop thinking small and we are going to think as big as humanly possible, because that is where your return on investment comes in. So let's dig in with a little bit of a case story here. My friend, Michelle Phan, she went from YouTube creator to beauty mogul. Now, she has a fascinating story and background. So she started on YouTube at age 19 back in 2007, when again, most people were were seeing this platform as a novelty. There was a lot of karaoke clips and pranks and things of that nature. But she saw a massive future for creators like herself. Her mindset was, I can create my own TV show, I can create my own television station, my own TV network. Like, who wouldn't want to have their own television station or TV show? Now, in the beginning, she was purely focused on beauty tutorials, and then she expanded her content into lifestyle and tech and motivation. She realized early on that influence was the currency of the future. Those with the most followers, the most the largest audience would lead industries. So Michelle had success. She generated millions of subscribers and millions of views. But she didn't stop there. On a trip to Thailand, she was really inspired by experience. So her and her friend went to a mall and they saw all of these girls going crazy around this one stand at the mall. And Michelle asked her friend, like, what is going on there? Why are all these young girls just going crazy trying to buy the products in this one stand? And her friend explained that they are buying beauty samples. And Michelle's like, why would anybody buy a beauty sample? And she explained that the best beauty products are expensive. They can be 100, $200. And people in Thailand, they don't have a lot of money, so they want to test out these products to make sure that they are right for them, that they match their skin complexion, that they don't cause any issues with their skin. So for them, it was massively valuable to be able to purchase these samples, to try them out before they made the commitment to buy a full bottle of that. So this really seeded an idea in her head. To the point. In 2011, her and two friends. Friends founded a company called Ipsy. Now, Ipsy was a beauty community and subscription service where every month they would send their members beauty samples to try out. Now, the amazing thing is this company started with less than $3 million in funding, and just three years later, they were doing $120 million in revenue per year. At one point, the company was valued at $800,000,000. Now, the other fascinating part of this is as Michelle was founding this company, she spent $0 in marketing. Well, how would she be able to scale it to that level without spending any money on marketing? Because she understood the power of social media. Not only was she able to leverage her audience and the size of that to promote it, but she leveraged all the experience that she had garnered in creating that audience to really engage customers. So instead of paying for ads, she would get customers to share their experience, to create vlogs and review products in the form of videos across YouTube. But she didn't stop there. Then L', Oreal, the cosmetics company, came to her. And when they came to her, she said, you know, I'm not really interested in doing a sponsorship. I would love to partner with you to launch a brand new, brand new cosmetics line. And they said yes. Why? Because they believed so much in her knowledge, her expertise, the audience, and the relationship that she had with her fans. Now this is really transformative because l', Oreal, previous to that had never created a brand from scratch other than l'. Oreal. They would typically just acquire companies as they became successful. So Michelle and l' Oreal partner partnered to create EM cosmetics. Now this is really important because most beauty influencers would just focus on getting that brand deal making, you know, five or six figures off those types of partnerships. But what she did is she dreamed bigger. So the key insight here is Michelle didn't just focus on building subscribers, followers, she had a larger vision. She built an empire, proving that social media, it's more than visibility, it is a launchpad for big ideas. So the actual strategies that you can take away here is start thinking beyond likes, views, followers. Ask yourself, what is it that you are building that will last? What is your big vision? Now I would love for you to just click, pause and write down these questions. Let me go through them one more time. What are you building that will last? And what is your big vision? So I truly want you to succeed. I am committed and dedicated to your success. But what I have learned over the past two decades of doing this and working with some of the biggest success stories out there, and even with my own success, it requires a lot of persistence and perseverance. So with that in mind, we need to focus now on how to build a foundation for your success. Because the reality is things will get tough and you need a clear foundation to help you through those tough times, to make sure that you stick with it, you persevere, and you come out on the other side successful. This is why we're going to shift our focus now to reverse engineering your success. So we need to start with your vision and then work backward. And we start with your vision with those last two questions I gave you. And now we're going to focus on working backward from there. So if you think about building a house from scratch, you don't start by decorating the house. You start with blueprints and foundations. And in social media, that foundation, that blueprint is understanding what you are building towards. So now we're going to go through three different steps to reverse engineer your success. So step one is defining your mission. So I want you to ask yourself, what is your mission? What do you stand for? Because this is going to guide every decision that you make. Then I want you to ask yourself, well, what are you ultimately trying to build? Are you trying to build a business? A global movement, A fashion brand, A personal brand? These are critical questions to ask yourself. Step two is to solve a real problem. So this is where you're going to identify what is your audience biggest pain point, what keeps them up at night? And then you're going to work to position yourself as a solution. Now, I want to share a little bit of a story with a friend of mine, Craig Clemons, who is probably one of the top copywriters in the world. His company, Golden Hippo, he sold over $2 billion worth of products on social media. And Craig was kind enough to do an interview for my second book, Hook Point. And he told me a really fascinating thing. He said, brendan, the minute that you can understand your customer, your consumer's biggest pain point, the thing that keeps them up at night, the thing that wakes them up in the middle of night in cold sweats, and you could articulate it to them better than they can articulate it to themselves. You have won their trust. They will follow you wherever you want them to go. They will buy whatever products or services that you offer because they know that you understand them, you understand how to solve their biggest pain point. Now I want you to think right now is what is the biggest pain point that you have right now? The thing that really causes stress, anxiety? Now imagine somebody stops you on the street and says, you know what? I know what you're experiencing, I know what you're going through, and I have the solution to that problem. I can make that problem go away. What would you say to that? I don't know about you. I would say yes, like, who doesn't want their biggest pain point, their biggest problem solved? So step three is activating content. So now that we have that understanding, we want to create content that is aligned with Your mission with your audience needs so that you can start building that trust with your audience so that they can start having that relationship where they're ultimately going to follow you wherever you want them to go. Because this is not just about posting, this is about solving people's problems, educating, entertaining. So now I want to share another case story with Dr. Julie Smith. Now, Dr. Julie Smith, she didn't start with millions of followers, she start like everybody else, at zero. But she had a very clear mission and that mission was to make top quality mental health education accessible to all. Now, this is a mission I firmly believe in and I love that we have people like Dr. Julie Smith in the world covering it now because she had a strong mission and she aligned her expertise of being a clinical psychologist with what the audience needs and craves in relation to this topic. She became one of social media's top mental health educators. Now, her success came from leveraging the visual metaphor format. And we're going to walk through an example here in just a minute. But this format allowed her to provide practical advice and really deep and powerful mental health challenges. So she covers topics like ptsd, anxiety, panic attacks, leveraging this visual metaphor format. So let's actually watch an example of this so that you can kind of see what it looks like. This video is called the Depression Rainbow.

