Right now, you have a choice to make. You're either building a personal brand to get followers
or you're building it to get customers.
Gurus would tell you that you need to make the widest content possible to get the most amount of views. But the reality is, all you need to do is build real trust with your ideal customer.
In 2025,
after sixteen years of building personal brands, I decided to do something crazy and build my own. And in the first ten months, we got over 200,000
followers,
40,000 people on our email list, but most importantly,
we received over 750
applications to work with us. In this course, I'm gonna help you start your personal brand by establishing your brand positioning and building a content strategy that gets real customers,
not just followers. But here's the crazy thing. There's a chance that you are here watching this video thinking that you should start your personal brand purely because
you've seen somebody you admire do it, and so you think this is just something that you have to do. A huge mistake that I see is people are building their personal brand just to check a box.
They have never actually sat down and defined a goal or what their desired outcome is, and then use that to inform whether or not they should actually build their personal brand. I actually believe that there might be a case where you don't need to do that. When I was embarking on this crazy journey of building my own business and potentially building my own personal brand, I had the fortune
of being able to sit down with Gary Vaynerchuk. I worked for Gary for a couple of years. When I shared with him that I was considering not only building my own consulting firm, but starting to put out content to
help people build their personal brand, but then also drive awareness and conversion to my business. And his response
shocked me. This is the man that preaches online twenty four seven.
Everyone needs to be making content. Content is the gateway drug to what you want out of life. That's like his direct quote. What he said to me is, I really think you should be sure that this is what you really want. You might be able to build a great business without ever making content. I want you to make sure that this fits into the life that you are building. And as you can imagine, sitting down with the content king,
hearing something like that,
it caused me to think twice. And I really tried to look at what am I trying to accomplish is making content publicly.
Is this necessary to accomplish
that? And what I realized is that I had two main goals. The first one was that I wanted to grow my business. Theoretically, I could do that without making content.
But the second goal was that I wanted to help people
build a personal brand. I think there's a shitload of people teaching people how to build a bad personal brand that makes the world worse.
I want to help people build personal brands that add to the world, that make the world better. I wanted to do that for a huge amount of people that I know will never work with us directly at Ralston. They'll never pay us a dime.
And so the first
desired outcome I had, I could accomplish that without making content.
The second one, where I help a bunch of people for free that never work with us,
I would never have been able to do that, at least at the scale that I'm looking to accomplish
without making content.
And so it answered the question for me.
The beauty of it is now I have something to measure against.
Every decision I make
supports those two desired outcomes.
Is this helping build the business or is this helping educate people for free? If it's not doing one of those two things, I'm probably not gonna put it out in the content. You really need to think about what it is that you are trying to accomplish and whether or not content supports that. So all that to say, it was absolutely insane to me that
Gary
said this and kind of gave me a pause, but it really made me realize just how important it is
to
establish
and understand
the end goal in mind because you may realize
that there are better ways of accomplishing that goal
outside
of making content. Here's an example. Uh, I have a friend who is in, uh, executive protection. Okay?
And let's say that this friend of mine is currently
a security guard at a local mall or a local bank. We'll use the mall example. And they have the desire to work their way up into executive protection where they are protecting
and being like a basically a bodyguard
for
somebody who is probably pretty important. If you're going to be Taylor Swift's
EP,
it's probably not a good thing if a bunch of people know who you are because you're not going to be able to move through different scenarios as discreetly. In that case, do you think that it would be a good idea to make content? Do you think that making content and building your personal brand publicly
will help you accomplish
your desired outcome? I'm going to go ahead and answer it for you. I'm going say the answer is no.
There are scenarios where being more publicly known actually hurts
your desired outcome and makes it harder to accomplish the goal at hand rather than easier. And so what we need to do is we need to establish
what is that desired outcome? What are we trying to accomplish?
And does building a public personal brand and making content
support that
or does it hurt it? But before we get into
establishing your brand positioning,
I want to
figure out what this goal is. This desired outcome that you have, what you're trying to achieve. A couple years ago, I came up with a framework called the brand journey framework. And it's four simple questions, and it basically helps you figure out what that desired outcome is,
and then everything you need to do from today to get to that point. It reverse engineers all the way from the desired outcome to today. Very, very simple, very effective. But actually before we get into the questions, we have a workbook that goes with this entire course, and it allows you to take what you are hearing me say and supposedly learning and actually make sure that you learn it and apply it to your personal brand. You're gonna click that link, go to the website, enter your email, we will send you the workbook for you to download and go through in accordance with this entire course. And the brand journey framework is the first exercise you're going to do. Here's the four simple questions. Question number one is, what is your desired outcome?
What are you wanting to achieve? The second question you'll answer is,
in order to achieve that desired outcome, what would I need to be known for? Right? Like, what is the reputation that I need to have? The third question is, in order to develop that reputation, to be known for the thing, to get the outcome I desire, what would you have to do?
We become known for things not just by saying bullshit out of our mouth, but by the actions that we actually take day in and day out. What are the actions you need to do to be known for the thing to get your desired outcome? The last and final question, the fourth one, what do I need to learn
in order to do the things to become known for the thing to get my desired outcome? If you go through this journey, you're gonna have a very clear roadmap on how you're going to get to your desired outcome, but then you can look at what is that end goal in mind and does making content
accelerate
my ability to get there or does it actually make it slower and harder for me to accomplish that goal? If the answer is it makes it easier, amazing.
Let's proceed. If the answer is it doesn't make it easier and it's actually going to be harder, I would encourage you, don't waste any more time on this video. The rest of this video is for those of you who have identified
that making content and building a public personal brand moves you closer to your end goal. If that's the case, let's get you closer to the end goal. And the first question that I would like to address is why should anybody
listen to you? You watching this, you're in one of two camps. You're either the student or the expert, and the majority of this video to be very clear is for the expert. But one thing that I want to call out is that some of you are actually a student who are pretending to be an expert. If you're the student, you don't have the big w's. You don't have years of experience.
You're not who your audience wants to be.
You're on the journey of becoming who your audience wants to become.
What your job is is to be the guinea pig, to be the proxy for your audience. You do all the testing and investing
that either goes well or doesn't go well. And so if you're the student,
fucking be the student. Don't pretend and posture as the expert. This is where I see so many people get trapped and stuck online, and what you end up doing is you burn trust
forever
with that audience. So for the students watching,
know that you are the student. Now, the expert, I think it's it's probably pretty clear to you. Although, you might be somebody who would feel awkward calling yourself an expert, but if you have
multiple w's on your resume,
if you are the person who your audience wants to become,
or you have done the thing that your audience wants to do, then you are the expert. And it's your job to teach in public. The student is learning in public, but you are teaching in public. And there's a little bit of build in public that you can you can add into that, but the main thing that I wanna focus on is that you're gonna be sharing how you've accomplished what you've accomplished. The mistakes, I guess, that you've made along the way that you would encourage others to avoid when going on the same journey, but you also wanna make sure that you're imparting to them the ability to go from where they are to that expert level quicker than you did. The And first thing I wanna do is actually an exercise. I wanna start this video off by actually taking some real action and getting some results right away for us. Okay? And so what you're gonna do is there's a link in the description below this video on YouTube. Click that link, enter your email. We're going to send you the workbook,
and in that workbook, there's one exercise that I really wanna start off with, which is building your bank. Now for the students watching this, and again, like I said, we're not gonna talk too much to the students, but I do wanna give you this cause I think it's really useful. You're gonna build what I call an interest
bank. Interest as in what you are interested in. This is a running list of the things that you are studying, you're experiencing,
you're experimenting with, you're learning, you're testing. These are all the things that you are on your journey
of learning
and your channel is gonna be documenting
the process of improving or becoming better or working towards
becoming the expert in this field. Now, for the experts watching,
you need to establish a credibility bank. This is a running list of the things that you've done, you've achieved, you solved, you've proven, the mistakes that you've made, and the lessons that you learned from that. These are the things that you built. These are the successes
that you have in your career. And what this does is it builds the foundation that you're going to build and amplify
your personal brand off of. Now a really important note here. For some of you, you might feel like, oh, that's not fair. It's just the way that life is.
The reality is the results that you're going to get for your personal brand do have a lot to do with what you put down in your credibility bank. Now real quick, I don't want you to misunderstand this. I'm not saying make shit up in your credibility bank, but the more impressive
the items in your credibility bank are,
the more likely you are to have better than average results with growing your personal brand in the first couple of years. It's no secret to me that one of the reasons why we're having the success we're having with building my personal brand in the first year I mean, hello. We're at over 200,000 followers, over 39,000,
maybe even 40,000 people on our email list at this point. Like, it's getting kind of crazy. And I believe that we're being intentional with how we're making our content, but it's not lost on me that I have had several big public w's in my career
that have added to the legitimacy and credibility that I bring into the content I'm sharing. For example, rather than listening and watching content on how to build your personal brand from somebody who has only done it for themselves,
a lot of people value the fact that I have helped build multiple
very big personal brands within the business creator space.
And so they know that I'm not just speaking from a tactic point of view, but I'm teaching
principles that work in differing scenarios.
And so what I want you to do is put together your credibility bank that's in the workbook. You can go in, fill that out for yourself, and what you're going to do is this is the foundation that you draw from and you speak to because the question that we're trying to answer is why would anybody listen to you? Well, the answer is in your credibility bank. This is why people will listen to what you have to say. Because if you do more epic shit, you're gonna have more epic shit to talk about. It's a crazy concept. If you aren't impressed with your credibility bank,
well, that's fine. You can keep rolling and start building your personal brand, but just know that you should work on building a more impressive credibility bank, which means go do cool shit. For example, if I'm wanting to learn from you on how to
climb a mountain.
Well, if you've only climbed, you know, 5,000, 6,000
feet peaks,
that's not that impressive to me. But if you've bagged a bunch of fourteeners, you've done Everest, you've done K 2, and all these other crazy summits,
well then I'm suddenly going to take what you have to say
from a different frame than maybe,
you know, Joe who has only climbed a couple local hills as we would call them in the Northwest, not mountains.
Okay? And so the more impressive your credibility,
the more buy in and belief your audience will have with you and belief that what you're saying is gonna lead them to the outcomes they desire. Now that we are on the path of establishing why people are gonna actually listen to what we have to say. One thing that I wanna stop
and do real quick is address burnout. I But wanna hit this from a brand perspective because I think there's ways that you can burn out from a content creation perspective, but also from actually how you're building your brand and determining your brand positioning.
And I believe this happens, burnout, because most creators end up building a brand that they fucking hate. You start talking about shit that you're not actually interested in or passionate about and definitely not an expert in, but you just see these trending topics that all these other personal brands have built their brand around and so you assume that you need to do the same. But the reality is is if you don't like the brand that you are building, do you really think that you're gonna stick with it for long enough to get the results that you desire?
No. And so instead of trying to build a brand that the algorithm tells you, build the brand that excites you. This year,
there's been a lot of things that we have chosen to not do from a actual content perspective,
from a brand pillar perspective, from a packaging on our content perspective
that we know would actually lead to more views, more subscribers, more followers. We'd get better numbers,
but it'd be building a brand that I was embarrassed of, that I wasn't proud of. I can't tell you the amount of times that I have, uh, met with different individuals who they make YouTube content as an example, and they're consistently putting out YouTube videos, but here's an interesting little element.
They won't text
those YouTube videos to any of their friends. They won't share it with anybody whose opinion they actually care about. Why?
Because they are embarrassed of the brand that they are building,
and to me that is just a countdown clock to quitting. If you quit, you don't get your desired outcome. And so I really wanna just take this moment really quick here for you to be very intentional with how you're crafting this. As we move through the rest of this video and the rest of the exercises that you're gonna go through in your workbook, I want you to be very thoughtful. Don't think through the lens of what do people want. What is gonna get the most views? What are people gonna be most interested in? That's not the first question that you should be asking. The first question that you should be asking and answering
is what am I gonna be most proud of? What is gonna make me most stoked to continue doing this? What am I wanting to put out into the world to show who I am as a human,
not this curated caricature version of me that I've crafted so that the algorithm
works in my favor. What you wanna do is you wanna talk about your core subject matter. Right? Like for me, it's personal branding, and within personal branding, you have a bunch of different subtopics.
But in addition to that core subject matter, you want to inject elements that show you the human. You don't want your brand, in my opinion, to be based around just one sole thing because you the human more than likely is not based around one sole thing. And so that's why in my content, I will reference my Harley Davidsons, or the fact that I love metal, or the fact that I'm the biggest Seahawks fan imaginable other than the guys that wear no shirts and they paint Seahawks across their chest in the middle of winter during the Seahawks games. I'm trying to share in addition to the value I'm trying to provide you, I want you to know who I am as a human. One, because I'm interested in those things. I'm passionate, and I'm gonna want to talk about them. When I'm sitting and talking with my friends, those subject matters and those topics naturally come up. They should be coming up in the content as well. Rather than trying to hide who you are, and and think that there's this this world where you only talk about one thing ever, because that's what so many of the gurus online have told you to do. That is maybe a way to grow really quick on the platform, but it's also a way to quit really quickly from the platform. And so again,
I am trying to help you build something that is sustainable.
And so I want you to take a moment and really reflect on who you are as a human. The rest of the work that we're gonna do in this video needs to be based off of that. Not some ideal version that you think that your audience will desire,
but who you are as a human. The next question that you should be trying to answer and solve
is why would your audience
care? We know why they're gonna listen to us because we've established that we have the credibility that gives proof
to why we have something good to say. But why are they gonna care? What's in it for them? A mistake that I see you making is looking at what your competitors are doing and building your personal brand based on those findings. AKA you're optimizing around your competitors,
not your customers.
Do you want more competitors? Whatever group you optimize for is the group that you're going to attract more of. If you optimize around what your customers actually want, not what your competitors are doing, but what your customers actually want and need,
then you will attract more of them. So when you start with your customers, the way you do that is you identify what is the pain that they are facing.
Ultimately,
the main reason why we as humans consume educational content is there's some problem that we are looking to solve. There's some pain that we are feeling that we want relief from. You want to start by defining what the very painful problem is and what your unique solution is to it.
Your brand should be built around that. It's a combination of who you are as a human, your expertise,
and solving the problems that your customers actually face. That's what they care about. You probably have somebody in your life who is kind of the the fixer. Right? There's people in our lives that we know that are always fixing things, and what do we end up doing with them? We go to them when we have a problem. We also oftentimes will recommend our friends or family go to them with that same problem. If you become known as someone who solves your ideal customer's problems,
guess what?
More people will come to you. And so by building and optimizing your brand,
not around being second best to the top dogs in your space and copying everything they do, but instead you start from the place of how do I solve real painful problems for my customer.
Then what you're going to find is that your brand becomes known as somebody who solves
real
problems, not somebody who just makes cool content online. Cool content online will get views and it will attract attention,
but it doesn't build trust like solving problems does. And so if you know your ideal customer's painful problems,
then that's gonna help inform you of everything else that you need to work on through the rest of this video and the workbook associated with it. So make sure that you've downloaded the workbook. Click the link below.
Download that. Enter your information. It's literally just your email I think or something like that. And we're gonna email you the workbook,
and I want you to list out your customers painful problems. What you're gonna see in the workbook is it's asking you for 10 to 15.
Some of you might not be able to come up with that many right now. That's okay. As many as you can, but what I will tell you is the more painful problems you identify,
the more ideation you have for the content that you're gonna make in the future. Now one of the questions that we mentioned at the top of this video is how do you stand out? And I'm sure this hits a painful nerve for you because more than likely you feel at some level like your space,
your niche is saturated.
You feel like there are a lot of individuals who are making content, talking about the thing that you would be talking about or you are currently talking about. That's very real. There are more content creators online today than ever before. I think there's something like seven hundred thousand
hours
of YouTube content uploaded every single day. Like it's fucking absurd out here. And so you need an intentional
and strategic
way of actually standing out. And I believe that there are three different main levers that you can pull to stand out. Now, two of them are in your content. But today, what I wanna talk about is your contrarian belief,
and this is the biggest lever
in terms of the three levers that you can pull to stand out. I think this gives you the greatest returns out of all three. Like, you can take the other two, combine them, and they won't come even close
to identifying
your contrarian belief. This is the way that I believe you are gonna get the best traction
the quickest.
You know that whole eighty twenty principle that everybody always talks about? Well,
I will tell you, this is your 80%. This is the thing that's going to drive
the actual growth and make all the other things and initiatives you do for growing your personal brand a lot easier. Now when I say contrarian belief or contrarian take,
people misunderstand
this. I've been on podcasts where I'll say that and they immediately regurgitate it, but instead of contrarian, they say controversial.
I want to distinguish
and define
contrarian versus controversial
because I will never
ever ever tell you to be controversial for controversy's sake. I think that is a terrible,
terrible approach.
See, your contrarian belief is when you are going against the dominant belief because you actually
genuinely
believe it. You are incapable of not sharing
this belief because at your core, it's so fucking true. Now a controversial belief on the other hand is when you're taking a position
because you know it's going to trigger people. This is when you design your statement to get a reaction.
There are plenty of people that take this strategy on. There's plenty of people that preach it, and by all means, you do you boo boo. I am all for you taking whatever approach you desire,
but what I will tell you is if you build that brand,
you start to get known as somebody who is controversial.
For you watching this, you've probably not been in these rooms, but I've worked with some of the biggest personal brands in the business world. And what I will tell you is that they avoid people who are highly controversial like the plague. Nobody who has a really strong
established
brand
who is very thoughtful about the associations they make, they're not going to want to pair themselves
with you if you're building just a controversial brand for controversy's
sake. Most people who build a controversial brand, they're kind of known as a loose cannon. You don't know where that controversy is gonna be aimed. I encourage you build a contrarian belief,
not a controversial belief. Now that we have that defined, let's go into how you go about building your contrarian belief. I really want you to identify
the belief that you have that is fundamentally
different than the other individuals in your space, in your niche,
and be able to articulate that to your audience consistently.
A couple examples that I think might help you understand just how impactful having a contrarian take is. Sometimes as a side note, the contrarian take when you hear it after the fact, you're like, that was contrarian. That's insane. Yvon Chouinard, and I I hope I'm pronouncing that right. If I'm not, let me know in the comments. He is the CEO and founder of Patagonia,
and he was in an industry, the outdoor apparel world and industry, where they were hardcore about mass consumption
and they prioritized profits over everything.
