How Often Would You Play the Lottery If It Were Free?

Short form video is the greatest asymmetric bet we've seen. Every time I hit publish on a piece of content, especially short form video, I'm playing the lottery. Just imagine if the lottery were free, how often would you play it? As much as you can. Because why wouldn't you? I posted dozens of videos that all got hundreds of views no one cared about. Until I posted one video that got me 45,000 followers. That's the lottery ticket I'm talking about. I went from 50 followers to 45,000 literally overnight with a quick video that I took on my phone. That's $40,000 worth of value for 10 minutes of my time. There is a whole world on the other side of cringe. I want to talk about how to grow an audience with the short form to newsletter funnel. Now if you talk to a lot of people, a lot of experts in this space, they will not agree that such a funnel exists. Right? Because short form viewers are not necessarily long form viewers or long form readers. But I'm here to tell you that that's false. That you can use short form video and other content building strategies to drive your audience towards your newsletter. Preferably on beehive. An audience that you own that cannot be taken away from you. So I call this my 0.02% strategy. Because if you look at my screen here, I'm scrolling down, this whiteboard is about three feet away from me in my office. I took a picture of it, airdropped it to myself. This was made months ago, but it's still relevant today. I can expect to get 0.02% of my short form viewers to become newsletter subscribers to me and those subscribers open about 55% of my emails at about a 4% click through rate. Which is awesome, right? Which kind of breaks the stereotype that short form viewers are not very valuable. So I feel like we are right in the middle of two of the greatest asymmetric bets that we've ever seen. One is AI. Obviously I don't need to convince you on that. And the other one is short form video and it's not new, it's been out for a few years. But 10, 20, 30 years from now we're going to look back on these years still being very, very early. I am an introvert. I once did the Myers Briggs with my wife. We went to this workshop when I got my MBA and they had us all separate on opposite sides of the room based on introvert and extrovert. My wife was completely over there. I'm way over There. I don't like leaving my office, I don't like talking to people. And the thought of ever, you know, cringing at myself and taking and publishing of all things short form video just gave me extreme anxiety. Not for me. No thank you. That's cringe. That's embarrassing. But I'm here to tell you that there is a whole world on the other side of cringe, okay? Like, put your pride, put your ego aside, stop caring about what your high school friend thinks about you because really they don't think about you and you're probably doing better than anyway, so who cares even if they are thinking about you? Just put it aside and put your face on camera. And I promise that life changing things can happen. It is an asymmetric bet. So I want to talk about an analogy real quickly. Just imagine if the lottery were free. How often would you play it? As much as you can. You'd buy as many tickets as you could. Because why wouldn't you? Well, every time I hit publish on a piece of content, most especially short form video, I'm playing the lottery. And it costs me about $6 in labor to have that video edited for me because I don't edit my own videos. And it takes me a few minutes to research, script and take the video. And that's not an exaggeration. I didn't start that way, but I got that way with a lot of reps and a lot of practice. So every time I hit publish, I could launch a business with that video or with that tweet or with that newsletter, I could make a million dollars. If that business does really well, it could flop. I could be embarrassed. That's my biggest downside is losing $6 and being a little bit embarrassed. Or I could get hundreds or thousands of newsletter subscribers or tens of thousands of followers. This algorithm called short form Video, whether it's TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotlight or YouTube Shorts, is magical. And most people out there playing with it don't know what they're doing. They're not tracking anything. They're just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall. And so I'm here to show you some very, very specific things you can do to stand out to be in the.01% of people publishing videos. So you can convert 0.02% of your viewers to newsletter subscribers. So that would be 200 subscribers for every million views you get, or one subscriber for every 5,5000 views you get. So I'm going to get into it. First of all, I'm Chris Kerner. I've started over 75 businesses over the last 15 years. Five per year. To answer your question, I love it. It's what I love. I've never had a real job. Business is my passion. Whether it's porta potties or door to door, it doesn't matter. I love commerce, I love being a merchant. I love business, right? And so my content is about business. I don't care about the niche, whether it's real estate or whatever, it's just about business. Like I said, I have adhd. I'm an introvert. I like just staying in my office and I'm kind of a closeted class clown. So with AI taking this forefront position in our lives, we are going to see a huge outpouring of AI slop. Faceless videos, AI generated videos. And the platforms are going to allow it because it keeps people on their platform. Why wouldn't they allow it? Right? But I'm here to tell you that it's never been more important to show your face on camera, to, to be authentic, to not be AI today than it ever has been, because you will stand out even more. I'm also here to tell you that your follower count does matter. A lot of people are saying that follower count doesn't matter because the algorithms are so good. So if you have zero followers or a hundred followers and you post something, it can go viral on TikTok. That is more true than other platforms. But I know for a fact, because I've tested this extensively, follower count matters because follower count equals more data points. Now, I don't say that to discourage you. I started my Instagram account a little over a year ago with zero followers. It was a brand new fresh account. I didn't use my personal account and I posted dozens of videos that all got hundreds of views no one cared about until I posted one video that got me 45,000 followers. That's the lottery ticket I'm talking about. And I'm going to show you that video and I'm going to break it down later on. But follower count does matter. And so that is one of the two KPIs that I track. But you can also start with zero followers and do just fine. Attention is the world's greatest commodity today. It's not water, it's not data, it's not crypto, it's attention. Especially with AI, because there's going to be