I'm a psychologist and here's the top five things that someone with depression wants you to know. Number five, depression is not a choice and they can't just snap out of it. Number four, when they take days to answer a text or keep canceling plans at the last minute, it's nothing you did wrong. Their conflict is not with you, it's with themselves. And number three, the reasons for depression can't always be seen. But not knowing the reason does not make that depression any less valid. Number two, you might think that person is not trying hard enough, but that's because when you're depressed, even the simplest of tasks can feel like a mountain to climb. And number one, they're still the same person, but they're going through hell right now and they may need you more than ever.

So Again, this is Dr. Julie Smith leveraging the visual metaphor format. And as you can see, she's using this like a visual aspect to break down a very complex topic or subject matter. And if you see in this video, she is just focused on building trust. She's focusing on helping people solve the problem of depression, whether it's the individual themselves or maybe a family member or a loved one is seeing this. And can relay this information to somebody else. If you notice, she's not in here trying to sell products. She's not trying to tell you to sign up for a service. She is just truly trying to leverage her expertise and matching it with the audience's biggest pain points and their specific needs. Now, the results of this are pretty staggering. She's generated an audience of over 4.8 million followers on TikTok, 2.1 million on Instagram. She has over 500 million views globally, and her first book, why has nobody Told me this before? Sold over 1 million copies. Now that is a staggering number for, for a first time author. So that you can see when she's focused on her mission, she's focused on helping her audience focused on solving their greatest pain point. She generated a massive audience and that audience was not just invested in the information that she was giving, they were invested in her success as well. So now I want to go over a major challenge to success. Now, this is a fatal flaw that I see all the time that that holds brands and individuals back from reaching their true potential. And I'm gonna be a little bit harsh with it. And that is your social media profile. I'm sorry, it's not your website, your posts, they are not your ads. Organic social media. Building an audience, building a connection is not about trying to sell something. It is about getting people to know, like, and trust you. So they ultimately want to take the that next step of wherever you want them to go. So the key insight here that we can take away is that successful creators, they don't just post, they solve problems in ways that deeply resonate and connect the audience. Social media, it's not about selling. It is truly about storytelling. So this is a massive mindset shift that I want you to take away from today. Stop chasing sales and start telling stories that build trust. Now, I know a lot of you are probably thinking, well, Brendan, I'm here on social media. I'm here to invest time into this video because I want to grow my business, I want to make more money. And I hear you, I'm here to help you with that. But when you focus on building relationships through storytelling, sales become a byproduct of the connection that you've created with your audience. Again, the goal is to get people to know, like, and trust you. And, and if you do that, if you achieve that, they will naturally want to buy from you. So let's break down another case story that actually amplifies this point. So this is a client of ours, his name is Tanner Leatherstein, a fascinating guy. He is one of the true experts in leather craftsmanship. Now he found the passion for this at age 11. At age 11 he created his first leather jacket. Now along the way he lost his way. He became a cab driver and had a corporate gig for a short period of time. But then he moved into back to his passion of building leather craft goods. So he created a company called Paguy that does handcrafted leather goods at the highest possible level. Now when Tanner first came to us, he was really struggling. He only had 2000 followers and he was just focusing on chasing sales. He was just making ads, chasing trends and they really didn't work because they weren't building that level of trust that we saw with Dr. Julie Smith in that last example. So when Tanner came to us, we helped them design a storytelling format called Is it Worth it? Something that could really connect with audiences, show his expertise, build a relationship with them, build that trust up. So in this format, is it worth it? He'll take expensive leather goods, deconstruct it on screen and tell you whether it's worth the money that you paid for. So let's watch a quick example so you can see what this actually looks like.