He came onto the scene and built a company based on the belief that you should prioritize environmental stewardship, aka taking care of the fucking environment,
rather than prioritizing profits. And so his actions followed.
All the things that he has done within Patagonia
point to the fact that he's actually caring more about the environment than he is about profits, and now he's known as the model for building an organization where it's value led,
not profit led. And another example, the final one that I wanna share is Reed Hastings with Netflix. Everybody thought that people loved,
absolutely
adored, and held tightly the ability to go to their local blockbuster or video rental store. There was the Hollywoods all the other ones and pick out the VHS. They wanted to physically hold them and read the back in order to understand what the video was gonna be about. And Reed had this crazy contrarian belief that actually people don't want to leave their house. They want to be able to select a movie from their couch, have it delivered to their front door, be able to watch it, and then return it without ever leaving their home. And I think it's pretty obvious, uh, that contrarian take
kinda worked. He started by shipping DVDs. Right? So that you wouldn't have to like go to the local store. You could just open your front door and boom there it is. Watch it, open your front door, place it right back in the mailbox and off we go. And eventually that evolved into not even having to open the front door, just having to literally flip on the switch of the TV and boom you can stream. And I think it's pretty clear
where that contrarian take not only took Reed Hastings and Netflix, but took the entire entertainment
industry as a whole. Streaming is now the number one thing. That's what everybody is doing. Right? Every single network that we used to watch on cable now has their own version of an OTT. I just can't hammer home
just how important it is to have your contrarian belief. This is how you are going to stand out from all the other individuals in your space in your niche.
Hey, You're here because you're investing all of this time, money, and effort to build your personal brand and you're not seeing any results. You might be seeing your views going up, but oftentimes sales aren't matching. It reminds me of one of the clients that we worked with this year. High level media team, absolute gangsters, yet they hit a plateau. See, from a views and subscribers perspective, they were growing like crazy. But from a business perspective,
all of this new attention was not converting into leads. It's because they thought they were making educational content, when in reality they were making entertainment
content. So we walked them through our principles and tactics of how to make educational content, not entertainment. Their previous average per video was four to 5,000 leads. This video got over 20,000 leads. And even though they weren't optimizing for this, that video ended up being their number three video of the entire year with over a million views.
This is why we created Ralston Select. Click the link in the description below if you want more information. Now let's get back to the video. So clearly a great business and a great brand can be built off of a contrarian belief,
but the question that you are probably asking is how do I figure out what mine is? How do I know what my contrarian belief actually should be? Now there's a chance that you actually do know it off top. Right? Like that was me. For years I had been hearing people preach going viral and maximizing for views and I just knew at my core that was not the right way to build a personal brand where you're trying to actually grow your business if you sell a high ticket offer. It just didn't make sense to me. I knew it. And so when I would hear those things, I would have that reaction that I described earlier. My blood would boil. The hair on my neck would stand. Like, I would get a little annoyed and irritated. The first thing that you can think of is what do you hear people in your industry say
that rubs you the wrong way? That makes you go, uh, I don't know if I completely agree with that. I guarantee there's several of these industry tropes that are out there that you fundamentally
view differently. But if you are struggling with coming up with what your contrarian belief is, you don't totally know what it is, I have a very simple exercise that I wanna walk you through that I think is wildly useful
and will provide immense levels of clarity on what your contrarian belief could be or potentially provide you several that then you can go and test in your content. It's called the two column approach,
and what I want you to do is you're gonna draw out two columns or if you downloaded that workbook, you actually have this table right in front of you so you can fill it out. On the left side, you're gonna write down all of the different things that people in your space or niche say that you disagree with. And on the right side, you're gonna write out what your view of that is. I also, in addition to the statements that they say, I want you to write out the things that your competitors do that you disagree with, that you don't like, or that you think your customers
hate. If you're an agency
and
most agencies are really slow to respond, terrible with communication, and not organized. That is less of a statement that they're making and more of their actions. And so what I want you to do is identify that on the left side, and then on the right side, I want you to write out what you would do differently. What this is is it ends up being a list of contrarian takes. It's a contrarian belief or a contrarian action that then you can utilize
for building your personal brand. When I started,
I had three. I'm gonna share with you the belief that I disagreed with and what my view of it was, and I'm gonna do that for two more after that. Because I think it'll help get your wheels turning on what you could identify
in your niche or your space that you don't fuck with. So the first one is always try to go viral, a million views or bust. That's what I hear so many people preaching. I believe and I preach that you should optimize for trust,
not virality.
That is my contrarian belief. Another one is that there's plenty of people out there that preach that you should be posting on every single platform.
Volumes,
mountains, mountains of content that you should be posting daily
on every single platform imaginable, and the moment that a new platform appears in the App Store, you better download that sign up for a new account and be posting at least 20 times a day on it. Like it's it's crazy. Right? And sure that probably works, but it's not practical.
I believe that you should build a system that you will actually stick with,
not what your favorite creator does. Okay? You need to build it around you, not optimizing around them. The third one is that you need your media team to fear you in order to respect you and listen to what you have to say. And it sounds kind of audacious when I say this, but if you're not in this world and you don't lead media teams and work with a lot of people that do, well then you might not realize this, but this is a very, very it's weird, but it's a common belief that a lot of people have.
And my contrarian belief, my contrarian take on that is that you need to create an environment of psychological safety
or the work will suffer. Creative will suffer if they don't feel safe to take risks.
And so these are the three contrarian takes
that I entered
onto the scene with. When we first started building my personal brand, I talked about all three of these in podcasts and in my content. But what I did is I started to notice
that one of them was clearly resonating
with the audience more than the other two. We're at a point right now where all of a sudden I'm seeing more and more people talk about optimizing for trust than virality.
When I first started making content a year ago, that was not the case. There were very few people preaching this message, and so what I noticed is it was catching fire. People were resonating with it and understood it. They agreed with it. They were frustrated and tired of the old way of building a personal brand online.
And so when I noticed that, instead of trying to force all three onto my audience, I doubled down on the one that was clearly resonating with you. And by the way, thank you for resonating with that. Uh, that's the one that I am most passionate about, and so this actually worked out really well for me because the one that I like to preach and share with as many people one on one or in small group settings as possible, I'm now able to preach
and shout from the mountaintops in my content.
Not because it's what I want, but because it's what you have told me you wanted. So once you've done the exercise, you'll have identified
a couple of different contrarian takes,
and I want you to test them in your content.
And then once you notice that
one is resonating more with your audience, just like I described with my contrarian take around optimizing for trust over virality,
once you notice that, I want you to double and triple
down with your audience
on sharing that statement
over and over and over again.
Now the natural question that you have is how do I know that they're resonating with it? Yes. I do read your DMs. I do read your comments. I knew you were about to ask that question, and it's a very fair question, and there's a lot of different places that you can look to as indicators that your audience is fucking with this. Look at the piece of content where you're talking about this contrarian belief. Are people commenting,
literally quoting your contrarian belief back at you? That's a big sign. That's something that I see, uh, a lot of times is a great indicator. Another one is if you make a video that is central around or a piece of content in general, it could be a blog post or sub stack, whatever. If you make a piece of content around your contrarian belief and you get more DMs than normal referencing that piece of content, that is another good indicator that your audience is fucking with this. If you get to a point where things start getting really crazy for you, and this is a wild point to get to with your personal brand. It it blows my mind every time I see it. If people start making content, talking about your contrarian take and tagging you in it,
that's when you really know this thing has gone intergalactic.
This is what you're going to build your brand around. This is what you become known for. If you actually listen to your audience and you actually pay attention to what they're saying to you, you will know. You'll know that they're liking this one more than the other ones.
And that actually brings up a really important point, which I haven't really talked about much ever in my content,
which is who should you be listening to? Not what creators should you be listening to.
You
as the creator,
who should you be listening to to inform
the pivots
or
lack of pivots that you make with your personal brand. And it's a very interesting discussion that happens online. You have half of the camp that falls into the the belief that you should respond to every comment, read every comment, and take it as doctrine, as gospel.
And then you have the other camp that is like ignore the comments completely, make whatever you want and never take into account what they have to say.
And I think there needs to be a happy medium, but first we needed to find what are you doing?
I believe
that if you have a mass market
low ticket offer
that you are selling,
this is why you're building your personal brand is to lead towards that, drive sales, build your business. If that's the world that you're in, then I do think you can listen to the audience in your comments section.
If they're saying that they want more of something or they want less of something,
I think it's worth listening to them. Now on the flip side,
if you have a narrow market high ticket offering,
I don't know that it makes sense
to listen
to what the audience is saying in your comment section to dictate how you build your personal brand. I think you need to go to a different group of people.
I think what you need to do is look at what your customers are saying, what they want more of, what the questions are that they have. That's what you want to optimize around because whatever group you optimize around is the group that you're gonna get more of. Do you want more followers or do you want more customers? For me, I want more customers. I love
that you are subscribed to my channel. If you're not, you should hit that subscribe button. I've never said that before, but it just
felt natural here.
But I'm not looking to build my follower count. I'm looking to build my business, and so I want to optimize. I care about everyone who's watching the content greatly,
and it's not to say that I don't look at your comments and take it into account, but the biggest driver of the pivots or adjustments or the things that will double down on for my personal brand comes from our clients.
And so back to noticing that people were resonating with optimizing for trust, not virality. Yes. The general audience was fucking with that very clearly. But more importantly,
my ideal clients were. I was getting d m's from people that I knew, but I never worked with for years
that were saying, oh my god, this makes so much sense. I click with this. I'm so tired about working with this agency that is having me film these topics that we know are gonna get millions of views, but I could give less than a fuck about. My Instagram has turned into something that I'm ashamed of, not something that I'm proud of. And so that's what we're optimizing around.
Again, I wanna leave you with this on this point. This is super super important. The group that you optimize around is the group that you will get more of. If you optimize around your followers, sure, you'll get more followers. But if you optimize around your customers,
you will get
more
customers.
Now once you land on that contrarian belief, that contrarian take that you're going to really lean into,
what you're gonna wanna do with that is you need to craft what I call a brand statement.
This is a way for you to clearly and concisely
communicate that contrarian belief
so that you can say it as many times as you fucking can in the content that you make. Okay? I believe that you want to consistently pair yourself with that belief so that eventually your audience makes that association.
I'm gonna share a lot more on that in just a second. But it's kinda like how Apple and Johnny Ive have created
the association
with Apple being a design first,
not a processor
or
tech
first company.
When you think of Apple,
I would bet you're not thinking about the technical.
You think about the design. And I don't believe they became known as a design company
because of their marketing.
I believe they became known as a design company
because
for years,
they consistently paired themselves
with a very clear contrarian approach
to building computers and ultimately
hardware design as a whole.
Johnny Ive is known
for approaching design with simplicity,
clarity,
restraint,
not being overly done, but actually exercising discipline
and having an elegant approach
to a world
that the word elegant couldn't have been further away from. And Apple continued to pair themselves
with this for twenty
years. Okay? So now when you hear Apple, you don't think processor first, you think design first. And so again, make sure that you downloaded the workbook, and you do the two column exercise.
This is going to give you the ammo that then you can go into the world making your content to test which of these contrarian takes, which one is resonating with the customer or the audience that I'm optimizing
for.
My ideal customer, that's what you want to optimize around. Again, if you have a mass market low ticket offering, cool. Your ideal customer is loud in your comments.
But typically, if you have a high ticket narrow market offer,
what I have found is
my ideal client,
more often than not, they end up texting,
DMing, or emailing me rather than commenting publicly on the piece of content. And I don't need to get into the why behind that, but that's just the reality. And so in my world, I'm optimizing more around the private messages I'm receiving than the public comments I'm getting. And so that
pairing that we're talking about of Apple pairing themselves with design first thinking leads to an association.
If you haven't heard me define these terms, I want to actually define
branding and brand for you because this is how you're going to determine how you want to be viewed.
At its core,
branding is just a pairing of things,
and I believe that brand is the byproduct
of that. The good brand is when your audience inherently associates
you and the thing that you are intentionally pairing yourself with. If Apple is for twenty years straight consistently pairing themselves
with design first thinking,
it's no surprise for us that the association that we draw upon very quickly when thinking of Apple is design.
That's how this actually works. That's how branding
works and how the byproduct occurs,
which is brand. A really simple example is below this this cool shirt that I just recently got, below it is a black t shirt. Just plain. Right? And if you see me in a plain black t shirt,
there's not that much to draw upon. You're more looking at maybe, you know, my rings, my glasses, my hat, whatever. There's not that much to go off of. Now if I were to take that same
plain black t shirt and slap a black metal logo, you know, like a Swedish or Norwegian black metal band that you can't even read, that might change how you perceive me. You suddenly have different associations that you're drawing upon. Why? Because I'm pairing myself with that logo.
Now, if we were to exchange
that black metal logo for a Hello Kitty logo,
might be a different perception. Might be some different associations that you draw upon. Right?
So what you
you, the brand, what you pair yourself with consistently
informs
the brand that your audience sees.
This is the lens. This is the filter that they view you through, and so you want to be very thoughtful
and strategic
with the pairings that you make.
Knowing this, I think you're going to want to be a little bit more thoughtful with the words that come out of your mouth and the people that you show up publicly with. And so the formula that you can think of is
pairing
times
consistency
equals
an association.
Pairing
times consistency
equals association.
Here's an example I wanna share with you. You're very familiar probably with Instagram stories. I think it's something that we interact with on a pretty regular basis. For me, it's a, you know, too many times per day, uh, as my screen time report on my phone is constantly telling me. If you look at Instagram stories for example.
Let's say you meet somebody
recently,
and you both follow each other on Instagram. You don't know that much about this person.
And so what's gonna end up happening
is whatever you see them consistently posting in their Instagram story is gonna shape
the brand
that you develop or the brand that you view them through. The lens that you view them through. For example,
you connect with Sarah and you now follow Sarah on Instagram
and suddenly you start noticing that Sarah posts a lot of black metal songs in her stories.
What are you going to assume?
It's simple. It's not like some loaded question.
The answer is you're gonna assume that she's into black metal. Right? Pairing times consistency equals association.
She is consistently pairing herself with black metal songs and so the association is she must like black metal. Now, if you're one of those people who love Amish romance novels and you're posting a screenshot of your favorite Amish romance novel in your story, I'm gonna make the assumption that you like Amish romance novels. And even more than that, if I have known people in my life previously
who have liked Amish romance novels,
I am going to associate not only you with the Amish romance novel,
I'm gonna associate you with what it means
in my life to like an Amish romance novel. Okay? It's a little heady there, but basically the point being is whatever you consistently pair yourself with, that is the association that your audience is gonna start creating
for your brand.
Now,
that we want to be careful and weary of is we've described this from like a positive frame. Right? I love black metal, so I think it's very positive to be associated with black metal. But this works equally as powerfully
in the reverse. Okay? So just as effective as it is for a positive association,
it's also just as effective for a negative one. If you pair yourself
with something
or someone
that is the opposite of what your desired outcome is, that is the opposite of the brand that you wanna build and what you wanna be known for,
then that be a bad pairing.
That's not a good pairing for you to make. That's not what you wanna do. I'm trying to build a trustworthy
brand. I wanna be known as a trusted figure.
And so
knowing that this is how branding works, it would be really fucking stupid of me to start consistently showing up online
with people who are known as untrustworthy
characters.
If I show up with untrustworthy individuals consistently,
you are gonna start wondering if I'm trustworthy myself.
Like I said, these associations are the lens that your audience
views you through, and the way that you can actually
control
and set these associations is by being intentional
with the pairings that you consistently
make.
Now I'm a huge fan of reverse engineering
from a desired outcome to today. I try to apply that way of thinking to as much,
uh, that I do in my work life and in my personal life as humanly possible. And it's what I wanna do here with your desired associations.
In that workbook that if you haven't downloaded yet, click the link in the description,
enter your email, we'll email you the workbook.
In your workbook, there's a desired associations exercise.
I think it's called that or something like that. And what it's gonna prompt you to do is it's very simple. I want you to write out two associations
that you wanna be known as being
for,
and I want you to write out two associations that you wanna be known as being against.
Just as much as you want to build a brand as what you are going towards, you also wanna build a brand that speaks to what you are not willing to do, what you do not want. Something that a lot of luxury brands do a really good job of is not only speaking to who
they do make their product for, but who their product is not for. And by doing that, you create an exclusivity
for the audience that you are actually building and optimizing around.
And so this is how you're gonna be able to reverse engineer these desired associations.
And once you determine what those are, the next logical question you need to ask yourself and answer is, well, in order to get those associations,
what do I need to consistently pair myself with? This gives you the actions
in order to shape the associations
that your audience makes when thinking of your brand. It's no longer this
crapshoot where you're, you know, pulling the lever out the slot machine and hoping that you get all three bananas. Like,
this is how you do it intentionally,
not with guesswork. Now watching this video, you're probably at the beginning of building your personal brand, or you saw this and realize you don't like your personal brand, and you want almost like a restart or a refresh.
And so what I'm about to walk you through at this stage that you're at might feel
absurd.
I wanna walk you through
and talk about some brand
threats. And in the beginning stages, this feels audacious. This feels insane. Like, you can't even imagine
that there would be a threat to your brand right now because you're just in the beginning stage. But let me tell you, this is a very, very real thing. There's been several incidents this year where people have come to us and worked with us for a short period of time purely to help solve
a problem they were having with their brand publicly.
You know, one could call it a little PR disaster moment,
and this is something that I think,
sure, you're gonna have things that you can't predict,
but a lot of the time if you build with the right foundation,
I think you can avoid a lot of these brand problems
and brand threats that a lot of personal brands find themselves encountering
in the first couple of years of establishing
who they are online.
And the thing that I want you to really be thinking about is
what you say now publicly
creates the lens that your audience is going to view you through,
And what you claim
that you are strong and staunch about, your audience will hold you to that for a lot longer than maybe you realize right now. Like, maybe you hate how authors or or, you know, subject matter experts pump out a new book every year because that that indicates that it must be a shitty or low quality book. I believe that if you say that enough
a year, two years, three years, even four or five years down the road, it might be very difficult for you to ever do something like put out a book every single year or even just put out a book in general. And this might seem surprising to you, but you'll be shocked
at how much your audience can latch on to some of these messages. You have no idea what the future holds, and so I would encourage you. I'm not saying don't take any strong stances,
but keep your optionality
open.