more content created than we've ever seen. And so being your weird little unique self on camera is going to stand out. More than it ever has. So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is, is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you. Just by way of credibility, I'm going to show my Beehive screen. So I started a newsletter a year and a half ago. I started on another platform. And then you'll see, In December of 2023, I moved it to Beehive. I had 2,300 subscribers and it took me months to get that many subscribers, mostly from Twitter. I had about 50,000 Twitter followers. And then right here in February of 2024, I started my podcast. And so then I thought, I'm gonna have a podcast. I might as well hit record on the camera. If I hit record on the camera, I might as well lazily upload those clips to short form platforms to grow my podcast. Well, I soon learned that the lazy way is not the good way and that those auto generated clips of you talking on a podcast are very, very, very, very hard to go viral. It can be done if very strategically, but usually the harder way is the better way. And so I started posting these auto generated clips to grow the podcast. They did nothing. And then I just hit record on my front facing camera and started talking about things I'm working on, things that I've built, opinions that I have about business. And that's when things really started taking off. In April, my first video went viral. It got 2 million views and 45,000 followers, which is an incredible or view to follow conversion rate. It's not typical and I've achieved that very few times since. But ever since then, I've been adding 15 to 30,000 organic subscribers per month. I've done like a couple Facebook ad tests and I've converted subscribers very cheaply. So about 1 to 3,000 of my subscribers were paid and literally every other one, the other 173,000 of them are organic free. I'm very cheap. I have a very lean team. I grew up poor and those habits have never left me. So I don't like shoveling tens of thousands of dollars to meta, even though I know that they can bring me results and that those subscribers are generally high quality. So if you look at this screen, this is the last 90 days of how many Beehive subscribers I've added on a daily basis. And I'm showing you this so you could see that it's consistent, that it's not a flash in the pan. It doesn't rely on going viral. Going viral helps, but it's very steady eddy between 3,000 and 2,000 new organic subscribers per day. This is taking a second to load because Beehive prefers 30 day increments. So I'll go to 30 days and you can see that this is my daily organic subscribers or last 30 days. And then you can see here these are my subscriber sources straight through my landing page. Facebook Reels, Instagram, TikTok referral, then 58 other sources. So I just wanted to show that. But I track two KPIs and I'm going to show you the sheet that I use to track that. I have a virtual assistant who updates this sheet. And if you look at these two columns right here, VPF is views per follow and FPD is followers per day. This is not updated because she dropped the ball and she didn't update this in time. But I add between 4,000 and 10,000 followers per day across platforms combined and I get about one follower for every 300 to 800 views. That tells me the power of my call to action, how strong or how weak it is, both on a per platform basis and on a per piece of content basis. I'm a big fan of Alex Bromozi, as many of you probably are, and I differ from him on one key thing. He says to not put calls to action in your short form content. Don't ask anything. If people like it, they're going to find your thing. They're going to click on your thing and buy or subscribe to your thing. I completely disagree. I don't see a purpose to putting content out there on the Internet without a call to action unless I'm trying to build goodwill. I want people to see how I interact with my family. It's not a very high value piece of content and I don't think it's going to do good numbers. I won't put a call to action in there, but 80, 90% of the time I'm putting calls to action in every single piece of content I publish because I've tested it and I know that it might sometimes a little bit affect the reach or the virality of that piece of content, but nine times out of ten it won't and you net out ahead. If I did not have calls to action in my content and I've tested this, I'm going to convert one follower to every one to 5,000 views. But because I have a call to action, a strong call to action, I'm converting one out of every, you know, 300 to 800 views. So it's a massive difference. Earlier on I said that follower count does matter, and it does because it's more data points. When I had 10,000 followers, my banger videos would do a hundred thousand views and my duds would do 5,000 views. Like my baseline was 5,000. Today my baseline is a hundred thousand. Like if I were to put out the same video today that I did back then with 10,000 followers, it would do 10 to 20 times more views, even though it's the same piece of content. Because meta and all the other algorithms just have more data points to work with. They know the right people to show that to. And so follower count for sure does not matter nearly as much as it used to, but it still matters a lot. So let me just recap real quickly. Calls to action and everything. Follower counts matter. Short form video is the greatest asymmetric bet we've seen, at least in social media. And the short form video to newsletter funnel does exist. It is very possible to grow big newsletters with not just any subscribers, but very high quality subscribers that are loyal to you, that open and then that click. So a couple other best practices that I use speed to publish, right? You can research all day and you can research hooks and you can research competitors in your niche and you can learn and you can take notes, but that is just an advanced form of procrastination. At the end of the day, you just got to hit publish a lot of times, you got to fail a lot of times. You have to look at the retention charts a lot of times and see what's working. Where are people falling off? Where are they not falling off? I'm going to show you a video that I posted to TikTok and it got 6 million views and brought me like 80,000 followers or something, which is not typical. But I want to show you the retention chart. My whole strategy with posting a short form video is to post to TikTok first, because I care about TikTok the least. They are the least loyal followers, they're the most finicky followers. It's the most international followers followers and it's the youngest followers. My normal followers are between 25 and 55 years old, 85% in the US, 85% male. And TikTok throws those averages way off. So I post my video and when I say I mean my team to TikTok first and we wait one to two hours and we watch the retention chart.