Ortega, Veneta Arcomito Is it worth it? Let's get into it. First impression. I really love the feeling of the leather. The lambskin they used inside out because of the woven design. There's a lot of leather consumed in this bag. But we're going to see how much of it and how good is it. Here is the chip because of the woven design and double sided feature of it. It has insane amount of leather. Quadruple of a bag of this size. I estimate 18 square foot of lambskin similar to this one. A very good choice. I total it up to $130 for leather, probably another 120 for labor and the accessories shouldn't be more than $250 for leather and labor to make it bag like this. I paid $2,500 for this bag. My estimate of 250, you're definitely paying a premium. But out of all my reviews I never seen such intricate design and all the details inside out. Same good leather selection used with very well engineered design aspect. So definitely you're paying a premium but you're getting top of the line leather and craftsmanship. You decide if it's worth it or not.

So again, this format, it's is it worth it? And as you can see, he has real passion for this. He's sharing his expertise in breaking down these expensive leather goods. Now, the fascinating thing is this single format. He has 94 videos with over 1 million views and he went from 2000 followers to 2.3 million across his social media channels. And the same thing that we saw with Dr. Julie Smith, he's not selling you anything. There's no direct calls to action. He is just providing pure value. He's getting people to know, like, and trust him. And in terms of that trust, like, he buys all of these products, like he said, this bag, he paid $2,500. I know personally, he actually pays for these products. He has brands reaching out to him all the time that wants to sponsor his videos and things of that nature. But he won't do that. Like, if he, if he has a brand reach out to them, he says, okay, I'll break it down, but you need to sign this contract saying you're willing to accept whatever review I have and I am going to buy it as a secret shopper. You won't even know that it's me buying from it. So again, to those people asking, well, if he's not talking about his products or his products and in his company, how is he making money off of this? Well, the result, before working with us, he was paying for every click to his website. He was using pay per click advertising, and he was generating about 10,000 visitors a month. After this format started to be integrated and take off, he jumped to 100,000 visitors a month, all organic, not having to pay for a single click. And his most expensive products will sell out the ones that he sells for thousands of dollars because they are handcrafted. He can't even keep them on the shelf. So this is another example that if you focus on solving your audience's pain point, you focus on building that relationship and not immediately trying to sell something that they will ultimately want to take that next step with you. They will ultimately want to buy your products and services at scale. So I know that I've mentioned the word format in the example of Dr. Julie Smith and Tanner Leatherstein. So let's just talk a little bit about what does a format actually mean? So now let's dig into the power of formats. Storytelling is the foundation of great content, and formats are the key to social media success. So we've looked at two examples of formats. We looked at the visual metaphor format with Dr. Julie Smith and the is it worth it format with Tanner Leatherstein. Now, at my company Hook Point, we've done over 10,000 hours of research identifying over 300 storytelling formats. Now, I say that because we just looked at two examples and we're going to look at a few more in a minute. These formats are not necessarily to say that these are my recommendations for you. These are just examples. Now, as we look at formats, I want you to keep in mind that these formats are containers. They're structures that you can insert any expertise, any brand, any message into it and, and it has a much higher chance of success. So let's actually look at some more examples so that hopefully it can resonate of what these formats look like. And I'm sure you've probably seen a few of these formats in your feed. So we're going to look at three different formats here. We have Tips on the Move with Mark Tilbury, How Much Sugar With Joy Wellness and Stories from a Stranger with Hunter Prosperity. Now, as we watch these formats, I just want you to kind of think about, well, how could something like this apply to my subject matter, my expertise? So let's dig in.