If you really truly believe it, like you'll die on that fucking hill, say it. Right? Like I talk about optimizing for trust over virality. That's something that I'm not going to change. I I do not foresee that change, but there's other things that maybe I believe that I'm not interested in doing right now, but maybe in five years I learned that that would be really important and impactful for our business, and that's something that we need to do. And so I wanna be careful about restricting
my future ability to act based on current
statements
and thoughts
that I share in my content haphazardly
without real intentional thought. It's kinda like what my mom always told me about tattoos.
Only get it if you're still gonna be proud of it when you're in your fifties and sixties. I would encourage you to think about the things that you say
and the statements you make in your content and the stances that you take. Is it a stance
that you're still gonna be proud of and agree with in five, ten, fifteen years.
If not,
I would take a second stab
at maybe thinking about whether or not you wanna say that publicly.
Because what you can end up doing is actually creating a prison that your brand lives within and cannot escape. For example,
there was a time where I was working with a creator where it became wildly difficult for us to sell a product that we were selling and had because they had built the expectation for a long time that they were just giving away free content and that was all they were ever going to do. Even though they had given a lot of goodwill
to the audience and done really well by the audience when they went to make this transition of informing their audience of an offer they had,
their audience got pretty pissy about it. And the reason why is because they set up expectations
that this would never happen.
What you say now influences
your ability to act later.
Now I'm not saying, and please don't get it twisted and misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not saying you can't change your position down the road. You absolutely can. I admire people that admit that they said one thing one way and they have new information now and they're changing their view on something. Right? But just like in politics, whenever a politician and it's very rare that they do this, whenever a politician comes out and says, held this position and now I believe it differently. Sure. I respect and admire that and I think you probably do, but the masses
ridicule them and critique them heavily. It's very difficult as a public figure on whatever spectrum, whether it's massive or even a small little community of people,
it's very difficult for humans to see you say something consistently
and now say something different. And so what I would recommend is
if you believe
that this is something worth dying on the hill for, cool. By all means, say it, share it. But if you don't, I would
question
whether or not this is worth sharing publicly
because
you can make a change in what you believe. You can say, you can change your stance,
but you will deal with backlash.
I I promise you that. I'm not saying that's a reason to not do it. I'm not saying backlash is the worst thing in the world, but it is something that you should know that you are going to experience if you go about changing your views, beliefs, and opinions on things that you have been consistently saying
for a significant amount of time. Now, so much of this video has been focusing around
you and how
all these different elements of who you are.
And so we're really clear
on you. Right? We know who you are.
But the question is, should you assume that your audience knows who you are when they're engaging with your content? And more than likely,
you have made the mistake or you've seen another creator make the mistake where they make content for a warm audience. They have inside jokes. They have all these little things that only their warmest,
most consistent audience
understands
and knows. I assume
a lot of times in my content that you know my background and and the different work that I've done in my career. But the reality is you don't. And so I need to, at some point in the video, give a qualifier or give some credibility
so that somebody,
you, who doesn't know who I am,
wants to listen to what I have to say. But the mistake here that I want to correct is thinking that your audience knows who you are.
What you should be doing is every piece of content you make, you should assume
that the person watching it has no clue
anything about you. Who you are, what you stand for, what your preferences are, what your interests are, what your track record is. None of that is known by the audience. And so I would tell you that everything you do with your personal brand, you should approach it through the lens of these people are witnessing or experiencing me for the first time.
And with that in mind, you're going to contextualize things a little bit differently. It's kinda like when you're talking to a group that you've just recently met versus friends you've known for thirteen, fourteen years.
It's going to be a wildly different conversation.
With this new group, if you mention,
you know, Valerie, I'm gonna have to mention the fact that Valerie is my mom's name. That that is something that my friends all know, but a new group doesn't. That's a very simple example, but you need to apply that way of thinking
to building your personal brand. It's kind of like what I said earlier, which is the principle of whatever group you optimize for is the group that you're gonna get more of. If you optimize your content around a warm audience, you're just gonna continue with your current audience, and you're gonna have a very tough time bringing new people into your world. If, however, you optimize for a cold audience, and cold and warm just means cold, they don't know who you are. Warm, they do know who you are. If you optimize for a cold audience,
you're gonna attract more of those individuals. But guess what? The cold audience, they come up, they come up to your front door, you open the door and you say, come on in. The fire's warm and there's hot cocoa in the kitchen. That's how you can convert them from being a cold audience to being a warm audience.
You're not going to ever convert them if they don't engage with your content, and they won't engage with your content if in the beginning you're alluding to things that only people who know you would understand.
I hope this makes sense. This is a huge mistake that some of the biggest creators in the spaces and niches that you follow and admire,
this is the mistake that a lot of them are making.
Don't make the same mistake.
Now, a funny part in this is in order for you to be able to share what your brand is and what you stand for, you kinda need to know.
In order to be able to explain what your personal brand is and what it stands for, you need to understand that. And so that's why we've been focusing on what we've been focusing on in this video.
Everyone wants to jump to content strategy right away. What is the content strategy that's gonna get me a million views or whatever?
That shit doesn't matter.
If you get a million views around a brand that you don't understand, how the fuck are those million people ever going to actually understand what your brand stands for? Here's the secret. They won't. And so you don't want to be doing that. Please make sure you understand your brand so that you can then communicate what your brand is and who you are to a cold audience,
and then you can convert them into a warm audience. Now a little caveat that I wanna add here. I'm gonna share a moment of of interesting vulnerability.
I'm in my first year of building my personal brand, and we've put out to date, as of filming this video, we've put out, I believe eight videos. No. Nine videos. Eight videos? Nine. Nine videos. Thank you, Trevor. We've put out nine videos
to date. We're still in the early stages. We're still in our first year of putting content out on YouTube. And something that I noticed is in our most recent video on YouTube,
we got some comments saying that we were getting a little bit more repetitive.
I saw the comment and immediately I was like, oh, okay. I wanna make sure that we're not doing anything that is gonna bore the audience. Like, I wanna make sure we're providing value and usefulness and all of those things. And so I had a little moment, like a little mini panic attack. Nah. That's a little dramatic. I had a moment where I was like, a gasp is is more realistic.
Then Trevor and I were really thinking about it and we're like, okay. We're in our first year.
So yes, we are gonna optimize our content around a cold audience,
but something that we can do a better job of
in 2026
is doing both. You wanna make sure that you are doing a good job of making content that is for
new audience acquisition
and
a good job of making content that is providing
current audience nurture.
And if you're missing one or the other, what's gonna happen is you essentially one is you're not attracting anybody new, and so you're only just working with the people that are currently in your audience. If you're only optimizing for the new audience and not nurturing the old, it's like a leaky bucket. You're gonna be adding water in all the time, but as you're adding in more water, you've got water escaping. So you're staying at the same level. You're not going to see the numbers on your content or more importantly, the conversions for your business go up because what happens is every new person that comes in, you have one of the current members leave.
And so you need to make sure from a personal brand high level perspective that you're thinking about not only the cold audience. I'm telling you hardcore optimize and make every video assuming that they're a cold audience,
but also make sure that you are nurturing
the warm audience, the people that have already showed you that they are loyal and care about you and what you are producing.
So earlier I teased that brand statement.
This is where you're able to take that contrarian belief that you have identified. Right? You probably identified a couple. Then you started testing them in your content and seeing which one was resonating the most and that's the one you're gonna double down on. Once you have that contrary intake that you're gonna double down on, you need to form it in a very clear and concise
statement.
Okay? Why do you wanna do that? Well, what did we talk about earlier? What is branding? It's consistently pairing yourself with something and the byproduct of that is your brand. If you want to build a brand that stands out, it needs to be a contrarian take, but you need to be able to say it consistently
in the content you produce.
And so I believe that what you wanna do is take all the work that we've done so far, and there's been a lot of it. You wanna take that and put it into one single statement that you're able to articulate in any scenario, shape, or form. Okay? I say it in the content that we're making for our own channels. I say it if I go on a podcast or on the rare occasion where I speak at an event, I will share it there. And my
brand statement is as follows. I believe that business owners and entrepreneurs trying to grow their business through their personal brand should optimize
for trust,
not virality. There's a lot that is communicated in that statement. The beautiful thing is is I'm communicating who I serve,
how I serve them,
and what I do differently than my competitors.
Three important things to make it very clear to my ideal customer why they should choose me or not choose me over my competitors.
It makes it very easy for them to make a decision. We wanna make things easy
for people to decide on. Not just for buying and converting with you, but also whether or not they're gonna opt in to consume the content in general.
We want this to be an easy
decision for them. So there is a an exercise that walks you through. It's very simple. The framework that I use for crafting a brand statement. I'm not saying this is the only way that you can make a brand statement. There's other ways you can it, but this is a very simple and effective way to do it. And what it does is it produces something that communicates to your audience who you serve, how you do it, and what makes you different than your competitors. And so in the workbook, make sure you download it. If you didn't, it's the link in the description.
Click that link, enter your email. We're going to email you the workbook. In the brand statement section, you're gonna follow the framework. I believe,
insert your audience,
who want their core desire,
should your contrarian belief,
not common belief in niche or space. If you fill this in, you're gonna have something that you can regurgitate and say in any scenario,
day or night, awake,
tired,
good mood, bad mood, whatever. It's very easy for you to say. I can say my brand statement in my sleep. In fact, if you ask my girlfriend, I'm sure there's been times where I have said it in the middle of the night while I'm dreaming. This becomes
the powerful
leverage that you have to amplify your brand and stand out from all these other fuckers, just kidding, all these other individuals who are lovely and wonderful in your space that you want to differentiate yourself from. You wanna separate yourself from the pack. This is how you do it. Okay? Another analogy, uh, that we shared earlier is how Apple consistently paired themselves with design first thinking. And then what happened?
We start thinking of design when we think of Apple. You have to say this statement over and over and over again so that when your audience thinks of you, they think of this statement.
I believe that we, through a very low volume of content, have done this very effectively in our first year of building my personal brand. So much so that
last year there was a video that we put out that was really long. It's like three and a half hours long. And one of the comments on the video was calling out the fact that this is too long, too boring, too educational to ever get a million views.
And before I could even respond,
you or
other people in the audience were going and commenting,
saying, and telling, informing this person, that's not what I'm optimizing for. They beat me to it. They knew and they know
what I am trying to build and what I'm optimizing around, which is trust not virality.
And they know that because I am consistently pairing myself with it. Okay? And so please
go through that exercise. It might take you a little bit longer than you think. It seems really simple when I say it out loud, but then when you go to put pen to paper, it actually takes a little while. So block some real meaningful time to craft this.
Once you have this, I think you're gonna be blown away at the results that you get on how you stand out compared to others in your space.
Now that you understand your brand, it's time to amplify it with your content strategy.
Now the first thing that I want to immediately flag and qualify
is saying that there is a lot of nuance to this viral verse trust
conversation
and debate. Just for the sake of time, I'm going to make the assumption that you have a high ticket offer that you're selling to a very specific and fairly narrow group of people. Okay? It's not like you have a probiotic soda that you're selling or, uh, an anti aging cream. Right? For those kinds of brands, going viral is a lot more effective. It's actually kind of a biggie that you really want. But if you are selling a high ticket offer to a very narrow group, well,
I think it's probably the case that maybe going viral is not as useful
as some of your local gurus on Instagram will have you believe. So what I wanna do is I wanna break down
what optimizing
for going viral typically looks like, like how it actually goes based on my seventeen years of experience. Now I'm not saying this is always the case. There are obviously outliers, and this is to be clear when it goes well. When you do it really, really good. When you optimize for going viral, you start getting more views. A lot more views.
And you start gaining a lot more followers,
which is wonderful.
You're seeing everything move up into the right on all the social platforms. But here's what actually happens.
When you do this, when you optimize for virality,
inherently, you have to make content that is wider. Okay? And typically, what this ends up doing is diluting the message. Think of it like a shot of whiskey versus a whiskey and Coke. Going viral and optimizing for virality is like having a whiskey and Coke when you really want the full proof whiskey that burns as it goes down. Right? That's what you are looking for. Okay? And so in doing this, what you end up doing is you create wide content
that is vanilla and attracts followers and viewers off of that content. But what are they wanting more of? That same shit that you brought them in with. It's not like they're coming in from some really wide vanilla piece of content and all a sudden being like, yes. I would love a very deep breakdown on how I can conduct my marketing funnel from Instagram
to my email and then convert on the back end. Like, they don't give a fuck about that shit. And so what I have seen, and I have been a part of a team where the creator wanted to do this. Okay? And what happens is originally,
you're building and optimizing your audience around
solving problems for them, taking the painful problems that they deal with and helping them solve them. But over time, as you go wider,
you no longer serve their need. So what do they stop doing? Consuming your content. So what you're doing is you're bringing in all these people that are not interested in the high ticket niche offer that you have,
and they're coming in, but they don't care to buy. They have no interest in it. Meanwhile, the people that were buying from you are now tuning you out because your content no longer serves them. So as views and followers are going up to the right, guess what sales are doing? Straight down.
It suddenly becomes so clear.
You end up alienating the people that actually want to buy from you. How dumb. Right? Yet,
you are considering doing this. I've considered doing this. Many creators that I love and respect and admire and look up to have considered or have done this in a season. You don't have to make that mistake. I'm sharing the mistake with you right now so you don't have to go down that road and learn this lesson the painful way. Because what I will tell you is it is extremely painful to wake up one day and realize the people that were buying from you no longer give a shit about what you're putting out because what you're putting out does not serve them.
It's kinda like how I tend to gain weight. One day I wake up, I'm like, oh, shit. I put on 20 pounds. Right? I wasn't paying attention. I was just going, living my life, doing things,
and being busy. And then one day I'm like, oh, fuck. It's the same in this instance. You don't realize it as it's happening until one day your ideal customer, maybe somebody that you know and previously had a relationship with or still do, they tell you something like, I used to consume your content. I loved it. I haven't watched a single video in the last six months because none of it has helped me. None of it has been helping me solve the problems and the painful problems that I have within my business or whatever use case you're making content around. Right? Maybe you were helping people lose weight and keep track of their calories and, you know, get at least 15,000 steps a day, whatever, and suddenly you're starting to make videos where you're comparing candy bars.
That's no longer serving your customers' need. And so what's gonna happen is they're going to start to tune out your content. Now on the other hand, if you optimize for building trust,
I believe that is gonna provide insane
results for your business. Why is that gonna provide insane results? Well, I think in order to answer that question, we have to define what trust is. And I have a very simple definition that I think will be very useful for you. I believe that trust is how much you believe that someone or something
will meet your expectations
in the future
based on how they have behaved in the past.
If I go out to start my Harley Davidson.
Okay? I flip the switch on, and then I start it. If all of a sudden,
tomorrow,
I go out there and I press the ignition button and it
and it doesn't start, it just petters and it just dies. Do you believe that the next day when I go out there, if I do nothing different, that I am going to trust that it's gonna start a little bit less? Okay?
That I believe is a very simple version of how trust works. So then how do you optimize your content around
building trust rather than going viral? Well, I think it's actually very simple. Do you need to identify what the painful problems are that you are solving for your ideal customer? What is your unique solution to that painful problem? How do you go about solving it differently than others? I'm not saying make shit up, but just look at what do you do a little differently than some of your competitors? And then the third thing, you need to set expectations of what the painful problem is that we're going to solve in this video. The next step is you need to make it easy for them to take the actions to go from here to here.
What do they need to do in order to get the outcome they desire to solve the problem that they're looking to solve? And if you do that and repeat over and over,
I believe
that your audience is going to have a strong belief that you will meet or even exceed
expectations
in the future. This is a beautiful thing. Why? Because it means that they're going to continue to believe that you will deliver. And if they believe that you're going to continue to deliver,
when you suddenly make them aware of an offer that you have, the likelihood that they believe you'll deliver on that offer
goes up. So the likelihood that they actually convert
goes up. And the reason why they believe that is because they trust they're going to get more
out of what you provide in your offer than what they invest. Why? Because that's what's been happening
for the last one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve months, however long you've been making content. Those actions on repeat
builds that pattern of trust in your audience.
It's incredible what this can do. And so it takes this, like, wildly
confusing thing of, like, how do I build trust and makes it very simple. These are the very basic actions that you need to take in order to increase this trust with your audience. Now something you'll hear a lot of people talking about is who should you be listening to
in
future ideation on your content. Right? Do you go to the comment section as your source? Do you go to your customers?
Which one do I do? Well, it's gonna depend on what your offer is. If your offer is a mass market, not niche
offering and it's low ticket, well, then, yeah, you can look at the comment section as inspiration. Why? Because you have more people in the comment section that are reflective of what your buyer looks like, acts like, and who they are. On the flip side, if you're like me and you have a high ticket offering,
well, maybe the comment section isn't gonna be the best place for you to optimize off of because maybe those are people who are consuming your content, engaging with it. They're awesome. I love them, but they're not the type that is gonna actually end up buying
my offering. Right? My one on one service or even potentially joining one of our group offering. Whatever group you want more of, that's what you should optimize for. If you want more followers, cool. Listen to your followers. Make the content they're asking for. But if you want more customers,
what are your customers asking for? I wanna be clear. I care about what you, the audience, is saying in the comment section. That's I don't want that to get misunderstood.
But what I wanna share with you is that the majority of my content that I put out,
the customers that we end up working with,
they don't this is not a rule. It's an observation. Oftentimes, they don't comment publicly on the content. They will DM. They'll text. They'll email privately.
And so I'm looking at those conversations,
and what are those people finding useful?
What are their follow-up questions that they want more in-depth information on? This is how I'm optimizing my content, and it's how if you have a high ticket offer, it's how I recommend you optimize
yours.
This is the source that you wanna go to, your customers, not necessarily your followers. But the thing is is you're never going to get to the point of reaching your ideal customer because it's not like the first video you put out, boom, all of a sudden thousands of people are seeing it. That's not what usually happens. You have to go through the painful period
of doing this for a while with very little results. And the only reason that you're going to stick with it is if you build a system and a foundation that is actually sustainable.
Not trying to copy what your favorite content creator is doing, not trying to replicate what the guru on your Instagram feed is telling you you need to do by being on every single platform all at once, posting 10 to 20 times a day, that's ludicrous.
I mean, there's a crazy stat that up to 73%
of people who start making content quit within their first year. Within their first year.