So you've probably heard me talk about Beehive before and if you've ever received a newsletter from me, it was powered by Beehive. I've been using Beehive for the last year and a half. Their three founders left Morning Brew and built the platform so the rest of us could use the same tools that turned Morning Brew into a multi million dollar operation. That's why Beehive doesn't feel like every other newsletter platform, because it's not. It was built by people who scaled a newsletter empire. Now you know that I only recommend stuff that actually moves the needle. For me, this moves the needle. So go to beehive.com Chris use the code Chris 30 to get 30% off your first three months.

So if you look at this screen right here, this was a video I posted and it got, I said 80, sorry, 38,000 followers from this video. It's a 30 second video and this was the retention chart right here. You can see it's very, very flat, which is what I like to see. When I see a retention chart like this or when my team does, they don't change a thing. They publish it everywhere after that. If they see people are dropping off at the call to action or dropping off at a certain point, they will watch that certain point and then realize, oh, that sentence isn't very good. It doesn't really add much value with that sentence. Let's cut it out. Or you know what, let's cut out the call to action on this. Because they're not very loyal to this video. They're kind of finicky. So let's either put the call to action at the end when they're already more committed to the video, or let's cut it out altogether. So I'm going to play this video and you should be able to hear the sound. And I want you to notice right on my mouse where my call to action is. It's near the beginning and it lasts two and a half seconds. And you'll see that people don't really fall off here. And I'll tell you why in a minute. Look at this frickin thing right here.