Took me 10 years to learn this, but I'll teach it to you in less than one minute. To become rich, you need multiple income streams. I have seven and they generate me over a hundred thousand dollars per week versus my retail store where I sell radar control, cars, planes, helicopters and more. Second is my own brand and product range which I manufacture in China and distribute all over the world. Third is my eBay store where I buy stock from failing businesses and sell it online. Fourth is the stock market where I invest my money and let it grow over time. Fifth is my residential real estate which I rent out to families. 6th is my commercial real estate which I rent out to other businesses. Seventh is my personal brand where I post videos online to help the next generation generation grow their wealth.

So it's pretty self explanatory on why it's called Tips on the Move. He's giving you tips as he's moving in in different locations. This video generated 31 million views and Mark has used this format to amass an audience of over 15 million people across his social media channels. So again, this is a format, it's repeatable. You can use this format over and over again and plug in different information. And again he's using it for business to tips. But this could be used for nutrition, it could be used for finance, it could be used for athletics, like if you're athletic trainer or if you're like a mindset coach. Any subject matter can be plugged into this. So let's move on to the second format called How Much Sugar it's pretty self explanatory as you see it from Joey Wellness. Let's see how much sugar is in this entire jar of Nutella. 11 grams of sugar for every tablespoon spoon which is 20 grams of Nutella. This entire jar is 725 grams. So if you divide 725 by 20, there's about 36 tablespoons of Nutella in here. Each tablespoon is 11 grams of sugar. This entire jar is 398 grams of sugar. Let's measure that.

It.

I don't even have enough sugar cubes but you get the point.

So that's.

This video gets me every time. It's pretty crazy. This video generated 25 million views and he's built an audience of 1.8 million followers across his social media channels. And as you can see with this format, like he can just break down other products. Like he has a video about ketchup, like any type of health product that needs awareness about how much sugar in he can use it. Now this again, this format can be used for other industries as well. Let's look dive into the last one that's called Stories from a Stranger from Hunter Prosper. And again the, the title of this format is pretty self explanatory as we dive into the video.

What was the name of your first love and why did you fall in love with them? Oh my God, Johnny. I'd seen him at a dance. He come over and asked me to dance. I was okay, right up my alley, you know all. He was cute, just so cute and so smooth. I was teenager and he did ask me to marry him. I kept thinking his mother doesn't speak English. He was Italian. We went together for three before we got married. How long were you guys married? 64 years. We used to dance. I don't know what they have out there for the kids today. We dance every night. He was just different. What's your name?

Margie.