All the investment that you made, all of the uncomfy feelings that you went through and and being public and everything was for nothing.
And so you're watching this video because you want to build something that will last. So let's build a foundation and a content strategy that will do the same. So what does it mean to build a sustainable system and foundation? It means that your content strategy needs to fit within the constraints of your business, your life, and your experience level. Now I don't want to sound like I'm like one of those woo woo people.
I'm saying you have realities based on the business, life, and experience that you have. You might only have one or two hours a week that you can dedicate to content. Another person watching this video
might have up to ten hours a week that they can dedicate.
Everybody has different constraints on their time and bandwidth.
Right? Like energy bandwidth, mental bandwidth, just the time. You need to reverse engineer what your work, your life,
and the experience level that you have. And by that, I mean, like, how much content have you filmed on camera? You're gonna wanna build a system that eases you into it. I didn't start off this year making content, putting out a video every single week on YouTube. That would have been fucking absurd for me. I was not used to being on camera. I had to ease my way into it. Okay? And so that's what I mean by creating a sustainable
system and foundation
to work from. You'll get way greater returns
doing twenty minute walks every day for the rest of your life than six months of Ronnie Coleman esque working out. It's the same with your content strategy.
If you post a low volume,
but consistently
for many years,
you're going to beat the creator that tried to sprint hard for a year and then burned out and gave up after twelve months. And and honestly, this is what kinda separates
you, the business owner, from the average creator. You have a business that you are running, and so your content strategy and system needs to
complement
what your business looks like and what your day to day in the business looks like,
not some
round hole that we're trying to jam a square peg into. I can't tell you how many different systems I've had to design based on the entrepreneur. I've worked with entrepreneurs who are incredibly busy, and they literally have, like, at most sixty
seconds a week where they can actually dedicate time to making specific content for the platform. The rest of their content is purely documented.
It's just somebody following them around and filming them. I've also worked with individuals who allocate up to twelve to eighteen hours a week for filming, where they'll sit down for a full twelve hour session on a Friday and film all fucking day. There's all kinds of versions of this across the spectrum here, but it doesn't matter what others are doing. You need to look at what your day to day looks like and then build the system from there. So some questions that I would encourage you to answer in the workbook, and just a reminder, if you haven't downloaded it, download the workbook. There's a link in the description down below. All you gotta do is click the link, enter your email, check your email.
We sent you the workbook. You can download it and go through all of these exercises
along with me. And this exercise has some questions that I want you to answer. They're gonna be like prompts. They're basically gonna help you develop
and understand
what does my actual capacity for content look like? How many hours a week do you actually have for content? Or what parts of the content creation process
bring you energy? What parts drain you? What time of day are you most on? Where is your brain the sharpest, or where do you communicate the best? I know for me, I am the sharpest and the best in the morning. In the morning is where I am prime. That's where I am my best. Okay? And so we try to orient as much as we can. Today, we've been filming all day, but we do our best to orient our film sessions to when I have the best energy and when I communicate
and verbally process the best. Make sure that you go through the worksheet, answer these questions. It's not anything complex,
but it's something that I guarantee you have not sat down and done. And so by putting this together,
you are able to then build your content system, reverse engineering the amount of time that you have available
rather than trying to keep up this unsustainable thing that you know is just a ticking time bomb for you to give up at any point. Real quick, I just want to say I am so sorry. I know that this is a lot to take in right now and even more for you to take action on. But that is the whole reason why we created Ralston Select. Ralston Select is your one stop destination
to not only learn, but to actually implement.
We're talking pre production, production, post production, and platform strategy,
all through the lens of educational content. Click the link in the description below if you want more information.
Now let's get back to the video. Now the next thing that we need to do after that we've understood, like, okay, we have these foundations on how we're gonna do content. We need to choose our medium.
And this is really, really simple. There's four different mediums or ways of making content. There's video, audio, written, and graphic content. And instead of picking the medium
that all of your favorite content creators are doing or the medium that everybody online is talking about, pick the one that is most natural for you. If you're already writing stuff, if you're really into the written word, well, then I would argue maybe the best way for you to start is with substack rather than trying to do long form YouTube videos, especially if the idea of being on camera makes you, like, shudder.
I wouldn't
push you into doing that. I want you to work your way up to doing that. On the flip side, if you want to communicate verbally,
but the idea of being on camera is scary, audio is gonna be a great method for you. No matter what it is, I want you to pick how are you going to communicate your ideas and thoughts and who you are as a human most authentically.
That's the medium that we're gonna go with. Now the clear and obvious reality here is video is the best as in you can get the most out of video. When you film a video, you can then clip a short. You can take the audio and make it a podcast. You can take the transcript and write LinkedIn posts, emails, whatever. Right? Substacks. You are able to pull so much from video. But again,
if that's not what you fuck with, if that terrifies you, then you're probably not gonna stick with it or realistically,
you're probably not gonna ever start in the first place.
And so I would tell you, pick something that you can get momentum on and allow the momentum
to guide you into the next medium that you choose. And now once we have our medium, we need to pick our platform. Oh my god. This is where I think so many people go wrong and they misunderstand a lot of messages that people share online. Everybody talks about dominating all the platforms, being everywhere all at once, being omnipresent.
And here's the reality.
That is a terrible strategy for you. You are not Gary Vaynerchuk. You're not
Cody Sanchez. Okay? Trying to be everywhere all at once
will cause you more harm than good at this stage.
You will make diluted bullshit content.
I can tell you
with absolute certainty. Rather than trying to focus on all of them, I think you want to focus on a very select few.
Like, let's say for example, I all of a sudden tell my girlfriend, I'm gonna take up this new
hobby of rock climbing. And all of a sudden, the first time that I'm gonna go rock climbing,
I decide to do the scramble up K 2. Now if you don't know what K 2 is, it's a extreme mountain that is very difficult to summit. Um, many people have unfortunately
passed actually in trying to do it. I'm using an extreme example here, but that's what a lot of you think you can do with your content strategy. You think that you can get into
climbing and suddenly climb one of the most complex mountains in the fucking world. You think that you can start making content and
make content at the volume and cadence that the best creators in the world that have been doing this for years that have teams of ten, twenty, 30 people behind them are doing, and that is ludicrous. And so if you're starting off solo just as yourself, what I want you to do is pick one primary platform and one secondary platform. Let's use the example of YouTube and Instagram. Okay? What you're gonna do is you're gonna make pillar content for your primary platform. Okay? That's YouTube. That's the main dish that you are making. A long form direct to camera video like this. That could be an example of the content that you're making as your primary
platform pillar content. And so this is an example of my pillar content. It's a long form piece of content that I'm then going to use this pillar content from my primary platform in order to create content for my secondary platform,
in this example, Instagram,
which means you might just take the direct to camera long form YouTube video, and you might cut
or clip
moments for Instagram Reels. Or you might get a little crazy and saucy,
and you mine a moment that you really love, you wanna rewrap it as a carousel for Instagram. That would be another way of utilizing
this process. See, your primary platform,
that's the one that gets the energy and the innovation. Your secondary platform gets
repurposed
content. It's not that you don't care about it, but it's that you're not putting any of your energy towards innovation on that platform.
You're reserving that for the primary.
Now if you're starting out or restarting and you have a team,
I expect more of you. What I want you to do is I want you to pick three primary platforms. That's what we did when we set out to build my personal brand. And let's use me as an example. We picked YouTube,
Instagram, and LinkedIn. Okay? And you're gonna follow a very similar flow to the solo creator. You're gonna make pillar content for one of the primary platforms. That's what this is. This is the pillar content on our primary platform. Then what you're gonna do is you're gonna use the pillar content to inform platform native content that you create for the two other platforms. I kind of hinted
at this for the solo creator. This could look like taking a moment that you clip and post as an Instagram Reel. A moment from the YouTube long form, Instagram Reel. But another version of this is you find the moment and then you rewrap it contextual to the platform you're posting it on. So maybe what that looks like is you mine a moment from your long form, and instead of just clipping it and posting that to LinkedIn
as a short vertical video,
maybe you take that moment and you do a written post with it. You recontextualize
the wrapper
in order to perform best given what that platform wants
natively. Not every platform prefers the same kind of content, not the same style, not the same way of communicating. There's many nuances to this. And so this is how you can behave
in a dynamic where you have three primary platforms. One thing that I want to call out here is
you need to apply the eye of Sauron approach.
I believe this is the most sustainable way to actually drive innovation on your three primary platforms, but not all at once, and that's the key. In Lord of the Rings, there's, you know, the eye of Sauron, and he's moving around and focusing on one area at a time trying to find the ring. Well, what we are trying to do is find innovation. And so what we are going to do is we are going to focus on one of the three primary platforms at once.
All of the focus there, everything else goes on maintenance mode. And so that's what we've been doing in the first year of building my personal brand. We have had the eye on YouTube. Instagram and LinkedIn have been on maintenance mode. What does that mean? That means that we're still posting on all three, but YouTube is the only platform right now that we're putting our time, attention, and money towards
innovation.
The other platforms,
we're making content that we know works in formats that we know
work. They're not doing exceptionally well. Sometimes we have a breakout, but we're not optimizing for that. YouTube is our main focus right now. And then once we get to a point where we feel like YouTube is really dialed, we will turn the eye to Instagram or to LinkedIn,
and then we'll move on to the next one. So you just get to
here's the key. Once you go through all three,
don't stop there.
Turn your eye back to the first one. Let's say you go YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn. By the time you get to LinkedIn and get some innovation over there, you're gonna need to innovate on YouTube because your audience has probably gotten fatigued. The preferences of the audience on the platform are constantly evolving, and that's why your eye needs to constantly be shifting. Now what platforms do you pick? Like, how do you know which ones to go with? Right? Like, how did I determine YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn? Here's the first question. What medium did you pick? If you picked video,
well, what platforms
prefer video the most? If you picked written, for example, what platforms do really well with written? I'm gonna say if you chose written, YouTube might not be the best strategy for right now. Substack,
LinkedIn,
maybe Facebook.
These are platforms that might better serve you and the medium that you have picked. Now the other thing that you can ask is where does my ideal customer spend the most time? And the natural follow-up question that immediately comes is, well, how do I figure that out? You just ask. Okay? You ask around. It's not that complicated. Whenever you go to a new city and you're trying to find your favorite organic market that serves non GMO,
you know, healthy shit,
you find somebody who looks like they only eat granola bars and go on hikes all day and you ask them. Find somebody who looks like or acts like or seems like your ideal customer and ask them where they're hanging out and go from there. It's not that complicated.
If you are complicating it, I'm gonna call you out right now. You are using it as a form of procrastination,
and that's some bullshit. Just pick a fucking platform and start. You can always evolve
and iterate from there. You can change what platforms you do five months or five days into this thing. Don't debate. Pick a platform, and let's start posting. Now make sure that in this section, you didn't just listen to me share this. There's actually an exercise in the workbook that you should have downloaded. If you haven't, click the link in the description. Enter your email. We're gonna email it to you. Go to your email. Grab the workbook
and go
through
the exercise of determining your platforms. Okay? For the solo creator, you have an exercise. For the creator with team, you have an exercise.
Fill that information in. Now even if you are being the most disciplined
Dan out there and you have done a great job of only picking, if you're a solo creator, one primary and one secondary platform, or if you have a team, three primary platforms that you're gonna focus on, Great job. That's amazing. You can still fuck it up by having an incorrect cadence,
a cadence that you cannot sustain. Okay? So just because you're disciplined on the platforms that you choose doesn't mean that you have a winning formula. You need to also be disciplined on the cadence that you choose. If you choose an output that matches your favorite creator with a team of 30, you are doomed.
As cliche
and fucking ridiculously repetitive as this sounds because you've heard so many people say this in so many different ways. It truly is a marathon, not a sprint. You can always increase the volume of content that you post,
but what I have found is creators have a very tough time stepping back the volume. Very easy to increase. But once you set an expectation with your audience, a lot of creators struggle
to walk that back.
And so I encourage you, start with something that feels very realistic now and increase over time. And in the true sense of this being a marathon, not a sprint,
a great example of what a sprint looks like on an extreme level is think of all those creators
in the last, you know, three or four years that have had their fifteen minutes of fame. They went wildly viral, and then they disappeared. How much did they actually get from that sprint? Sure. There's a few individuals who were able to take it and run with it, but
I would, uh, beg you to find somebody who
had that fifteen minutes
two years ago and is still consistently
showing up
for their audience and is relevant in any sort of way. I'm sure there's examples,
uh, and anomalies,
but by and large,
it ends up being a very short sprint that is short lived. If you don't stick with this for a long time, no matter how big you get, if it's for a short period of time, there's not actually that much value long term for you in it. You want to build a system that allows you to keep reaping the benefits of building a strong personal brand and putting out content that compounds in interest
year
after year,
not some fifteen minute moment in the spotlight. Now for you who may still be on the climb of your career, and if you're watching this, you're probably that type of person. You're you've never reached your destination, so you're always climbing. And one thing that I will note from experience, both for myself and a lot of people that I have worked for in the past, shit is going to get bigger. If you're doing this correctly and it's working, things are only going to get crazier.
Make sure to build a system that is sustainable now so that your future self thanks you. What I will tell you is when we started, when I released my first how to build a personal brand course back in April 2025
to now, we're filming this December 2025,
my capacity has changed significantly.
I had a whole lot more time dedicated towards content at the beginning of this journey than I do right now. But lucky for us,
we didn't build an output cadence that was optimized around the time that I had then. We built it in a way that was optimized around the time that I was gonna have in the future. I probably had the capacity at the beginning to do a weekly YouTube video, but if we would have done that six months well, actually, probably, like, four months into putting content out on YouTube, we wouldn't have been able to sustain that because I got way too busy
running the actual business.
And the whole reason why we're building this personal brand is to support the business. And so all of a sudden, if you don't do this correctly, you get to this weird place where your personal brand and your business are, like, at odds and competing with each other when really they should be complementary.
So if you're wondering, well, okay, this is all nice and dandy, but how how much should I fucking post, Caleb? Well, here's what I would say. I'm not gonna give you an exact amount because you are different from everybody else seeing this right now. Start with a cadence that feels doable.
If I say, I want you to make a video
twice a week on YouTube. Does that sound doable? Or are you like, whoo. That sounds like a push. If it sounds like a push, don't do it. What about weekly? What about biweekly?
What about monthly?
Quarterly?
Yearly? Right? Like, you can chunk up as much as you want. Here's the key. It has far less to do with what you start out with and far more to do with the frequency at which you increase that cadence. So as long as you know that you're gonna increase the volume every two weeks, every month, every quarter, every year, whatever, then you are set. So even if in the first year of making content, you only put out one YouTube video a month, you know in year two,
you could increase that volume if you wanted,
and that wouldn't be a problem because we are doing a marathon,
not a sprint. And I've got two frameworks that will really help you in accomplishing this. First one is the accordion method, and the second one is the seventy twenty ten framework.
I recommend using the accordion method to figure out what the fuck your audience wants
more of from you, and I recommend utilizing the seventy twenty ten framework to help improve
the performance
and longevity
of your content. The accordion method works just like an accordion. You are expanding and contracting. Right? You are going to expand
the accordion when you are making more content in the beginning. Okay? So in the beginning, you should have your accordion
fully expanded.
This is your high volume content
so that you can learn
what your audience wants more of, aka what they call quality. So you're using quantity
to inform what your audience says is quality.
And then once you have that information on what your audience says is quality, you're gonna contract it and
not make higher quality content per se because I believe that quality is not something that you determine, but your audience does.
But what you're gonna do is you're gonna put the same amount of effort you were putting into the expanded amount of volume
and put that same effort into less pieces of content,
increasing the odds
that your audience labels it as
quality. And this is a never ending cycle because the moment that you think you know what your audience likes and you contract and you start making more of that, soon you'll get to a point where your audience is no longer resonating or responding
to that content the same way they were previously,
which means we will have to expand the accordion again to do more volume, to get more data and more information on what our audience is calling quality.
Now real quick, how do you determine when your audience is calling something quality? Well, if you've never posted a single thing on Instagram,
let's start with your first 12 posts. If you do 12 posts over the course of, let's say, four weeks, that's three posts a week.
At the end of that month, you're going to notice that
some posts did better than others.
And in the beginning, you don't have much you can go off of. So I know this is shocking. It's coming from me, but you're gonna look at the views. Okay? Look at the views, likes, comments.
What content got more of those metrics? Okay?
That is probably a very good indicator that you should make more of that because your audience clearly liked that more than the other content you made. You want to continue
the expansion until you feel like you have enough information and certainty
that you know okay. Cool. Every time that I share like, for me, like, something that Trevor and I have figured out very clearly on my Instagram is when I share the brand journey framework, it seems to work really well. It does really well on Instagram specifically. We expanded the accordion enough to get that information, and then we can contract it and make more content specifically around that through Instagram Reels, carousels, etcetera.
The next one is the 7030
framework.
It is extremely
simple and wildly useful.
Consistent theme with me, I like things that are simple and useful. 70% of the content that you make should be shit that you know works
from the accordion method. Right? You expanded the accordion. You got information on what works. 70% of what you're doing should be that shit. You should know that this is going to work. I'm not saying you know it's gonna be like, you know, 10 x multiplier as in do 10 x your normal performing content. I'm not saying it's gonna go crazy, but it's 70% should be content that you know is going to at least perform at benchmark, if not higher. The next 20%
should be iterations
of that 70%. It's still the content that you know that works, but you're doing slight tweaks to either the hook, the setting, the delivery, the packaging.
You're changing one little variable to try to improve the performance of what is already working to get better results. The last 10%,
this is where you are most likely to fuck up. They hear me say this, and they get excited about the 10%. But in reality, once you start building a brand and having content that works and you have kind of a baseline
performance,
you have a high likelihood
of falling victim to the trap of needing to always hit your benchmark performance,
and you start to get scared
of trying anything new that may or may not perform as well as your standard.
This is where people go wrong.
You need that 10%. You need those big swings in order to figure out what the next thing is.
A lot of people who make content for more than a year experience audience fatigue.
