Dan Martell says half the work of content creation is research and ideation, not filming or editing. He walks through his systematic process for finding market-fit topics, then emphasizes how positioning and packaging, like thumbnail design, matter as much as the idea itself.
Most people would be surprised to find out that 50% of the effort is on the research of what we work on content-wise, not on the capture or the editing. Break it down a little bit. What's the research process look like? I don't know. That's a great— I knew what it looked like when I did it, and trust me, it is way more sophisticated now. I mean, the big idea is in any market there's an essence for what the market wants. So like you can go to my channel and say, what's Dan's most popular videos? And go, oh, I'm gonna do my version of that. The problem is, is you don't look at the timeline. If it was the most popular 7 years ago, probably not a good decision. That and a bunch of like ideation. I would say like the team that works on ideation is like, it is a process and a system. It's just like innovation within a big company. The innovation part is hard. Once it's innovated and then we operationalize it and manufacture it, then it's like, okay, there's a separate set of problems. And I didn't realize the level of focus that needed to go in to the positioning of the content, the packaging. I mean, you know, this thumbnail, just thumbnail design, the level of opportunity for people once they go pro is there. It's just, it looks like work.