This is the most genius business idea I've seen this year. Day 53 of Genius Business ideas Follow for more. It's called Toasted Tours and they take people on wine or beer sipping tours all up and down California in a shipping container on wheels. How much do they charge? 180 bucks.

For four hours.

And they have 40 people on this thing, in case you're not counting that. Eighteen hundred dollars per hour.

And these things stay booked.

I know what you're thinking.

Oh, they can't be leg.

It's legal.

They have insurance. They've never had an accident.

This needs to be copied all over the world.

Get the full business plan right here. All right, so two calls to action. Most of my videos have two. Actually, you might have heard an echo in that because it was on other computers, but you get the idea. The first call to action was in the beginning, which breaks the mold. And it was two and a half seconds, which is incredibly long. No one fell off. Why? Well, it's not because of my riz. It's because of what was happening behind me. It's because what was happening behind me broke their frame. Like, what is going on here? This is like a shipping container that's moving and people are in it. Like, is this a cage? Is this going to a prison? What is happening? So it's not because of what I'm saying. It's because they need their question answered. And that's what every good video needs to do. It needs to have a hook that asks a question. Maybe not literally, but either the visual hook or the verbal hook or the on screen text hook needs to open a loop that doesn't get closed either until the end of the video, so your retention can be high. Or until they fulfill the call to action and do the thing. In this case, subscribe to my newsletter. So that's the first call to action that gets them to follow me. And then here, the second call to action is to my newsletter. And it's the same call to action in every single one of my videos. Every single one of my videos I create a business plan for that's keyword optimized that gets published on my website that uses ahrefs to find the right keywords. With Claude GPT that I built myself. And it's just a long standing prompt. And my assistant says, all right, Claude, I've got this business idea. It's called Toasted Tours. They do wine tours in Napa Valley. It's kind of weird because it's on a shipping container. Make me a business plan. I need to have a financial analysis startup cost, a timeline, yada yada, boom. Spits out a business plan. I publish it to my website and then when people subscribe to me, they get a long standing link where they can click on it and they can search Toasted Tours and they'll see the business plan. So I'm putting out between three and seven reels a day with different business ideas that each have a business plan attached to it. And to give you an idea of how powerful and how profitable this flywheel is, if I convert 0.02% of my viewers to be subscribers, which sometimes on videos like this it's, it could be as much as 0.1%, five times more than that. So let's just say conservatively it's.02%. Now I know that this video did over 20 million views across platforms. So that's going to be 200 times 20. That's going to be 4,000 newsletter subscribers from one organic video that I saw while scrolling reels like all of you do on a regular basis. I wasn't like researching. I didn't, I didn't have like deep research or operator go out and find. I don't have a team like curating these business ideas for me. I was just on Instagram, I saw the video, I pulled out my iPhone 16, put it on front facing camera, put my nice mic on because audio is important. I took a video, I didn't script it, I didn't use a teleprompter. I just kind of like freestyled it and I just left pauses in there as I thought of my next sentence. Boom. Uploaded to my drive. My editor got a notification, she edited it. Within an hour it was published to TikTok and then within two hours it was published everywhere else. So 4,000 newsletter subscribers from one organic video, $6 in cost, five 10 minutes of time. And my newsletter subscribers are worth about $10 each. So that's $40,000 worth of value for 10 minutes of my time. Not to mention like all of the other things, I got over a hundred thousand followers across platform, which means all of my videos from then on will have a better chance of going viral. And it was just this flywheel effect. Now if I show you a more average video, this is it right here. I posted this four days ago. You can see here on the right. I got 300 followers from it. It did okay. It got 300,000 views almost and climbing. That's a more average video for me. But on average I am getting between. This is on a weekly basis. If you look at these views, about 30 million views per week across platforms. So 100 to 150 million per month across platforms. With a very lean team, mostly overseas, driving millions of dollars worth of LTV lifetime value to my newsletter and their high quality newsletter subscribers as well. So that's how powerful this funnel is. I'm going to speak for six more minutes and then open it up for questions. So