And what ninety nine point nine percent of creators do is they get to the point where their audience is fatigued on their current style of content, and then they go into scramble mode. They are suddenly met with the challenging difficult process of needing to figure out what does my audience want from me now
when it is needed. If you implement the 10 in the 7030 framework,
what you actually end up doing is you find the next version of your content before your audience tells you they want it. Thus, you never go into a point where you're panicking and trying to figure out what do we do. Suddenly, content isn't resonating. We gotta figure this out ASAP. No. You're gonna be the intentional thoughtful creator who actually ends up building a system where you're always trying to put your content out of business. You're trying to find the next style,
next format,
next version of content that you're gonna make that your audience isn't fatigued over currently. The crazy thing is is eventually they will, and that's why you always want to be prioritizing that 10%.
Now it's 10%.
So just to be clear, the majority of your content should not be these big swings that you have no idea whether or not they're gonna work or You should have some predictability in your content, and then 10% of it should be big,
big swings.
Cool. So we have some clarity on how we're gonna make content and how we're gonna operate and all these things,
But the big question is how do we come up with ideas? How do you know what to make? Right? I'm sure you've heard the classic guru advice, which is something to the effect of list out your top 10 favorite creators in your niche. Then what you wanna do is identify
their top 10 videos on YouTube. Then what you're gonna do is you're gonna take the transcripts
from those videos. You're gonna put them into Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, whatever AI tool you use and reconfigure
the script for you.
It
might be the the the little push that gets you over the barrier of entry of creating content. And if that's the case, I'm not here to judge you. I'm not trying to make you feel bad. But very quickly,
I encourage you to change
how you do this. Okay? I am not the guy to teach you how to rip off other people's ideas and make them your own. That's not me. To be fair, it is a strategy that works as far as generating
views and impressions.
But if you're here, you wanna learn how to build a brand around optimizing for trust, which means
we need to start with the pain that our customers feel. And so like I said earlier in this video,
what you need to do is start with your customers in mind and the pain that they are feeling. What problems do they have that you solve? What are they afraid of? What pisses them off and makes them frustrated? What are they doing wrong? Maybe they think they're doing it right, but what are they actually doing wrong? Once you have that painful problem, like we talked about earlier, you need to take your unique solution
and pair it together. I like to call this a beautiful gift that you're giving your audience. Their painful problem plus your unique solution equals
gift for your audience. Now this gift gets multiplied
by your credibility.
Okay? Ideally,
contextual
credibility. What do I mean by contextual credibility? Well, for example,
some videos,
I will give my credibility as a general credibility statement, which is some of the effect of I've been scaling personal brands for seventeen years to over 30,000,000 followers.
That is a
general credibility
statement. Sometimes, however, we will use a contextual
credibility statement
specifically for the video. So for example, if we're making a video on building a media team, I might reference as my credibility statement,
building a media team from zero to 18 full time members
while increasing content performance quarter over quarter
rather than my general seventeen years to 30,000,000 followers
credibility statement. It's contextual to the topic that we're talking about,
which increases the odds that your audience is going to believe what you are about to say because you have proven yourself worthy not in the general space, but in the very specific space in which you are about to speak to. And so in your workbook,
again, if you haven't downloaded it, click that fucking link in the description. What are you doing here? We wanna be taking action. Click the link. Enter your email. Go to your email. Grab the workbook, and let's work on this together. What you're gonna notice is in the workbook, there's an formula that's listed out or laid out for you to be able to look at and follow. The formula goes as follows. So the problem that your customer faces plus your unique solution
times
the contextual credibility that you have
and a proven rapper,
that is what determines the success of your content. If somebody's making a video on how to start your personal brand and their credibility is that they've built five different brands to 5,000 followers each,
that's great. That's impressive. That's not easy to do. Right? I'm I'm not belittling it. But you're going to take that information
differently
than somebody who has scaled personal brands to over 30,000,000 followers. Or another example, someone who has built personal brands and had millions of followers, but they've only been doing it for the last five years versus somebody who has gotten the same amount of total followers, but they've been doing it for seventeen years. And I I know this is sounding like I'm trying to put myself into this, like, wonderful corner. Just roll with me here. Hear it through a humble tone. You might hear that person differently
because not only have they gotten a great result,
they've done it through many different seasons and scenarios.
And so you are more likely to believe that they're not sharing what worked in one scenario. They're sharing principles that you can apply into your specific scenario. The credibility
that you have
is a huge multiplier
that determines the success of your content. Make sure that the credibility that you're providing in the piece of content
is contextual to what you're speaking to. The more contextual it is, the more your audience will believe what you are about to say. Now the exercise that I want you to do is you're gonna list out 10 to 15 painful problems that your ideal customer faces.
Then for each problem, you're going to attach your unique solution to it. For each problem plus solution, you need to write out what is your credibility
or the contextual credibility
that you are going to share. Or if this is a video that lends itself to your general credibility statement, label it as such. In your workbook, you can fill this out. You can actually identify your problems that you solve,
what your unique solution is,
and what the credibility statement is going to be that you're gonna share in that piece of content.
This becomes wildly effective. Now the two point o version is maybe you actually identify these things, the painful problem and the unique solution, and maybe you write two or three different versions of what the contextual credibility is gonna be. Why? Because you're not just gonna make one video about this problem. You're gonna make multiple videos over the next couple of years about this painful problem, and so you may want different versions of a contextual credibility statement to give
for those individual videos. Now what I wanna focus on is your delivery,
how you communicate
these ideas that we just worked on coming up with. Right? Delivery is one of the three levers that I talk about in helping you stand out. You have your contrarian belief, your delivery, and your wrapping paper. I believe contrarian belief is the strongest lever you can pull, but I actually believe that the second strongest one you can pull is not your wrapping paper, not the packaging, not the formats.
It's actually your delivery. It's how you communicate the information and ideas that you have
in a
different way potentially than other people in your space. I think a lot of people mess up their delivery because they think they need to be
like this, like, content version of themselves. And I understand that that thinking. Right? Like, I understand that there's a lot of people out there that talk about how you need to be really animated.
You know? There's the classic old statement that I remember on old productions that I used to do, telling talent,
you know, whatever you would normally do, turn up times 10 because it it shows up differently on camera, whatever.
Essentially,
what a lot of the industry has done is created this perception
that you need to create this alter ego for your content. Now if that's your shtick and that's the brand that you're creating and you're intentionally creating this alter ego, by all means, you do you. But what I recommend is that your delivery should actually be
the most authentic version of who you actually are as a human. Delivery is not about becoming someone else or building this caricature version of yourself. Delivery is actually about removing all the things that keep you and are stopping you from being fully you. Delivery isn't this performance or performative act, and this is where you can go wrong. You start trying to perform. You start acting.
Right? You do things that feel unnatural
and not true to who you are. You start trying to match energy. This is a big one. You start trying to match energy of your favorite creator, and you actually just become like a an off brand version of them. You burn out because you've built a character,
not a personal brand.
See, I'm not asking you to perform. I don't want you to act. I don't want you to pretend
and become somebody that you are not. I want you to talk the way that you talk.
If you're an extremely calm individual
and that's how you communicate in real life,
be calm in your content. If you're more intense
in the way that you teach,
be intense.
If you're naturally dry and witty, I love those kinds of people, bring the dryness and the witty humor into your content.
It should be a natural reflection
of how you operate and communicate and deliver information
in your everyday life. See, it's far less about
being some charismatic character on camera,
and it's far more about actually understanding the points that you're trying to communicate to your audience. The better that you understand what you're trying to say,
the better the delivery
becomes. It's not about being this crazy charismatic character. It's about actually understanding what the fuck are you trying to communicate so that you communicate it in a way that they understand.
Something that I've noticed that you might be struggling with is communicating your points of view.
And sometimes I think this comes down to communication styles,
uh, experience,
confidence, all those things. But I've also come to realize that a lot of the times and it's kind of embarrassing
for for us to admit.
But a lot of the times, the reason why we're having a tough time communicating something is maybe we don't fully understand the point that we're actually trying to communicate. Now this might get a bit heady,
so I don't wanna get bogged down on it, but I wanna give you something that can be very useful helping you communicate your ideas when you're starting off with your personal brand and trying to get up and running. Here's how I think about it. You should be able to explain a concept
to three different people in three completely
different and unique scenarios.
If you are able to do this, I believe you are at the point where you understand
the concept enough to be able to communicate it in your content in a way that your audience is going to actually understand.
And so even if you're the most dry, sarcastic,
monotone individual,
if you understand what you're communicating
and you're communicating something useful,
your audience is going to fuck with it. You will build a following. It might not be the biggest following in the world, but it's gonna be a following of individuals who trust you deeply.
You don't have to be the most charismatic.
You just need to be the most useful. If you optimize your personal brand
around
usefulness
rather than charisma,
you will build a strong personal brand. If you optimize around charisma over usefulness,
you will build a vanity based
brand. So the biggest thing that I want you to take away from this section is that you don't need to get better at your delivery.
You need to remove
everything that restricts
you or makes you feel unlike
yourself
when you are making
content.
And one way that I've gone about doing this for myself is actually implementing game tape reviews. It's like a quarterback Monday morning reviewing the game tape footage of how they performed on Sunday. I like to look at my content and see what is it that I'm communicating that was clear and what are the areas that are not clear. Trevor and I have been talking about this a lot lately where I go on podcasts and I'll watch how I answer a question to see
how quickly am I able to communicate
the important points without going down some crazy rabbit hole. I'm a verbal processor, and so sometimes I can take a little bit longer than I need to to communicate a point. And so something I'm trying to implement with game tape reviews is every time that I find that I'm taking a little too long on the spot, I'll pause the video and figure out how could I answer this question
more clearly and more concisely. Now that we understand how we're gonna approach our delivery, trying to remove all the things that make us feel like we are not ourselves and not show up as we are, we wanna move on to the third
lever to pull on standing out. The first two, like I said, are contrarian belief and delivery like we just spoke about. The next one is your wrapping paper. Okay? This is the third lever that you can pull on to stand out
in your space or your niche. Something that I hear so many times is like, man,
this was such a good piece of content. Why did it get no views? Nobody watched it. I think a lot of times, not always, because some of y'all are creating some bullshit, but most of you are making really good content.
And it's not necessarily that the content isn't good, it's that it doesn't have a good wrapping paper or wrapper around it to make it attractive
to the audience you're trying to reach. Because here's the way that this actually works.
When you make content on YouTube, for example,
sure,
you have competitors within your niche or space,
but the way that consumption works is you're not competing with just your competitors.
You're competing with everybody making content on YouTube.
I'm competing on your YouTube homepage with whatever other channels you're
subscribed to along with mister beast and a creator you've never heard of and 10 other creators that you love and admire and have watched a ton of videos from. Your wrapping is the only competitive advantage you have before
somebody clicks.
The contrarian belief and the delivery that we talk about, those are only able to be shared and communicated and
engaged with after they click. Your wrapping paper is what causes them to click so they can find out what your contrarian belief is, so they can experience your delivery. So the way that you wrap your content determines how likely or unlikely someone is to actually consume it, aka it's really fucking important.
It's so important. It's why it's one of the three levers that you can pull on in order to stand out. Your packaging. Right? So on YouTube, this is your title and thumbnail. It's also your hook. It's also the format in which you're making the content. What do I mean by format? Well, you have like a direct to camera video here. Uh, we have our in the wild cinematic videos, which on our channel are if you're struggling with making content, please watch this. Or if you're struggling in your creative career, watch this video. There are two videos that are wildly different format. Right? And so that is how
you can think of your wrapping paper. It's either your packaging, your hook, or your format.
It's how you're wrapping the concept or concepts
that you're sharing in the content. Back to what we were talking about earlier, how you're taking the painful problem your customer faces,
your unique solution, that's the gift. You need to wrap the gift in a way that your ideal viewer is going to want to rip open, a k a click on. Now the exercise that we're gonna walk through in your workbook, again, again, if you haven't downloaded it, download it, click the link in the description down below. You're going to build a wrapping paper
library.
Okay? I like to think of this as I really love Christmas time. I'm obsessed with it. I love Christmas wrapping paper. I have all different kinds. If I'm giving them multiple gifts, each of them should be a unique wrapper. Okay? And so my vision for my future is one day, I have a home where there's an entire room dedicated towards wrapping paper. I know that's absurd, but this is how I like to think about it. You wanna create a room where you walk in, and there's all these different wrapping paper options that you can choose from. You know those screenshots that you take when you're scrolling through Instagram or you see a a title thumbnail that you like on YouTube? You take the screenshot, and it just goes off into nowhere in your iPhoto or your photo album, and you never see it again. Well, this is something where you can actually house that inspiration
and utilize it in the future. No longer are those screenshots just gonna live on your phone. They're actually gonna be utilized for the work you're doing. If we're thinking about just the lens of the packaging. Right? The title thumbnail for a YouTube video, for example. If you're making a YouTube video, you've already filmed it, you're in the edit, and you're trying to figure out how are we gonna package it. What I have found and what a lot of my friends in the industry have found is when you need packaging,
that is when it is hardest to find. And so what you wanna do is you wanna develop this in an evergreen sense so that when you have a video that you are wanting to package,
you go into your wrapping paper library,
and you see what wrapping paper best fits this
video or this gift that I am giving my audience. What I recommend you do is you want to have a habit
weekly,
biweekly, monthly, whatever cadence you want.
You want a habit of searching
and shopping for wrapping paper. And the two best sources that I will recommend when it comes to YouTube are one of 10.com and YouTube itself. You wanna set up a one of 10 account, and I recommend that on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis,
you scroll one of 10, and literally,
you're not searching for anything specific. You are generally scrolling until something catches your attention. And when it catches your attention, you need to screenshot that and add it to your wrapping paper library. You can do this you know, Google Docs, in Notion, in whatever project management tool you use. Wherever you are going to actually access this and use it on a recurring basis, that's where you want to store
this inspiration.
That's the room that you wanna house all your wrapping paper in. To be clear, when I say you're scrolling one of 10 and looking for things that stand out, I'm talking things that stand out that it's like, oh, you clearly immediately know, oh, this would be a perfect video for me. But also, I want you to screenshot the absurd shit. The shit that you're like, I don't know how I could ever turn this into a video of mine or or package a video of mine with this. You would be surprised if you were able to see our wrapping paper leopard.
There are some wild
videos
in there or packaging options in there that are absolutely absurd. There are some crazy things in there, but I guarantee at some point over the next two years, we're gonna use, I'd say, probably a good 60%
of what we have in there. This becomes wildly useful, and you'll be surprised. One example that I will share is I remember we were scrolling through and we came across a video. It was like something to the effect of how I attract 10 out of 10 girls every single day. Trevor called it out. It was like, wow. This is a great idea.
We were looking and we were like, oh, wow. It caught both of our attention. And then we were like, okay. Let's screenshot it, put it in. I don't know how we would use this, but maybe one day we can figure it out. A couple weeks later, we were talking with one of our clients. All of a sudden, I realized I was like, holy shit. What we just discussed with them, we could turn into a video on how we attract 10 out of 10 clients every single day, week, or month, whatever cadence. There's an example where an absurd piece of packaging that on the surface would never make sense for us suddenly made sense when we had the right problem and solution combination
to meet that wrapping paper. So develop your wrapping paper library,
ideally with some diversity, having all kinds of crazy different ideas in there. And then the next thing that you're going to do after you've built that wrapping paper library is you're gonna wrap the gift. Remember that beautiful gift that you developed earlier? You're gonna take that combination, the painful problem and unique solution, and you scroll through your library to see what wrapping paper best
wraps
this gift.
This is not just for YouTube, by the way. I have a friend who he has been and logged in to LinkedIn every single day,
I think for probably at least the last five years, if not longer. He has a photo album on his phone where he has, I think at this point, it's over five or 600 screenshots of top performing posts on LinkedIn. What he'll do is he'll put together his concept,
his problem plus solution,
and then he looks at all of these screenshots
of the way various LinkedIn posts that performed really well have been formatted.
What was the structure? What was the hook? How could I reorient this for my problem solution combination? And then he writes it in that context. You can also do this for Instagram, for TikTok,
for Pinterest,
for Snapchat,
for LinkedIn, for any platform you can imagine you can develop your wrapping paper library.
Because like I said at the top, you want to share your contrarian belief and you want people to experience your delivery, but they're only gonna know what your contrarian belief is and experience your delivery if they actually click on the video or engage with the post. And they only do that if you have an appealing
wrapper that makes them want to tear it open. If you're trying to optimize for the short form platforms, they have a beautiful feature called save. I'm not recommending that you just hit the general save button because that is basically like taking a screenshot and having it drop into your photo album and never seeing it again. We've all done that. I do it a million times to this day. What you do wanna do is you can actually on a lot of these platforms, Instagram
for sure, you can actually create different folders that you save posts in. And so I would recommend you create an inspiration folder
that you can save
specific pieces of content that you really like. And the cool thing about Instagram is you can really get that variety or really get that diversity that I was encouraging you to do because you can save reels, you can save carousels, or you can save singular posts. And so you can develop this beautiful diverse library of what good content on Instagram looks like so that when you're trying to figure out how to share
your gift, the problem, and solution with your audience, you can look at several or
potentially hundreds of different versions of what a top performing post contextualized for that platform looks like. Now in looking at these, you know, outliers and looking at
packaging from other creators or an Instagram reel or a TikTok or a YouTube short that somebody made that you really admire that you're saving for inspiration for later, look outside of your space and niche. Look at creators that are in completely different worlds. What's working for them? And then how can you borrow that from a first principle way of thinking? What are the the elements that would work for my message,
my gift, the painful problem plus unique solution?
What could I take from a gardening YouTube channel that would work in wrapping
my ideas
in my lane? I believe this is the way that you can stand out even more.
The problem that we are facing right now in all these different spaces and niches is everybody's copying each other in their own space and niche, so you all look the same. If you want to not look the same, don't do what everybody else is doing. Right? It seems obvious, but you are not doing this right now with your own content
or the people you admire aren't even doing this. And so if you just look into other niches and spaces, I think you'll be blown away at how much your content stands out from your competitors.
You might be sharing similar
subject matter, similar advice even. You might not have some strong contrarian belief even. You might not be at that point yet. But if you are borrowing
your wrapping paper from other industries,
this will help you do things fundamentally different than all the other creators that are looking like each other within your niche or space. I don't know who needs to hear this, but that thing I'm talking about, educational content, it's really hard to learn. See, everybody online is teaching you entertainment based tactics and principles,
and that's why we created Ralston Select. We designed it specifically
to be the one place that you go to learn how to do preproduction,
production, postproduction,
and platform strategy through the lens of educational content. If you wanna learn more, click the link in the description. Let's get back to the video. Now a big debate that you're gonna see online around content strategy is, do you make deep content or do you make wide content? And here's the reality. It's not one or the other. See, so many people online are telling you to lean into just one of these. Fuck that. That's some bullshit. It's it's like anything in life. There's nuance to it. You need a strong ratio of both, and you need to inject something that's missing from this conversation,
which is a personal element. We are after all building a personal brand, aren't we? And so you wanna make sure that it's not just deep and wide, it's deep, wide, and personal.
