Building a 10 Million Monthly View Content Machine with Codie Sanchez

This next session is with Cody Sanchez. She is an amazing friend. Her session is going to be on how she built a 10 million view content machine that continues to compound over time. This is from our Leveling Up Founders event. You can learn more at live.levelingup.com. And without further ado, let us go to the session. Enjoy.

The part that like I kind of can't get over a little bit is like when I think about this, you know, I went to Georgetown. That's That's me being a tourist. I worked at Goldman Sachs. That's me being sleep deprived. I was on TV. I did the whole stock market thing. And now, and now I do TikToks on the interwebs. And so, you know, when I tell my former private equity partners, my former investment banking partners, that now I am basically all in on content and we are a content and media business with a satellite of holdco investments, They don't get it. They categorically do not get it. They often say to me things like, it's cute, are you gonna be the next Grant Cardone? And at that point I'm like, motherfucker, he's got a nice plane. I'm okay with it, I'm not there yet. But I guess the point that I'm gonna make to you guys today is that I don't think that those of us who are focusing on content first have lost our fucking minds. I think in fact there is something happening here that lots of people who are super tactical, data-driven, and numerical are completely missing the boat on. And that is that this is the new leverage. Anybody know who this dapper fellow is? This is Rockefeller, former titan. And, you know, Balaji, I think, and maybe Naval have talked about this, but there's really 4 types of leverage in the world. And this is how they came into existence. We had labor first, started with the slaves, yikes, all the way now to employees, sometimes also yikes. Then we had capital, Rockefellers, do you know how the Rockefellers became titans? Do you guys know why? Correlated very specifically with one thing, the institution of the banking system. Capital came on board, new type of leverage. These guys knew how to use it and became titans of industry that we all know their name now hundreds of years later. Then we had code. Who's a billionaire based off code? Steve fucking Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates. That was the last realm of individuals who understood what I would call the 19th century type of leverage, the 20th century type of leverage. But what's the 21st century type of leverage? It is your eyeballs. It is attention. And so everything that I'm going to talk to you about today is how to think about this with a little bit of twist, applying content to your personal brand or business. And there are plenty of people who do not want to do ticky-talkies on the interwebs, which I get. But I do think that almost every human who cares about the ability to use leverage to its maximum potential, which is what we're taught in finance, should have a personal brand. First, I would have a content business for every single business you guys have. So let's say somebody here was talking about pet companies, right? And they don't have video, but they have search. I think that's smart. I think you should add a content aspect to every single business that you guys have. The reason why is because look at these margins, 75 to 80% margins. So you have, I don't know, an ebook that you sell to new baby dog owners. You have an ebook that you sell to XYZ people. You do a group meetup for vets.

Yes.

I don't know, and you charge people for them. You should have some content business. The second is, if you're thinking about raising money and you're thinking about raising money for your business, here's what most people do wrong. When they go out to raise money, they go to kind of smart, typically angels or institutional investors or VCs or worse, private equity funds, of which I have been for more than a decade. Who gives the best terms? Retail investors? Private equity investors?

Retail investors.