be thinking of questions. What niche do you pick? So think of a Venn diagram. Think of something that you understand really well because you know the whole profit versus passion argument, you know, I say chase your passion if you want to be scalable and sustainable. And if you can afford to, if you can't afford to, then do whatever it takes to be self sustaining. So think of something that you love, think of something you could talk about forever, think of something that you know and think of something where you won't ever run out of content. That's your niche. For me, it's business. No niches, off limits. As far as generating ideas. What do I post about? I'm afraid after a week I'm going to run out of things to say. Instagram, just the Instagram for you page. Not TikTok, not YouTube shorts. Train your algorithm. You can go into the Instagram settings and you can reset your algorithm. So if all it's showing you are Theo Vaughn or videos or Blackstone Grill cooking videos, reset that sucker. And every time you see something in your niche that you might be able to emulate, maybe it's not in your niche, but it has an amazing hook. Maybe it is in your niche and you might want to emulate it. Show the algorithm that you want to see more of that. You like it, you bookmark it, you comment, whatever. Very quickly, within 30 minutes you will start seeing things that give you ideas. It doesn't have to be a green screen style like me. It probably isn't going to be business. Statistically speaking, it could be anything. You just need these brilliant algorithms that we're trying to exploit to show you the same inspiration that you're going to be giving to others. And then you just gotta start posting. I use Capcut for editing. Well, I used to, but their terms and conditions were just changed and it's garbage now. So we use other, we use Edits and Premiere and other tools for editing. Now I don't suggest Capcut anymore, that's a recent development. But we use these cheap tools for editing. I use my iPhone 16 for taking videos. You don't need expensive equipment. Use the same algorithms to generate the inspiration. If you look at my tab right now, these are me tracking all of my shorts across platforms. And so you can see Here on cell AC3, I average 830,000 views across platforms. If I take the same video posted to all five places, Snapchat YouTube Shorts, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Reels. Also pro tip with Facebook reels. Do not cross post from Instagram to Facebook reels. Upload manually to all five platforms. I promise you it makes a difference. I didn't think it would make a difference because if it's good content, they're going to push it. It makes a difference. Upload manually, separately to all five platforms. So think about that. Call it a million views per video on average. 200 newsletter subscribers per video. I put out five videos per day. A thousand subscribers per day. It's powerful. And if you're thinking, oh, you started this audience already or you had a big budget, none of that. When I started publishing video content, I had 50,000 Twitter subscribers. That's it. 50,000 Twitter subscribers. And I tried to pull them over to short form video. No, you can't do that. You absolutely cannot do that. No one cares. People that love you on Twitter are probably not going to watch you on Instagram unless they accidentally find you. They're not going to go through the friction full process of clicking through and finding you and then following you. I started from scratch and I posted some bad videos. This was one of my first videos ever. I'm going to play it real quickly and I'm going to show you everything that went wrong with this. Notice there's zero edits, there's zero cuts. I didn't know how to edit videos when I was doing it myself and so I would take everything in one take and I kept restarting the video without a teleprompter just to get it all in one take. So I'm like out of breath. Quick question. What if there were a private community out there of people that were building businesses based on this podcast? Well, I just made it and it's only for business starters and business builders, it's called TK Owners. And it's basically like having me and a hundred other business geniuses as your business partner, but you give them 0% equity. Also, there's going to be exclusive new trends, growth hacks, business ideas, and a database of everything I've ever talked about. You'll find thousands of startup case studies. You'll have weekly ask me anythings with me while I'll answer your questions directly. You'll be in my Slack channel where I'm hanging out every week and helping members one on one. We've got exclusive guest speakers, including some names that you'll recognize. And if you're building something cool, I'll introduce you to anyone you need TK Owners is the fastest way to plug into a smart, ambitious group of builders and accountability partners that are sharing wins without the fluff. And it's 99 bucks a month about the cost of an energy drink per day. You can join now@tkowners.com link in the show notes. This is day two of 10 of.