And I have a ratio that I roughly loosely follow and recommend that you follow as well. You should be able to give or take 10 points roughly on this. 75%
of the content, I believe, should be deep
content,
solving
deep
problems for your ideal customer. 20% is niche wide content. Now I'm gonna explain what niche wide means here in a second, and the remaining 5%
is personal. Now again, just a reminder,
before we break this down and go into what the deep or the niche wide and what the personal content looks like, this is a very rough ratio to follow. It is not a rule. Please do not be one of those people that takes this wildly too literally. You need to ebb and flow this and adjust it based on you, and it's gonna look different month to month. But if you roughly loosely follow 7525,
you will be in a really good spot. Now the 75%
deep content, this is your educational content.
This is the main source of the value
from your personal brand.
These are the frameworks. These are the painful problems that are solved. Right? These are the tactical nuggets that you're giving. These are the belief shifts or the point of view that you have on your industry niche or space. This is the content that is going to establish the most trust in your ability to get results,
and it will reinforce your credibility.
This is also
the content that I believe is gonna get you the most customers,
the most high
paying customers because this is the content that increases the odds they believe that you can actually help them solve the problem they are wanting to
solve.
20% of the content being
niche wide.
This is what I like to think of as broad
within your niche. These are the subtopics
that serve your ideal customer still, but they also serve a broader base of viewers. An example of what niche wide content could look like, if you're making content, helping business owners
leverage the relationships that they already
have to create new business
rather than trying to go out and acquire new customers, a version of niche wide content within this example that you could make is
helping people
reconnect
with old friends or colleagues in general. Right? Not just within the context of business. This is still useful for your ideal customer and the main audience that you are trying to build, but it also serves a broader audience
and increases the odds that your content will show up to new people.
But here's the key. Unlike making general random wide content,
you're still attracting people
that are interested
in the general topic that you are talking about. This increases the odds that the average person that comes in will have interest in your offer. They're not just a random person that has no relation to the offer that you're actually providing. Right? It's somebody that's still gonna be at least adjacent
to the offer that you have.
And potentially,
through nurturing them through your content,
may get to a point where they do become interested in purchasing the offer that you make available to them. Think of this like your side dishes. Okay? Your niche wide content, that's the side dish. The deep content, that 75%,
that is your main dish.
Okay? And the niche wide content is the sauteed spinach. It's the garlic mashed potatoes. It's your side dishes. And the other thing that you wanna definitely not miss out on is the 5% personal content. Okay? Again,
you are building a personal brand. I'm not saying
do that influencer shit that you probably are thinking of immediately. I'm not saying
big content where it's like, look at my lifestyle. Look at how awesome I am. What this is is sharing
you, the human,
in that
personal brand.
And I believe that this is what helps you stand out from the crowd because
these are the only things that are truly unique to you. More than likely, the subject matter that you've decided to speak to, there's other people that are talking about it. And if we're being honest with ourselves, there are probably other people that are teaching similar principles and even potentially,
crazy enough, similar contrarian takes. There probably are. But what they definitely cannot replicate is the unique combination of all of your interests and preferences and hobbies and passions
that make up you the unique human that you are. Okay? So for me, what I constantly try to inject as much as I can into my content
and my brand is my love for Harley Davidson and the three Harleys that I have and obsess over. My love for metal, right, and all the different subgenres, the black metal, the hardcore, the metalcore.
I like it all. My roots in the fitness industry. I try to share that a lot. It's the combination
of all of these things
that create the lens that you view my personal branding advice and information and content through
that makes me unique compared to the next person that you see off on the right side of your screen here that is also talking about a similar subject matter. Knowing that your deep content, the 75%
is your steak,
and the
niche wide content, the 20% are your side dishes, you can almost think about your personal content
like it's the dessert. A quick note here is the 5% personal doesn't mean that 5% of your content should be a singular
video
or sub stack
article around your personal passion. I believe that the 5% should be sprinkled into
the other content. You haven't seen me make a video in-depth on my
Harley Davidson Road King special build out, right, going into detail on that. But what you have seen, if you've watched some of my content, is you've seen that bike. You've seen one of my other bikes. I'm injecting it. I'm wearing a Harley Davidson hat right now for god's sake. And so I'm not saying that you need to make specific content around your hobbies, passions, interests, but I do recommend you inject those into both the deep content and your niche wide
content.
It gives your audience more at bats to connect with you. I wasn't planning on sharing this, but it's really important. The more
of the interests
and individual unique things that make you unique and and wildly
you,
the more chances to connect with you. Our relationships
in our personal life, in our work life, the closer the relationship on the relationship sphere or circle,
the closer they get to you, more than likely,
you have more than one interest in common.
Right? That's typically an indicator of the closeness of your relationship. And so if you're wanting to develop a close relationship with your audience, you want to identify
more interests
that you have in common with them. But if you never share those interests, you never inject that into your content, how are they gonna know
what they could connect with you on other than the core thing you talk about? It's really important to focus on the 75%. The deep content, that is where you're gonna get the greatest returns. The niche wide content,
that's how you're going to start to develop a more well rounded brand and bring more people in and increase the odds that you can reach a newer audience. But the thing that is going to make you actually stand out
is the 5% that is personal
in your personal brand. Now let's talk about structuring
your content because we now know what we're going to be making, but we need to figure out how we're going to go through it in a sequential order to make it easiest
for our audience to actually
not only consume all the way through, but learn and take action on what we are saying. There is a ton of shit out there on
content nerds talking about how to keep people watching your content, and this is affectionately
referred to as the art of retention.
These retention editing hacks,
I'd say, I'm gonna make a bold statement here. 98% of them come from the lens of entertainment content,
not educational.
They have this method where it's like every, you know, thirteen seconds or whatever, you need to make sure that there's a graphic or a scene change or some new
element on screen. That might be effective for entertainment content. Uh, I know I hate watching it personally, but there's a lot of people that like that. I get that. If you're truly making educational content, your actual goal is for the audience to take action on what you say. But if you're constantly having all these graphics that distract from the actual message,
you're inhibiting your audience's ability to be educated,
and you're actually just making entertainment
content.
I personally believe that within the world of educational content,
the greatest retention hack in the world without competition
is your audience learning. The way that we like to structure our intros
is actually fairly different than what a lot of people talk about. You've heard a lot of people talk about proof promise plan, and I think that is an incredible framework. We have created
our own framework for how we structure our intros to our videos, and it's called the four c's framework. I I like the letter c. What can I say? The four c's are
callout,
credibility,
compass,
and the fourth one, which I've not really heard anyone mention, which is core learning. If we believe the greatest retention hack in educational content is the audience learning,
then why would we not try to get to the first learning as quick as possible in the video? And so we have now wrapped this into how we conduct our intro. Now real quick, the four c's applies to your wrapping
and your intro. We have a callout first. The callout can be in your intro,
but the callout can also be addressed in your packaging, in the wrapping of your video, aka on YouTube, your title and thumbnail. You might not need to do a callout in the actual
script of your intro because your title and thumbnail already take care of that. The callout basically is addressing who the fuck is this video for. The credibility,
as we've talked about, is why would somebody listen to you on this specific subject matter? Sure. You might be successful in general, but are you successful within this subject matter that we're addressing in this piece of content? The compass, give them the overview of how we're gonna get from the problem they are currently facing to the solution that they are seeking. What is the road map or the compass
that is gonna guide us along this journey? You're previewing what you're going to hit in the video. And I believe the most important one, the core learning,
you wanna start off the video as quick as possible getting to a valuable, useful nugget. Now I'm not saying you want to create or take the most important, biggest learning that you're gonna share in the video and share it up front. That I'm not saying is the best thing. But you have this thing that a lot of people have been preaching for years now, which is bury the value. It's like, put the the value and the learning deeper in the video so that people stay longer to get it. And
I think that did work for a long time. But we are at a point now where there is just way too much content out there being produced that people don't have the patience to wait. And that's why I believe you need to get them to a learning as quick as possible. Why? Well, if I learn something in the opening sixty seconds of a video, my belief that I'm gonna continue learning throughout the video increases.
If I see even a twenty minute video, in that opening sixty seconds if I learn, I'm assuming that's not the only learning I'm gonna get and the rest is gonna be bullshit. I'm assuming I'm gonna continue learning. That's an assumption that I'm making based on previous behaviors
in other pieces of content that I've consumed. So you need to optimize your introduction in your content, whether it's video or written. A lot of people talk about time to value. You wanna deliver value as quick as possible for the person that's paying for your service.
Well, think of it the same way with your video. You wanna give them value and usefulness as quick as possible. People's attention spans it's not even their attention span, actually. It's their level of patience.
They're less willing to wait for value from you because they know there's another creator that they could get it from quicker. Now from your intro, you then have the rest of the structure of your content. I could probably make an entire course just on this alone. Definitely could talk at least for an hour or two just on how you structure your video, but for the sake of time, I wanna give you something valuable that will be a great starting point for you that you can begin to adapt and evolve for yourself. And I recommend that you follow loosely a structure like this. You have your introduction,
then you give context on what you're about to speak to.
You share a principle,
a story
about that principle,
the tactic or the action that your audience needs to take, and then an example of what it looks like to either do that correctly or incorrectly or both if you were feeling crazy. And then after that, you link to the next video. It's that simple. You can get wildly robust and complex. I have an entire YouTube course framework that I share with people in Ralston Select that is, like, absolutely insane and very deep and robust. It's many pages long, but this will give you a very, very good starting point to get you rolling on creating this content. Rather than you sitting there looking at a blank page being like, what the hell do I do? How do I craft this? Use this framework to help you get started on making your YouTube content. Now I'd like to talk about how to go about repurposing
your content. And most business owners, when they hear
repurposing, they think that that means just reposting the same clip everywhere. And that's one
part of it, I guess. That's a version of repurposing for sure, but that's not the waterfall method. The waterfall method is about taking one really good moment from your pillar piece of content
and getting as much as possible out of it. This looks like one long form piece of content leading to many platform native pieces of content,
potentially many off of one specific
moment. This is not copy and paste. This is not post the same short everywhere, even though that's what we are currently doing right now. We're working on getting towards this point. This is platform native repackaging.
Maybe you've heard me actually say in podcast, which is you want to take your long form,
mine it for moments,
repackage
those moments in the way that the platform prefers. So now I wanna walk you through how we actually use the waterfall method in our content. We create one long form piece of YouTube content. Right now, our cadence is once a month. We will go through and watch it back to mine
for the golden moments. Now these are moments where I'm giving an or
we're watching it. We're like, damn. That was that was good. That was a banger line. Right? It's a belief breaker. It's an oh shit moment. It's it's something where you're sharing a story or a tactic
that can change the belief of the viewer or give them the exact steps that they need to take in order to get the outcome they are looking for. These are the moments that get clipped, not like some random moment, not random time stamps or arbitrary time stamps. Actually,
useful
moments. Something that you may have experienced before is if you hire a
less than ideal editor,
they'll go through your long form content and they'll pull 30 clips from it. They'll get you a lot of volume, but half to two thirds of those clips are not useful in any way. They don't exist or they don't work, sorry, on their own. They're not self contained.
They need the context of the moment that they exist within. And so what you're looking for is self contained clips.
Clips and moments
that don't need the context of the surrounding
conversation
in order to make sense. And then number three, what you're gonna do is you're gonna take those moments, those mind moments that you have, and you're gonna turn them into platform native content. That's what we are trying to do more and more. Sometimes what we'll do is we will, due to bandwidth, we'll clip a moment, and then we'll post that short, that clip to all the different platforms.
Sometimes what we'll do is we'll identify, damn. This was a really good moment from a podcast, for example, where I go back and forth with the host. And maybe what we're gonna do is take that concept and turn it into a written LinkedIn post,
or maybe we'll turn it into a newsletter that we send to people on our email list. And so what you're looking at is taking a golden moment and then figuring out how do I correctly
wrap it using the wrapping paper.
What format should I
wrap this idea in in order for it to best serve my audience on the platform that I am sharing it to? All of those moments are communicating the same message.
Right? It's the same source material, but you're using a different wrapper to share it with your audience. And again, this is something that you're gonna need to work your way up to. We are almost a year into building out my personal brand and posting content publicly, and we're not at the point of consistently doing this to the level that we want. It's Trevor and then half me,
not even half, like, maybe, like, a quarter or a fifth me devoted to the content, and the rest, I'm I'm running the business. And so as we expand our team, you'll start to see more and more of the content that we're posting on all three of our primary platforms
start to look more and more contextual and native
to the platform we're distributing on. This is something that you can work your way up to. You don't have to tackle from the very beginning. But I wanted to share it with you because I think it's something that you want to start building towards
rather than two, three years, four years down the road figuring out this is a new operation that you have to completely steer a massive ship.
Let's course correct while we're still a little speedboat, and it's easy to correct and adjust how we're operating. All of this incredible work to understand
what kind of content we're gonna make, how we're coming up with ideas,
All of this amazing work has been done. You've been going through your workbook because you downloaded that earlier. Right? And you've been filling out the exercises,
and we have gotten a lot of clarity. We really understand what we're gonna be doing. A pretty obvious question that you're gonna be asking is what are the first couple of videos that I make? And so what I wanna share with you is the first three videos that I recommend you make. Now
there's a million different versions of your first three. I'm mainly sharing what my first three were and how you can go about doing this for yourself,
your own version of it. So to be clear, this is not the end all be all. I'm more just adapting what I did and sharing it with you because I think it was very useful and successful for us. So the first video that I recommend you make is an introduction video.
This is where you're sharing your story
paired with lessons that your audience can use immediately. To be very clear, what this video is not, it's not a brag reel. It's not a resume dump. What this video is is it's three to five key moments over your career or life that were pivotal moments,
and each one is paired
with a lesson that your audience can immediately
benefit from. This is what makes the video valuable.
It's not just sharing what you have done and giving the credibility that they can view your brand through from then on. It's also providing them useful value
in the form of lessons that you have learned along the way, both from doing things correctly and incorrectly.
This is exactly how I built my intro video. It was every season or
big seasons of my career along with one lesson that you could take away. It was not every single job that I've had and every little tiny thing that's happened. It's the biggest moments in my career that were pivotal turning points
that I also had a very strong lesson associated with. That's what I recommend you build.
Now as far as what the flow of this video looks like, well, I think you can start with why are you making content now? Why are you building your personal brand? What is the purpose behind this and why now? Okay? That's how I started mine. That sets the frame. Then what you wanna do is you wanna share three to five key moments from your career and life. Again, they're not random moments. It's not like you're doing, you know, a full biography or anything like that. These are three to five
turning points
in your career or life that shaped how you think and what you believe. And then you're going to pair each of those moments with one
clear
lesson, a takeaway that your audience can act on. This is what most people miss. People don't wanna just hear about the awesome shit you've done. They wanna hear about what you learned in doing the awesome shit and how it can benefit them.
So pair each of these moments with a clear and valuable
lesson for your audience. See, ultimately,
you need to connect it back to the viewer. The video is about you,
but it is for your audience. So each lesson needs to speak to their pain,
their goals, the stage that they are at, the confusion that they are experiencing,
and the clarity that they are looking for. Finally,
you need to close with what they can expect from you going forward. What I try to do is share what I am trying to embark on, which is this crazy wild journey of building my personal brand, and you want to set the stage for the kind of content that they can expect,
who it is for,
what you do to help,
and maybe potentially
you can start to inject
a contrarian belief
into this introduction video so that people can start to know what you stand for. This is kind of setting the trajectory or the frame for the relationship that you're going to have with your audience
in future content. Now video number two is a positioning
deep dive. This is where you teach the subject that you wanna be known for through the lens of that contrarian belief. My version of this was psychotic. It was a six hour and twenty two minute course that we put out for free on YouTube. This was a really strong and very deep positioning video. I'm not saying that you need to do that, but I'm also not saying that it should be like a a quick little tips and tricks educational video. It's not a high level overview
of your industry or of your space, and it's definitely not something that's trendy or broad.
None of the shallow end shit. We wanna go into the deep end of the pool here. And so what this video is is it should be a very deep useful breakdown
of the core subject that you wanna be known for. Mine was how to build a personal brand. That's what I wanna be known for. And so my positioning deep video was that, and it needs to be taught
through the lens of your contrarian
belief. This video,
what it communicates to your audience is, here's how I see this space differently
and why it matters to you, and then how you can utilize
how I view it differently
to benefit
you in accomplishing the outcome you desire. That is the entire point. That is what my six and a half hour course was. Now, again, it does not need to be that long. Just make sure that you make it wildly useful.
It can be thirty minutes. It can be forty five, sixty, two hours, whatever duration you want. I will say, I would recommend
making it at least twenty five minutes. And once you start creeping into this, like, ten to fifteen minute masterclass world, it just becomes almost laughable.
Like, it's not truly that in-depth. A ten to fifteen minute video is not going to do what we are trying to accomplish with this deep positioning
video. Now the flow that you can take in this video is, one, I recommend start or at least in the opening, you know, section, start with your contrarian belief. Get this out of the way. Get this communicated to your audience so they view the rest of the video
through that lens.
The next thing is is you should probably define the subject that you wanna be known for. In my course, I very quickly define what branding and brand is because that's something that I really wanna be known for. It's also a wildly different definition of those two terms than the majority of what the industry says. What this does is it creates instant clarity for your audience. Then what you wanna do is you wanna teach the core belief
through a few key breakthroughs.
Okay? Not 20 surface level points, just three to five big,
useful mindset
shifting ideas.
Looking at my course, it's six and a half hours,
but there's four
core
subjects that I speak to. Brand,
content,
team, and monetization. I suggest three to five big
things that you tackle within the core subject matter that you're addressing. A prompt that may help you is
what are the few ideas
that if I would have gotten them earlier in my life, earlier in my career, would have changed everything for me. Once you have figured out what those are,
teach those. That's what's gonna make everything easier for your audience
to get to the desired outcome where you're currently at faster than you ever did. And then you need to make it easier
for the viewer to take action. Again,
this is where trust happens. If you make it easier for them to take action on what you say and they get the outcome they want, If you do that consistently, they're gonna start to associate you with them achieving their desired outcomes. What a beautiful brand to build. And then you wanna close by setting your point of view as their new lens.