Retail investors, right? You get the best terms when you take the smallest checks. You get the worst terms when you take the biggest checks. But all entrepreneurs are kind of dumb in this way because they're like, I got money from Kleiner Perkins, you raised money from dentists. And I'm like, I own 95% of the company and Kleiner Perkins owns 95% of your company. So I want you to flip the script so you can create a content business, have 75 to 80% margins. You can raise money from retail investors for whatever it is that you're pushing forward into your next venture. And I talk about it with this word called force multiplier, which is basically a military term that means fists versus fighter jets. Let's say you got 100 dudes about to wage some war and they've got their fists and they're going to go up against 100 other dudes, but those dudes have a jet. Who wins? The one with the jet. Content is a force multiplier in the same way. You can have unfair outcomes with content and the attention arbitrage trade that I do not think you can have by being the best SEO specialist out there. Why? SEO's been around for a while. The arbitrage window has closed. Is there still opportunity? Absolutely. Will you have force multiplier differentials, or what I call in finance 3 standard deviations? No, you won't. And so, if you have a business, do content. Investments, do content. Personal brand, do content, or don't and leave more money for like me and Vanessa. We're cool with it too. Here's sort of, let's call it 5 ways I think you can hack the system in 10 minutes. Let's start with number 1, hire children. Not those type of children, these type of children. The first thing that you should be doing is you should be hiring Gen Zs or millennials. The thing is, you guys don't actually understand the platform. I don't actually understand the platform. The platform being YouTube, TikTok, I mean even Instagram today. The algorithm has changed. The most important thing that you can do up front is hire people who are native to this. They actually don't speak any other language except the language of TikToks. When they hear a song, they say, that's a TikTok song. It's a completely different mind flip. So first would be hire children. Number 2, the hiring pyramid. So in any business, you have 4 steps that happen. First, you start a business, you're the generalist, you do everything. Second step, you hire another generalist or a few other generalists and they do many things. Then you start to hire specialists. And then finally, and those specialists start to replace the generalists, and then finally specialists run everything. This is an awesome framework for everything except content. It's wrong. I didn't realize this in the beginning. I spent a fuck ton of money and didn't make a lot of progress in the beginning because I did what most of us business people do. You hire the top person that you can when, you know, I had some money, I had an ability to hire quickly. And I hired a content director and I said, content director, make Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and whatever sing. And what do you think happened? They're in charge of all these platforms. None of them do well. What actually worked? Here's basically how we run it now. You have specialists for every single platform you're on. You got an Instagram person, you got a Twitter person, you got a LinkedIn person. They have graphic designers that support them. You've got a writer and a researcher for those specific platforms. You got a TikTok person, you got a bunch of video editors, you got a YouTube person, you got a video editor, thumbnail designer, YouTube consultant. This one is cool. I love stealing other people's 10,000 hours. Why would I want to have to fail for 10,000 hours when I can just take theirs? But each platform is different. If you talk on YouTube like you do on TikTok, you're not going to work. So on TikTok, it's your shitty little teenage cousin, and the comments are going to be filled with a bunch of gnarly stuff, and their attention span goes like this. And if you haven't caught them in the first 2 seconds, nothing else matters. YouTube, you can actually build some engagement with your audience over the long term. And when I say you, I mean you, your brand, you, your business, you, your portfolio of businesses. I think every company these days should be a media company instead of a product or individual company. All right, this is a lot, but you could just take a screenshot. If you want like a How would I do this in 30 seconds? But this speech is only 10 minutes. Here's what I'd do. Facebook, I wouldn't do a thing except ads and maybe Facebook groups. Instagram, here's the breakdown on how I do it. This is just basically our posting schedule. TikTok breakdown, Reels— I mean, IG Reels breakdown and Twitter breakdown. Now, the only thing I'll talk to you about is I think about it all like a funnel. So at the very top of the funnel is TikTok. TikTok is a terrible place for conversion. Typically, TikTok is a really bad place to leave your audience because it's the only platform I've seen where the algorithm actually makes no sense whatsoever on a consistent basis. And we have, like Eric said, 26, maybe now 27 companies that use these social media platforms in different ways. So it's not just my company now. So top of the funnel, TikTok, then you want to transition them to somewhere else. Typically Instagram. You can use Instagram to close. It's short enough where the TikTokers can have the IG attention spans. Then you move down from IG and TikTok to YouTube where you can actually build a real relationship and do a lot more converting. Then from there you move down to things like your email list or actually conversions to your product. Twitter to me is a place for founders. Twitter is an incredible place to get investments, to do deals, to hire. I mean, I have hired probably my last 15 or 20 hires, I don't touch LinkedIn. I don't touch LinkedIn with a 10-foot pole because have you guys been in your LinkedIn DMs lately? Is anybody excited about opening LinkedIn DMs? It's full of trash. But you go to your Twitter DMs and you build up a personal brand as a Twitter CEO and you can start reaching out to people who actually get marketing in the 21st century. I only use Twitter. The last thing I'll say here is that it works for everything. So people say, well, it doesn't work for me, I'm in private equity. company, I'll be like, motherfucker, it works for laundromats. Who thought that you'd care about laundromats on TikTok? This guy has, what is it, 3.4 million followers for his laundromats. And do you know how he makes money off of this? Not selling info products. The guy is looking for more deals. He just buys a ton of laundromats, then he buys car washes, and people send him stuff as owner of those. So it works for laundromats. It works for sponges. Scrub Daddy, $2.2 million. Mr. Car Wash. This company is one I'd love to get my mitts on, but now it's a multi, multi-billion dollar company. It's the largest car wash company in the world, and they actually went public. And if I was the owner of a company like Mr. Car Wash, I think they're leaving a huge opportunity sitting there. That's probably because they're run by private equity, but basically think about this. Scrub Daddy. Does tens of millions of dollars in sales, basically largely organically through things like their video platform, and they've been around a long time, so they do have a lot of SEO. Why wouldn't you add that to a car wash business? Why wouldn't you use your virality to add some sort of additional product? Why wouldn't you take your car wash business and create viral things about it with geolocation so that you could actually target more people to be subscribers to your new subscription offering that you're going to have for your car wash? If it works for brick-and-mortar laundromats and car washes, I'm pretty sure it could work for just about anything else. I think these guys have one of the best examples of it. There's this whole trend online called ASMR. Are you guys familiar with that? Now, this company is brilliant, I think, but awful at logistics. I tried to buy these guys and she told me to pound sand. But they do tens of millions of views and they run out of product every single week. Can you imagine? They've run out of product every single week for a year. Could you imagine what you could do if you were any good at all with logistics with a company like this? Incredible. Here's— oh, this is actually their revenue, kind of interesting. So I don't know if this is their revenue. I reverse engineered it, could be totally fake, but basically I saw how many varietals they put up each week, how many she says they offer, how often they restock, and then their price per slime. I'm like, God, at the low end, you guys are doing $2.8 million and they only allow you to buy it. Like, if you don't buy in 7 seconds, you can't get the product. Right? Imagine that. I want to kind of end here, which is, what is this? This is the arbitrage window that was open between the volatility index and the SPY, which we don't really have to know that. But basically what it's showing you is that over time, you used to be able to trade and make a lot of money. The higher it is, the more money you could make theoretically by taking the difference between what's happening in the market, like how crazy the market is, how much volatility it has, and the S&P 500. That trade has been completely eradicated. At some point, this trade will be gone, but I think right now this trade is the most important trade for the 21st century.

All right, so that's it for this session. Hope you enjoyed it. If you are interested in learning more about the Leveling Up Founders private event, it's basically an annual thing where we gather the top founders and also the top speakers and ultimately just help each other grow our businesses is faster. Last event was rated a 9.8 out of 10, and everyone said it was more so about the people. The speakers were amazing, but the people are even more amazing. So you can go to live.levelingup.com to learn more if you are interested, and we will, we'll catch you later.