Margie Hunter. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

So this video got 34 million views and Hunter has used this format to amass over 9 million followers across the social media channels. So these are all formats, as you can see, they're designed to build a relationship with the audience. They're building trust, they're building a connection with the audience and you see the level of success that they have with this type of content. So now let's move on to examples of just extraordinary growth. We're going to take a look at two creators who started like all of us small but Then dreamed extremely big and used their platforms not to just build audiences, but to create empires. Now, a lot of you may know Mr. Beast, and if you don't, he started off as a YouTube creator, but then turned into a media and business mogul. Now, Mr. Beast started in 2012 at the age of 13 in his bedroom in North Carolina. So he attended university for a very brief period of time because he ended up dropping out to pursue YouTube as a career full time. Now, his mom, she didn't really get the vision. She's like, if you want to do that, if you want to drop out of college, well, then you need to move out of the house and prove that you can sustain a living doing this instead of going to college. And he did and he proved it. And a few years later, his mom was actually working for the company. Now, as I mentioned, he started in 2012 and he started by posting gaming videos, but then he shifted to high concept viral content that captivated millions. A few examples of his top videos, one of the ones that really inspires me is called Team Trees initiative where he got 113 million views to raise enough money to plant 20 million trees around the world. Another video that you may have seen is he actually recreated Squid game and it's one of YouTube's most watched videos with 800 million views. Now today he is the most subscribed YouTuber with 375 million subscribers on his main channel. He has 50 million on his second channel, 47 on his gaming channel, and 28 million on his philanthropy channel. Not bad for a kid that started at the age of 13 from his bedroom. Now, the big thing to note is that he didn't stop there. He wanted to scale his empire beyond YouTube. So in 2024 he signed a deal with Amazon prime to create a reality TV show called Beast Games with the largest cash prize ever of $10 million. This show was so successful, it got greenlit for second series and this for the second season, it's valued the cash prize at $15 million. Now, he didn't just stop there, he's launched multiple successful businesses. Now, one of his most notable ones is Feastables, that has the fastest growing chocolate bar in the world and they are projected to do over $500 million in revenue. Now, it's said that Mr. Beast is raising funds for his company and valuing it at $5 billion. Now, one of the key insights here, and he has said this kind of jokingly in interviews, that he has reinvested everything to the point of stupidity, but the Reality is he's just joking because he has this relentless vision for something larger. He's not just settling for quick gains. He could easily put tens of millions of dollars in the bank right now. But he has this larger vision. He wants to keep producing better and better content on YouTube. He wants to be creating more media type content like the partnership with Amazon Prime. He is super passionate about, about his companies like Feastables. Like, one of the things that drives him is that he wants all of the chocolate for Feastables to be ethically sourced. What he found out that he was really shocked by that most chocolate companies are sourcing their cocoa through child labor and he is just super passionate about changing that. So he just keeps reinvesting everything into this larger vision that he has. So let's move on to Alex Cooper. Now, if you don't know Alex Cooper, she has become a, a podcasting powerhouse. So she in 2018 launched a podcast called Call Her Daddy. And it was a real bold and unfiltered podcast around dating advice, sex advice and things of that nature. It gained a lot of traction for the raw honesty, humor and relatability. Now, it wasn't an easy path. In 2020, there was a big public fallout. She had a co host in the beginning, the beginning, and they just butted heads and they decided to part their ways. In addition, she didn't own the rights to the brand Collar Daddy, her partner at the time, Barstool Sports, did. So she nearly lost the brand. She had to negotiate with Barstool to get the rights back to it. Now when she overcame those obstacles, she thought, you know, I really want to pivot the podcast. I want to go beyond dating advice and really dive into a more meaningful topics like mental health and female empowerment. So then she started to leverage social media to scale because again, she had this larger vision that she wanted to have impact for her audience. She had a major dream for the podcast and how she wanted to help her audience overcome certain issues, overcome certain pay points. So she could have earned early, quit early on when she ran into these obstacles, but she kept going. And the impact that she's had is absolutely astounding. She Today she has 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube, 3.5 million on Instagram, in 2.5 million on TikTok. Now, YouTube specifically is critically important because YouTube just announced that over 1 billion people a month consume podcasts on that specific platform. So the results of this, of her really pursuing a larger vision and looking at how can I really monetize and dream bigger of this audience, she has amazing results. So in 2021, she signed a $60 million distribution deal with Spotify. Then in 2024, she launched her own podcast network called the Unwell network. And then 2023, when the Spotify deal was up, she signed 125 million distribution deal with Sirius XM for the caller Daddy podcast and the Unwell network. Also in 2025, she launched Unwell Hydration, expanding into products alongside Mr. Beast. So the key takeaway here is Mr. Beast and Alex Cooper. They started like everybody, they started small, they started from zero. But they had a big dream, they had a big vision. And they didn't limit themselves to likes, subscribers, downloads. They built entire ecosystems that spanned industries. Because their success wasn't about where they started, it's about how far that they were willing to go. And that is something I want from you is don't think about where you're at today. Think about how far you want to take your vision, how far you want to take your dream. Because the size of your vision equals the size your success. Now again, this is something that I've lived by over the course of my career and I've seen it with work with some of the biggest people in entertainment and business, like Taylor Swift. When I first started working with her, she wasn't a massive global superstar, but she had that major vision. Because social media is a platform to build something truly extraordinary. So today we've explored why your vision sets your success ceiling. We have revealed why real world creators have been able to turn influence into multimillion and billion dollar businesses. We've also worked on how we can together reverse engineer your business before chasing views or followers. And then we've worked on that fatal mindset that holds all creators back of thinking that your social media profile is your website. In your organic post are your ads. As we know, it's all about building that relationship, getting people to know, like and trust you. So now I ask you, what will be your ROI on social media, your return on investment? Is it going to be another client, another brand deal, ad revenue? Or is it going to be something more? So what is your extraordinary vision? I want you to dream as big as possible, take action and turn social media into something truly remarkable. Because your potential is absolutely limitless and it is yours to seize. So as a big thank you for staying with me till the end of the video. I truly appreciate it. Here's a QR code that you can get access to my third book for absolutely free, the Guide to Going Viral. So if you enjoyed this video. I highly recommend you watch this next video because it breaks down exactly how. How a YouTuber built a $1.9 million a year business by transforming influence into income. So click right here and see firsthand how big visions turn into real world success.