This needs to change their belief.
Okay? You want them moving forward after this video to view everything that they do
through this new lens. You are building the foundation
for all the future videos that come. As long as you maintain a high value per minute, the more in-depth you go, the more material
source material you have to help you and your team
with future ideation of content. One of the big reasons why I did a six and a half hour course as my second fucking video ever on YouTube within building this personal brand was so that Trevor would have a lot of source material to help him ideate on future content ideas.
And then the third video that I recommend you make is an experimental video. This needs to be completely an experiment, trying something wildly different to discover what you enjoy making and what your audience enjoys viewing. The purpose of this video is a creative experiment. You are trying something wildly different as far as the style, the format, and the approach that you take. Even potentially the way that you show up in your delivery might be a little bit different. This exists to help you answer two extremely important questions. What do I enjoy making, and what does my audience want more of? See, if you're gonna stick with this whole making content thing, you're gonna be doing it for years. You should probably enjoy the formats that you make. Why not
try to find
multiple formats that you actually enjoy
making? So the flow of your experiment video could be as follows. Pick a format that you've been curious to try. Here are a couple of options. A vlog, a rant, a voice over with b roll, a scripted piece,
a highly produced creative video, a simple talking head with a twist, a day in the life with an educational tie in, a walkthrough or a demo, a story based video. It doesn't really matter what format you choose. It's more what one are you most curious about you
trying. Then the next thing is you need to make sure that it is completely different from the first two videos. It should almost feel, in my opinion, like a completely different YouTube channel. Your average YouTube guru will tell you you need to pick a topic and a format and consistently do that over and over so your audience knows what to expect from you. And sure, that is probably the best way to get the most amount of subscribers and views on YouTube, but that's also a big reason why a lot of YouTubers burn out really quickly. And so what we're building here, like we've talked about, is a sustainable
system that you can actually stick with. The next thing that you're gonna do is you need to anchor it to one useful idea. So my experimental video that I did, the third video that we put out on YouTube, it's called if you struggle with making content, please watch this.
The whole concept
is me talking through the mindset shifts that I had to go through in order to go from being the guy behind the camera to being the character in front of the camera. And what we chose to do is a 100%
scripted video where I am delivering
scripted written outlines
over the course of a motorcycle ride throughout Las Vegas, Nevada. This was
quite the experiment, to be honest with you. I was just curious if I had the chops to be able to do a video like that. And so, again, the format was new, but the value was consistent with the value that we were delivering in the previous two videos.
It wasn't an entertainment video that we were making, though I will say I I think based on the comments, a lot of people would say it was a more of an entertaining video than our previous educational content.
But still the purpose for the viewer
was to educate them on what shifts I was making in order to be somebody in front of the camera. Because turns out you and a lot of other people have moments where you struggle with being in front of the camera. Good news. Me too. It's a crazy thing. And so that's how I conducted that experiment. What you wanna do next is after you're done making the video, take note of how it felt making it. Did you enjoy it? Like, a big thing for Trevor and I was during the course of filming that video, there was a couple of, you know, stressful moments or whatever. We're in public in a gas station trying to film a scene and not piss off the gas
station attendee and the customers that are in there. But the amount of times that we would both turn to each other and be like, man, this is so much fun. We're having a blast. Right? We did another video like this, like the first experimental video in London, and it was so much fun. And so what we learned is like, okay. We walked away with it. Like, even if the audience doesn't really resonate with this, we really enjoyed making it. So we're gonna continue to make these kinds of videos because we enjoy it. By increasing the amount of content that we make that we like, we increase the odds that we stick with it. The next thing that you wanna do is in addition to paying attention to how you resonate with it, look at how your audience resonated. Here is the key. What you just heard me say is even if the audience didn't fuck with it, we would continue to do it. And now I'm saying pay attention to how the audience responds. Seems contradictory. Right? No. Here's the reality. If the audience wouldn't have responded well, if you didn't care about that video and didn't show interest in it, but we really liked it, we would still continue to do it just at a very low frequency. Just enough to make sure that we are enjoying making content, but not so much that we, you know, bore the audience.
However, what ended up happening is you and a lot of other people that were watching it were like, hey. We'd like to see more videos like this. So now we know that we like making it and the audience likes watching it, so we're gonna do more of those videos. So within, I think it was seven months later, we released another video in that style.
And probably six months later from that, we'll probably release another one in a similar style because, again, we enjoy it and so does the audience.
And there's your first three videos. You now have no excuse
to not get started on YouTube. You have to take action. I have removed every bit of excuses that you have. So stop procrastinating.
Stop waiting for some perfect idea, and get started on the first video, your introduction video. Now that you know how to make content and what content you're gonna make, I think it would be really cool if Trevor and I, my content director, walked you through together
how we approached building my personal brand in the first year.
In 2025,
I decided to start building my personal brand. Up until that point, I had always been the character behind the camera, not in front of it. And in the first year of building this personal brand, we grew the audience to over 265,000
people.
More impressively, I would say, is the 44,000
people that we were able to get on our email list.
Now a lot of people share these cool aspirational numbers,
but what a lot of people don't do is they do not introduce you to the characters who are behind the scenes helping make this actually happen.
And so what I wanted to do in this special video, this special episode, my first podcast ever on my channel is introduce two characters that have been helping make this happen. First, someone you've heard me reference quite a bit, my content director, Trevor Odom,
and also my dog, Bugsy. He's gonna be hopping in and out probably throughout this, maybe even chiming in with his opinions on how to build your personal brand. But what we wanted to do is go month by month. And so we wanna start at the very beginning, which is January.
And the thing that I wanna start with, which was really funny for me is I've been doing this. This is, like, seventeen years now.
But I remember I turned to Trevor
the first week, and I was like, dude, I know exactly what I would say to any client, anybody that we work with, anybody who asked me how to start their personal brand. But for some reason, with my own, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, I I felt too close to it, and I didn't know what to do. And I wasn't exactly sure where to start. Do we shoot photos? Do we like, so kinda walk me through and remind me really, like, where did we start with all of this? Basically, my first few tasks was like, k. We have a limited amount of content of you already out there. Yeah. Very limited. I think it was, what, three podcasts Yeah. That you had done? Including one that was, like, seven or eight years old from when I was on team Gary. I remember it was, like, in the conference room, I think, or something at Vayner. Yeah. I remember
basically, I took all of that content. One of my in the first few days, I built an AI database of just content. Because, like, having worked with you for five years, I know
what you talk about. But at the same time,
you starting your own personal brand, I had no idea all of the like, breadth of the talking points. Like, I knew you're gonna hit heavy on personal brand, you're gonna go deep into content, but what are those points, and what are those main pillars that you're gonna stick to? Like Yeah. I think the you you had the brand journey framework. You had the brand journey framework. I didn't even know
I don't even know if that's what it was called back then. Yeah. Like
so all of these things, I'm kind of learning for the first time after I I mean, I've been working with several other creators to now transition completely to somebody who's starting new. I'd never actually
started a personal brand before. I have been on a team that's been pumping hundreds of con pieces of content on a week, but I've never actually started one. My first few pieces of priority were I needed to build an AI database of all of your content, transcribe all the content that you had out there,
a speaking gig, like, that you had done,
which was only a handful of pieces. Couple, like, voice memos and stuff like that that I had recorded on walks to try and give you a little bit of ammo and stuff like that. Mhmm. Not a lot. Not a lot. So we did that. That gave me some ideation points of like, cool. He's gonna talk about the these select few things, and this is, like, this is what we can start making our short form content on. This is what we can start building long form content off of.
So then from there, I developed kind of, like, systems to stay organized and basically keep us on track. Like, it's funny because we come from teams that are much bigger.
And so it it kind of sounds silly that we're like,
we're gonna we're gonna build our project management board for all of our content that doesn't actually exist yet, and we're going to organize our Google Drive a certain way and have a file structure, like, a file naming convention and everything. But, like, in the back of our heads, I remember we were talking about this. It was like, we're gonna wanna stay organized. This might not be us forever,
and it's gonna be helpful for when shit actually does start happening. So one of the another thing that I started doing was I set up our Google Drive.
I think we purchased a few different pieces of equipment, like
one FX three and Yeah. This main A CAM here, that's what we had bought. An FX three and, I I think, a lens, a tripod, and, like, a light. Yeah. That might have been what we purchased in, like, the first
few weeks there. And then from there, it was organizing a project management board, which is something like, I was speaking to a,
a creative
manager on a team yesterday,
actually,
who is oddly in a very similar boat to what we're doing, and like, what my role is, which is he has never done this before. Yeah. And he's coming doing everything. Mhmm. And he's coming in, and he's doing everything.
I had not done that before. After a year of this, I'm like, I have a few pieces of advice for you, buddy. Like and one of the first things I told him to do was open
Notion, Asana,
Monday, whatever it is, and get yourself a project management board.
Set it up as a board view. Go left to right. Your
you put your content in there, all this all your raw footage that you film, you can have Google Drive links, whatever, and you move it left to right of, like, this content is for review. This content is ready for review. This content is already reviewed and approved, ready to be captioned and posted.
You have a con you have a calendar view of all of your content so that, like, this is something that a lot of teams we work with don't have, like, in place when they come to us. And it's one of the first few pieces that we did and we tell people to do is, like,
jump in,
get organized,
and make sure that you can stay on track. And the beauty of it for the person who's on camera too, the talent is they get a bird's eye view of where everything's at. Right? Like, I I know for years the amount of
entrepreneurs I've talked to that have gone and filmed a vlog or filmed a bunch of shorts, and then they're wondering
what is the status of all that epic shit we just filmed and invested a lot of my time into. Like, where's the status on that? And what's cool is when you have that system and you maintain that system, then the talent is able to actually take a look and see where everything is in in the status. Right? And so I think that's really helpful. One thing that I'll I'll just quickly hit on that I I focused on, and then we can move on to February,
is this was the first time where I was
really taking what I did naturally
and just felt inherent to me, my way of operating,
and learning how to distill it into bite sized chunks for people to learn from. And so the thing that I was really focusing on in January was like, how do I develop my
my natural ways of operating into frameworks? The way that my brain thinks and analyzes things.
How do I develop this into a framework that the audience can follow and makes it easy? And that was a very interesting transition because I've worked for some amazing individuals who are wildly gifted communicators
and incredibly
good at teaching people things. So I think I had a little bit of a leg up from observing them, but January was really me focusing on
figuring out how do I communicate these things. Right? And then actually one other thing that we should hit on really quick is the first video we did, we decided to do an introduction video. Right? We decided to introduce Your career. Yeah. It was like do you mind walking through just a little bit of, like, what that video was and what the goal was? Yeah. I mean, I think I don't even know whose idea I I it was just kind of like the easiest low hanging fruit that we can do for our first YouTube video is we can make a video about what you've done in your career. Shocker. Like, it's like the lowest hanging fruit that we that I think that we thought of, and it was like,
going back through your actually, I remember seeing a ton of
old clips of you and DRock when I was going through all the old footage of you, transcribing all that stuff, and it was like, there's been a lot of things you've done. And, like, I think a lot of people would want to be reintroduced to who Caleb is now that you've done this for, what, sixteen years. Yeah. And so we kind of just laid out your career.
I remember we whiteboarded it. We probably have you we have photos, because I remember you started taking you're, like, doc starting to document the process. Yep.
And we whiteboarded out for a whole day your career, all the positions that you have been in, and then
one or two lessons from each of those, like,
high it's like, it's very high level, but it's also
extremely tactical and extremely important. It was like and I think it ended up being, like, a fifty minute long video Yeah. For your for your first video. Which is crazy. And the kind of the takeaway for people is
you should assume that nobody knows who you are. Right? And obviously, for the majority of people, that seems obvious. Right? I've worked for some high profile individuals, so maybe it would have been easier for us to go into this assuming that some people knew who I was. That'd be kind of bold. But what we did is we decided, okay. Cool. We're building an audience.
We need to frame how the audience is gonna view me. And so for a lot of people who are starting or restarting their personal brand, I think something that is wildly effective is to create an introduction video that gives the credentials as to why you are somebody who should be listened to on the subject matter you're about to speak to in your content. Right? And, like, I think, you know, some of the people, which, again, it's not a lot, but some of the people that knew who I was before we did this, they were aware of some of the characters that I've worked with in the past. But maybe they didn't know about the time that I spent at Constellation Brands working on Prisoner Wine Company, High West Whiskey. Right? Like, they didn't know about my first job at Logos Bible Software where I learned a lot and was able to develop skills of how to work on
software
and make, you know, software that might be kinda seemingly boring for a lot of people look cool. So I I think it was a good moment for us to share a little bit more of who I was. But to your point, if it was just a list of my resume, that'd be boring as fuck, and nobody would give a shit. But we tried to tie in an applicable lesson for everybody watching. And I I think another
side note, I'm gonna keep doing that because this is a podcast where we're given as much gold as we can.
Um, one thing that Trevor did a really good job on on that video
is taking really good note of what I was saying and asking me follow-up questions,
helping to make those piece of the pieces of advice that I was giving more practical,
not just not just high level, but also in the dirt so that people could actually act on it. Appreciate that. Yeah. Absolutely. It was great. Before we go on to February,
something that I realized I didn't do at the top is I didn't really
list off all of the amazing credentials that Trevor has.
And I want to do it because he's not gonna do that. He is a humble character and kinda like myself, he's not gonna want to tout all of those things. He'll feel awkward doing that, and so I'm gonna do it for him. So in addition to Trevor being
one of Bugsy, my dog's best friends,
he freaks out every time that Trevor comes over. Trevor and I have actually been working together, like he said, for five years now, which is absolutely insane.
And
before he was my content director, Trevor actually led all of the short form for two very prominent entrepreneurs
and creators in the business creator space.
I'm talking, like, billions of views a year kind of level and hundreds and hundreds of shorts being produced every single week, overseeing many different editors,
also editing himself.
That was another interesting thing that I thought was really cool going into this year was I've watched you go from being an individual contributor.
Right? You're you're the editor making the short form clips to being a manager
where you're overseeing other editors,
and you're reviewing
all of the clips and you're the one in charge of the short form process and the quality
or sometimes lack of quality and then quickly adjusting and improving it,
you oversaw all of that. And then now you're going into this role where you are a director.
And in the beginning, it was director of nobody, but very quickly for our second project, we hired somebody on
to help with the motion graphics. And now we just recently brought on a contract editor that we absolutely love that you're overseeing.
We've worked with a couple other freelancers on other various projects. And so this is now in a time where you're not just focusing on short form,
but actually, oddly enough, Trevor was most experienced on short form. And what did we not do for the first year? Shorts. We focused on YouTube. And so I think that brings us perfectly to February, which is when we shipped the first YouTube video that we talked about, that intro. We don't need to talk about that. Let's talk about the course. Like,
not only my second video that we're doing on YouTube, this is your second video that you're filming, leading, and editing Mhmm.
For YouTube. Like, let let's talk through. Like, take take it from the beginning here. What what was the process for making? And real quick for context, if you're not familiar with it, no reason that you should be. We produced a six and a half hour free course on YouTube called how to build your personal brand.
It's absurd.
I think it's really, really high value. It's long as fuck, but I think a lot of people have gotten an insane amount of value. It's at I don't remember. It's somewhere over 750,000
views at this point. It's insane. Nobody is more surprised than me. But, yeah, Trevor, let's let's walk through kind of that process. That seemed to be, like, the biggest focus in February. Mhmm. I mean, that's our second video. Well, I've kind of reverting back just a little bit. Like, we filmed our first video end of January. I remember we booked, like, some,
it was a decent like Airbnb. It was just like a small setup. We used we used a Sony and a Canon, and just we we just kind of
we just started. We used what we had available. Mhmm. And then essentially,
I it was I remember this because you've actually had this idea for a while. You've told me that you've been eyeing this idea of how to how to build a brand, or a personal brand for a very long time in past roles too. Yeah.
But in during that film session, I remember we
were
probably mid film session, and you turned to me in the kitchen and you were like,
wouldn't it be crazy if we did, like, some mega, like, free course that we released on YouTube
as, like like, super soon. And we and I was like, interesting. Yeah. Like, that would be kinda cool.
And I think, funny enough, I brushed it off at that moment, but I think you immediately went back after that film session
and started writing it. Right? Two days later, I yeah. That was on a Thursday that we filmed that video. Mhmm. And that Saturday, I woke up
and
felt like a fire under me and felt like I I I felt compelled to to put all of this,
you know, to paper. It was a very quick, like, let's set a deadline for this, when this is gonna go live. Let's let's book a space for this. Let's like, it I think it all happened within a matter of a couple weeks where you went from this would be a funny thing that we that we should do, and this would be helpful for us, and people would we get a lot of value from it, to I think a couple weeks later, we're booking the space. I'm looking at spaces
in LA to film. It's like a we I found a warehouse. Yeah. Talk about that. Like, how did you find the space? I wanted to do this for our first video, because I remember I saw, like, screenshots of, like, Harleys in the background of this warehouse, and I was like, we can put your bike in the back, and we can, like That was the main motivating factor, just to be very clear, is the fact that we could put the Harley in the set. That was the selling point.
But, no, it looked like a dope. They don't shoot. I remember the the studio manager, whatever, was like, we have never had anybody, like,
shoot audio in here. There's like it's a place where basically rappers in LA go and film all their music videos. What what's the rapper Kevin Gates and YG were in there two days filming a music video, separately, not together. Separate music videos days before we were there. It was insane.
So then there's us. Yeah. This was, like, us. We show up with, like, a truckload of, like, some rented gear. We rented, like, half the gear. I remember because the studio manager was like, how many people? Like, is it gonna be, like, a 20 person team that's gonna come in? You guys have a truck that we're gonna have to back in? And I was like, two people. They were like, are you sure? We charge if the party's over five. And I was like, there's two of us. There's two people that just show up. It wasn't us trying to sneak people on set. That's for sure.
But, yeah, we we booked that space. I had found that on, I think it was, Peerspace or Peerspace.