A 60 second business plan. In the next 56 seconds, you will.

Know exactly how to start a business.

And where to find your first customers.

Luxury wedding bathroom trailers. Go to Facebook Marketplace. Search for luxury wedding bathroom trailers. You can buy them for 20 to 30 grand. Many companies will. Okay, you get the idea. This was 55 seconds. Should have been about 25. I got 3,600 views and that's how many it has today. Back then it had hundreds of views and I got 10 followers from it. I posted about 20 to 30 videos. That bad or worse. Until one day I'm driving. I'd love to tell you that my car was on autopilot, which I have, but I wasn't. I was being unsafe. I don't recommend that. And I had a tweet about this that did well. So I'm like, oh, let's just convert this tweet to a video. Or wonder what happens to all those pocket knives that the TSA confiscates at the airport. Me too. Guess what? This is day 5 of 10 of showing you how to make money with websites you've never heard of. All right, so open ended question. There's no captions, there's no fancy editing, low res camera. People followed me, right? Then this website confiscates all the pockets. I talk about the website and they're just like waiting. They're waiting. What is it? And then I say the name of the website at the very end. And today if I did this, it would be strategic. Back then it was all accidental because I just kept publishing crap. And you can see up here on the right, this video got 2.1 million views, 45,000 followers. So I went from 50 followers to 45,000 literally overnight with a quick video that I took on my phone. And the most important thing that happened there was the learning. Oh, now I need a call to action. Oh, now I need to do retention a little better. So to summarize all this up, publish everything, test all the niches, train the algorithm to show you what's relevant to you. Publish something like this in your niche, something like that, Something a little different. Maybe a video with just text on screen, maybe a 10 second video, maybe a three minute video test all the things, look at the retention charts, cut out what isn't valuable, where people are dropping off and just keep failing over and over and over again. Don't shrink away from your call to action. You have to leave the question open if you want to push them to your newsletter. You have to answer the question that the video asks in the newsletter. Okay, I'm going to say that again. You have to answer the question in your newsletter that your short form video question asks or they have no reason to follow you. You will not lose loyalty. They're not going to unsubscribe from you. They're going to go to your newsletter and they're going to want more of what you provided in that first welcome email. So I'm out of time, so I'd love to open it up for questions.

Chris, that was amazing, man. Excited to jump into some Q and A. Everyone give a round of thumbs ups here for Chris. Top voted question. Where did you find a good video editor for $6 an hour per video or $6 per video?

Sorry, Upwork. I just posted a job for it on Upwork.

Okay, easy. Next question. How do you see LinkedIn pairing with newsletters most effectively?

It's just going to come down to copying people that are growing newsletters on LinkedIn, looking at what they're doing. Are they posting like PDFs with a bunch of small words? That works really well, honestly. Large images with way too much content on it to digest. The algorithm loves that because people have to click into it, they have to zoom in and it keeps them on the platform longer. I know stuff like that works. Publish a ton of content with no links in it. Once it starts doing well, like above average for you. A few hours later, go in and add a link not to the top comment but in the post itself. And the algorithm will not suppress it because it's already a proven piece of content and they don't care that you're leading people off site at that point.

Great. Next question. Anonymous user, if you were starting today from scratch, essentially what would be your 30 day getting started plan?

I would try to publish 60 videos.

That's it?

Yep.

Next question from Amanda. Chris, I noticed your recent posts include three of the same piece. How much does repeated content factor into the newsletter strategy?

Sorry, three of the same.

What?

I think maybe she was asking. There was like repetition, repetition essentially, like how much does repeated content or talking maybe about the same thing factor in? Or do you have a approach there?

I have a strategy there. If I publish what I call a banger something viral. For me I will recycle that every three months and I refilm and have it re edited every time so it doesn't look like the exact same piece of content to the algorithm.

Okay, next question.

I wanted to happen just with a file and if that's okay. Tg, I'm backstage now but I think a lot of people are wanting to do this like 60 day video, 30 day plan challenge. Would you pick like, would you be posting on multiple different platforms? Would you start with just TikTok? Would you do YouTube shorts, TikTok Instagram Reels? How would you go about videos?

That was one of the 80% of things that I didn't get to. I would pick a medium. Right. If you're going to do written, then do LinkedIn and X. That also works to grow a newsletter. That's how I started. If you're going to do video, post it to all five platforms. They're not all the same. They won't all perform the same. I just had a video do 11,000 views on TikTok and 6 million on Facebook Reels. Right. But it's a no brainer. It's a lot more scalable that way. So don't not publish something on everything. Publish, publish everything everywhere.

Do you think there's an unfair advantage right now with shortform? Like I know I'm doing a lot of LinkedIn content, but do you think shortform has a certain virality you can't have? Like compared to written posts, yes.

But it's definitely a lot easier to go viral on LinkedIn today than on X. So if you had to choose a written platform, go LinkedIn but otherwise go short form. Cool.

Sorry, not hopping backstage.

No worries, no worries. Good question. Elizabeth asks what CTAs are best to use and this might change, but seems like you push pull a lot of people to newsletters. How do you think about that from a CTA side?

Yeah. So don't make the mistake of trying to take a shortcut down the funnel. If you have like a paid offer, a course community, do not do a CTA all the way down the funnel to there. It will not do well. It will not perform. You have to massage people into it. You got to get them there. They need to trust you more. So whatever is right next down the funnel for you at any given time, maybe it's just to be followed so you know your algorithm can have more data points. Otherwise newsletter or like long form content. If you have a podcast or a long form YouTube channel. Push them down the funnel there.

Awesome fella, if I'm pronouncing that correct, asks how long did you do this all by yourself before you were able to actually hire a team?

That's a good question. I probably edited and published myself by hand, two to 300 videos before outsourcing it. And that's, I don't say that's like that's necessary. You should do that. That's just how it ended up shaken out for me.

Hayden asks, how are your newsletter subscribers worth? I think you had mentioned $10 each. How did you come up with that number and back into that.

Yeah, if you look at my whiteboard here, this says 0.5%. Follow it's really 0.2%. And then 0.0, this is actually more 0.02% like I said over here. So my theory is 1% of people are going to buy or click something from you. And so one way to look at it is, all right, I got to pick that one thing that's the best and highest use. The other way to look at it is I need to try a hundred different things. That way I can get, you know, 30% of people to buy or click something from me. And so over here, paid newsletter, which would be this is like $12 a month over 12 months, $150 lifetime value. 70% of that would be the profit. $105 if like 1% of people do that. So basically I took all of these potential things. Most of these I don't even sell, but I could and I just basically said 1% of that. What's the profit on that? LTV add them all together. And then I also just know industry averages, like industry standard for a business or finance newsletter is between 7 and $15. So worst case scenario, I just put ads in my newsletter. I don't sell anything. I just put on a CPM basis, I just put ads in the newsletter. It's worth about $10. So if I do execute on this grandmaster plan here, they're actually worth a lot more than $10 each.

Let's see. Jill, this is a good question. Tips for bootstrapping solopreneurs in terms of how to actually scale short term video production, especially when you're looking at creating efficiencies using AI potentially and not using AI. Many ideas there use AI.

So use scraping tools like apify. Apify to extract transcripts from videos in your niche. Upload the transcript to ChatGPT or whatever and say, you know me, rewrite this script for me with a better hook, hopefully a better promise payoff at the end. AI is super good for making better hooks or for just generating ideas. Like, if you don't want to train the algorithm like I talked about, just say, here's my niche. Here's kind of what I'm thinking. Feed it some reference data. Like, here's five ideas of content that I want to make. Give me 50 more ideas, more similar to these that cost 20 bucks a month to do that. All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.