Shout out, Peerspace. We booked that. I picked it because there were so many different scenes, and we could do three different scenes. I also picked it because, like, we liked it because it looked very different from almost every, like, course or anything that you've seen is like
again, rappers use this space, and there's graffiti on these, like, walls, and we're like, it would be cool to set up a chair and a green backdrop,
and literally film our course in there because it's just so like, it's super cool. But I remember you invested
a lot for, like For a second video. For a second video, it was a lot to book that space for three days.
And I don't even know if you finished writing the video until, like, two days prior. Dude, what's crazy is we were never really done. Because remember the night before our first day of filming,
we were up until probably two or three in the morning
finishing
and rewriting a section, basically. And then we continued to do that every evening after filming. Because what we would do is you know, this was our second video ever that we were doing. So
we would learn from the film session. We immediately would go back to the Airbnb. I remember we would order
oh, man. I I can't remember what you're talking about. Yeah. I can't remember the name of the restaurant, but these awesome burritos.
And we would get that, and I always made sure to have my eight zero five Cervesa.
And we would then
rewrite the next section, taking into account the things that we learned. Right? Like, lines that maybe I had written that
read really well when you would read them, but when I would go to say them out loud, it just, like, felt weird and stuff. And we actually if I remember correctly,
we after the first day,
rewrote the second section so that it was not as many lines,
but more bullet points. Because I quickly realized
Mhmm. I'm a terrible reader. Just for context for everybody, I don't read books. I just listen to audiobooks.
And so what we quickly discovered is it does not work well for me to have predetermined
lines. For an intro, sure, we'll script it pretty heavily, but everything else is bullet points to keep me in line. Let's talk through k. We we picked a location, PureSpace.
It was really sick. It was really cool. It was very, very expensive, but it was worth it. Right? We did that. How did we go about setting everything up? Another question is why did we do different setups?
Right?
Like, there's four sections to the course. Right? We got
brand,
content,
team, and then a very, very quick monetize section. Why did we make them all different settings?
I think there's probably a few
reasons
to why we did that, ranging from we wanna get a bunch of different shorts from this, and it allows us to go you know, for you to switch outfits, for you to get shorts so that we can distribute that on the short form platforms a little bit easier.
One other thing, which we never ended ended up doing, but, like, we also had the idea at one point to actually split those into four different videos
after we posted the course and posted them as individual sections, which should maybe we'll actually do this year anyways. Kinda like what we're doing with this series this month. Yeah. Mhmm. It was when we're actually testing it now. We had an idea last year. But
doing that, it's also and this is something I think we realized after.
I think for you,
you actually
like, the change of environment and change of pace, I think, refreshes you a little bit. When and this is not something I don't think I planned when we had the idea to, like, switch this up,
but it was like,
you actually do really good if you have, like, a reset. Mhmm. And you go into a new scene, and it looks nice, and it's like, okay, we're refreshed. We also shot this over three different days. I think it was three days. Right? It was like Yeah. Three and a half days or something like that? Alright, buddy. So like,
that also
I mean, it just makes it easier for us to swap every day. I think we did a new scene Yeah. Up until,
I think We did I remember we did brand,
and we did
team together.
Then we did content in one day. Mhmm. And then we did monetize on the half Yep.
Yep. So it was two and a half days. So there I mean, that's probably a there's definitely a few reasons why we did that.
Mainly, it's also just because we we thought it was cool to show off all the scenes in the warehouse because it had so many cool scenes. But it's like The other thing too is we made the assumption that if anybody was gonna be crazy enough to watch all this stuff, they're probably not gonna watch it in one sitting. Shout out to the individuals who have watched it in one sitting. That's pretty crazy, and I'm
eternally grateful to you. People do that. I I have gotten DMs. Literally, I have gotten DMs of people that are like, yep. I woke up this Saturday and decided my Saturday is dedicated to that. Real quick, I just wanna say I am so sorry. I know that this is a lot to take in right now and even more for you to take action on. But that is the whole reason why we created Ralston Select. Ralston Select is your one stop destination
to not only learn, but to actually implement. We're talking pre production, production, post production, and platform strategy,
all through the lens of educational content.
Click the link in the description below if you want more information.
Now let's get back to the video. What I was also thinking about is, like, people are gonna come back to this video. And so we almost tried to treat each section like it's its own video in this massive
self contained
thing. Right? And and that way, if they did come back, it would kind of reengage them. To your point, it reengaged me filming it. But also the theory was maybe this will help reengage people
on some pretty heady,
deep, long shit.
Bumping into the table. Bugsie is just trying to find a spot right now. Hey. You can you can sit down. You can sit down.
He's a goldendoodle. He's two years old.
He's the sweetest. I know there's gonna be comments about him asking about him. So moving on from that, and and I wanna be careful because we're spending a lot of time on the course. But I think it was like, you know The biggest probably arguably the biggest thing we did Oh, definitely. Year. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it it it bears a little bit more attention.
So the next thing that we do is after we're done filming, how did we handle postproduction? Like, I feel like, one, you know, we can talk about hiring Michael, bringing him on. But Mhmm. Yeah. I'd love to talk through a little bit more. Yeah. I mean, like I said before,
you
you and your ever knowing wisdom knew that if we didn't set a date for this thing and actually, like, get it done, we were gonna procrastinate the hell out of it. That's true.
And it's just such a massive project. We would have spent months doing this, but from, like, start to finish, what what are we determined? Was, like, a month and I think so. Half or something? Yeah. From start to finish, from idea to post it was less than two months. I started it on February 1, and we published it on April 4. Mhmm. I mean, as soon as we got back, we went into postproduction.
I wanted to take a pass at the cut. We had three camera angles. We did a simple like, we did a basic three camera setup.
It was nothing fancy. The lighting was nothing fancy. Trevor, you're saying not fancy and basic, but I wanna real quick interrupt you here. Most people
at most do two cameras. It's true. And real quick, he's not gonna say this because we're we're going into post production, but real quick, a shout out to Trevor on the production. Trevor was managing three cameras,
the audio,
and he was running the
the outline. So, basically, we we have a 55 inch TV that we put right below the camera lens, and he was scrolling through the outline because, you know, you zoom into it, and you can only get a couple of lines before, boom, we're on to the next section. So Trevor's managing audio, camera angles, making sure focus, lighting is all good, and making sure to keep up with me on the outline. But please continue on the post production.
Mister Simple. I appreciate that. Before we even shot it, we actually had a few calls with a few different motion designers. Yeah. Because one thing that we wanted to do was, like,
there's a lot of people who,
like,
there some people are very visual, and, like, they draw on a whiteboard or something like that.
I asked you. You're you're like, I'm not a I'm not I don't draw at drawing, you guys. My handwriting is horrible. It looks terrible. Maybe one day, but not not in the first year. That's for sure. And one of the things that we also noticed with a lot of these, like, the whole idea for this course came from looking at the industry, looking at the niche that we're in,
and doing the opposite of that. Everybody does paid courses. We do a free one. Everybody does two
hour
master class courses, and we do six hours. It could have been more. We cut it down. I think we had fourteen hours of raw footage. So,
like, everything that you're hearing, like, we just took a look at what everybody else was doing, and we're like, you know what? Which would become a very staple piece for us later in But our in our
the the motion design, basically,
nobody does that. Nobody has motion graphics
throughout their courses, like, a lot of the times. Like, we wanted professional
Custom.
I am yeah. Custom.
No no, like, Mogurts or anything like that for all the editors out there. You know what a Mogurt is. But we wanted custom
motion graphics
in our style, our green,
our tan, stuff like that, our opal mist color. Love our colors.
So we wanted to do that. So we had a call. We actually hired somebody before we did the project. The the thing was I was going to do the
I was gonna cut it, swap the cameras, color grade it, everything was gonna be done, and then I'm gonna ship it off to this motion designer. And this is all gonna happen in like four
weeks that we shot it. We shot it. Even less, because you were going on a trip. Yeah. I flew to London, like, the I had to finish it by a certain day in like, I think I had less than two weeks to cut it, and actually like, and this is a six and a half hour. Cut it, and then you and I review it. So
like, I I think it was like a five day edit where I'm just I'm cutting this thing down from fourteen hours down to
six and a half or something like that.
Making notes in the timeline, grading it, doing the audio, doing a pass on the audio. And then we actually one of the things we wanted to do was review the whole thing together
before we shipped it off, so we could have a bunch of notes
for
this is actually a really good workflow that we do a lot of the times.
First off, we we almost always do an a roll cut Yes. So that you can review it, especially when you're working with contractors and stuff like that. Oh, I was talking to somebody yesterday who was, like, wanting to know how this, like, workflow they're like, I'm giving a lot of notes, and we're doing, like, v five, v six, v seven, and I'm like, do you wanna know how you can avoid that? Something that we learned early on, which was we review an a roll cut, or somebody reviews an a roll cut, so we did that together for this one. We can jump into that in just a second. But
you do the a roll cut, and then you leave a bunch of notes on frame from that a roll cut of, like, I'm picturing this here.
I'm thinking this here. The road map I'm thinking can be something like this, and you can actually draw on frame so that when the contractor comes in like, had a 100 something notes for Michael of, like, motion graphic here, something here, this lower third for the workbook that we included in the course, that needs to have a motion graphic that I think so when Michael sat down to film it, I could go on a on a trip to London because he had all that he needed in a frame folder ready for ready to go for him. Shout out Michael Moyes. We're gonna link him in the description. He's an incredible motion graphics
artist. He killed it. If you wanna hire him, I I highly recommend him. He's fucking awesome. He killed it. He killed it. And took a bet on us. Yeah. Absolutely. Really early on. Yeah. Which was really cool. But we reviewed that together, and that was probably the biggest thing we did in that postproduction process is we sat here in this living room actually for
fourteen
hours or Yeah.
We cut the intro. We actually changed like, completely changed the intro. That's right. That's a big point, actually. We had scripted an intro,
and
I'm gonna be real. I thought it was a good intro, and I still think it was.
But when we were watching it back,
there was a moment the way that it starts right now is you're on one of two paths. Mhmm. And that was originally probably about thirty to forty seconds into the video. Over a minute. Yeah. Yeah.
We decided
in post to cut that opening and go right to that.
And
it turns out, apparently, it was good because there's a lot of other individuals who are using a very similar intro, which I love. That I
that is the best
compliment that you could ever give, but it it was something that was not planned. A happy accident. Yeah. Yeah. Bob Ross moment. Big time. Okay. So you're you do the edit. You pass it off to Michael. What did that look like? I imagine and this is a moment for all of the the creators, the people who are on the actual production team. Like,
what were the details there? How did you
hand off a six and a half hour file? But more than that, right, because you still have to have the source media. You have three angles. You have all the different cuts. Like, walk through a little bit of what that looked like. So basically, the handoff of that project was the the workflow
was that Michael was going to do transparent on alpha, like MOV files for all of his motion graphics, so that he can actually just upload those onto a Google Drive. And then I can actually,
I believe I downloaded them and placed them in, I wanna say. Yeah. You did. Yeah. You were you were doing the placements. I think I was yeah. You got all the lossless or not lossless, the alpha channel files. Mhmm. Yep. So that was the workflow there. But like I said, he had that whole frame folder to basically go through, and he had very little questions for me. I had very little text from him when he was actually go he's like, he read through it all. He's like, cool. No. I have no questions. Like, I know what I'm gonna do. We gave him a lot of creative freedom on, like, the style. I don't know. I'm not a I'm not a motion graphic. I do remember we sent him one example,
and it was a a really cool video with Arthur Brooks, and it was on Harvard Business Review on their YouTube channel. And there was some motion that they did on that that I loved.
Because I remember he was asking for a reference, and I was like, I don't I don't know. Or saying the video. Yeah. And, also, like, I could tell you all of the stuff that I didn't like. Like,
what the majority of the people in the industry were doing for their motion graphics, that was, like, what I wanted the opposite of.
Yeah. And so man, he did an amazing job matching that. I base I mean, I remember I was like,
I'm picturing something like this here, but, like, I don't know how you're gonna execute this. I give you full creative freedom, and I think it actually bred, like, some of the coolest shit that, like I remember we were reviewing it. We were like, yes. Damn. Yeah. Like, holy shit. The heads were nodding hardcore. Yep. Yep. But that was that workflow. We we I just think for the footage, it was so much footage, and we had so little time. I actually shipped them an SSD and, like, overnighted it. Yep. UPS, by the way. What the fuck? It's, like, $300 to overnight a little
four terabyte. I did not know that. That's wild. Okay. Sorry. No. That used your card. Grooving. That was that was kind of the process there. It was, like, a little bit of back and forth. There were a couple different versions, I think, that I was reviewing back and forth. So then after
we're doing all of that, we're placing them in. We're reviewing it. We're stoked about it. One note actually off of what you said that I think is really important for people. If you're going to hire somebody now this
shouldn't be a qualifier that I have to add, but I'm gonna add it. They need to be good, and they need to have a portfolio to show you that they're good at what they do. Mhmm. But if you hire somebody who has a portfolio that shows you that they are good at what they do, trust them.
You're breeding them on. If if you hire somebody and then you tell them exactly what to do,
at least in the creative world, I think you're kinda defeating the purpose. Right? Then you're hiring a robot,
not a contributor.
And we we literally I remember telling Michael, like, man, we want you to flex your muscles here and show us, like, what you would do, what you think would be cool in this instance, what you think is different than what other people are doing. And Michael had done a a wide variety of different projects in the back. Like, in his portfolio,
it was a lot of stuff that wasn't this, which was also really appealing to us because it showed that he had a a different edge or angle he was coming from. He wasn't like it wasn't that he had been doing motion graphics for all of these talking head videos on YouTube. Right? Like, from what I remember, I didn't see a lot of that in his portfolio. Think he was like a gaming, like, editor. Yeah. I think yeah. For, like, Twitch streamers and stuff like that. Yes. He killed it for me. Yeah. And it's so sick. And we saw that, and we're like, oh, that's
that could be a cool unique approach here. So, yeah, you know, we're we're giving Michael a lot of love. Highly recommend check him out. His shit is linked in the description. Please, if you need a motion graphics artist as a freelancer, he is an amazing person to hire. So
Real quick, actually. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I kinda wanna hit on that, because you
you talk about leading a team with trust. And I think that that's what you taught me to do
when I was working under you in my previous role. And I think that's how we've kind of ran teams for a while
now.
I think that's how you've always led, which I think is really cool of, like,
even the latest this video and the video the few videos before this, I was just reviewing them last week
from our contract editor, Max Gangster.
Shout out, Max. Shout out, Max. Love him. I'm not gonna try to say his last name because I wouldn't know how to say it. But Apologies, Max. We we don't mispronounce, so we just won't say it. That's the that's the key. But that is a huge like, there have been so many we did this the other day where we're on frame,
Max is leaving us, and I'm first of all, I'm never demanding anything in frame. I'm always asking questions. Yep. Do you think that this would be cool right here? Yep. Would
it be possible if we did this right here? And then I'm also including them. Like, we were having a discussion, I think it was the other night or something, where it was like, let's ask Max. Mhmm. Yep. It was I like, I think it was if we were gonna include this podcast in the full course
upload. Spoiler alert. Yeah. That's right. Awesome. No. No. No. It's good. It's good. If you're in at this point on the podcast True. We're gonna take all the videos that we have uploaded in January, pack them together into one mega course on how to start your personal brand. But we haven't decided whether or not we're gonna include this. And we brought we're bringing it like, I'm gonna shoot a Slack message over to Max and be like, hey. What do you think about this? Is this good enough? Like, you're gonna you're gonna edit the footage and see it more than anyone else, like, in bringing in that level of trust in asking
your team.
It doesn't have to be, like, major decisions. Like, hey. What do we wanna do with this offer or something like that? But, like, bringing them in those creative decisions, giving that creative
flexibility. Like, Max asked several questions to me in this latest upload on this frame link, and I was like, I think we could do this, but what do you think? And one thing I tell Max is like, if you make a good if it's not going to be like, I kinda separate my notes from like game breaking notes to like, this is a preference of mine, and I state that in this. It's like, I'd love this, but I'm also open to this. Yes.
When I'm looking through notes and giving notes to editors,
to designers, whoever it is on a creative team. Mhmm.
And this is this all just comes back to trust of, like,
what do you think of this? Like, I'm asking Max more questions of, like
oh, I remember what I was gonna say. Like, told Max,
if you make an argument for it, I'm probably gonna go with you. There's a 98%
chance if you make a good argument, and he did it. He was like, I think we should include this and leave this in because it's kind of a humorous moment that shows Caleb's
side of, like, create like, little little funky side of Caleb. And I was like, cool. Heard. Let's do it. I I trust you. Love that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really big point. I think
the other thing that I would say, and then we should move on to March, is
your team, if they're the right characters and, again, that's a stupid qualifier that I have to put in because a lot of people don't realize that. If you hire the right people and you give them that level of trust, they will rise above
the level that you are bestowing that trust at. Like, I I've seen it time and time again. So it's it's a really good point. I'm glad you brought that up. Moving into March, we went psycho mode,
and we had just
filmed this video
middle to end of February.
And then I think about two or three weeks later, we're like, you know what? Let's do another course level video. And so I wrote the how to lead a media team. I can't remember what the title is on YouTube right now, but the video is like how to lead an already existing media team.
And
we I think within three or four weeks of filming the course, we went out to Joshua Tree and filmed
for an entire day. Was it a full day?
Yeah. I think it was one full day. I think we did yeah. We did that too. Sunrise to, like, way after sunset. Because I remember you jumped to the pool at the end when it was freezing. Fucking cold. Yeah. So we went into that. I think some interesting things to talk about here are the location
and the outlining process.
You you mentioned when we were talking about and planning for this podcast and talking about what we're gonna go over, you mentioned something that was really interesting, which was that I chose
the location. Can you speak to that a little bit? It's so interesting because a lot of people think that, like, when you
bring on
a creative director, and you're just starting your brand, or whatever, like, they know everything, and like, they will handle all the decisions and stuff. And I think, actually,
contrary to probably what a lot of people are thinking anyways, like, about my role, and what I'm doing for you, is
it's it's actually it wasn't like that, and it still isn't. I actually had this conversation yesterday,
and I remember I told this certain it was a creative manager that I was talking to, was the one that I said was Yeah. Starting in a similar role.
I was like, you know,
I'm actually still being onboarded
one year into this role. I'm still being onboarded. Because
you mentioned, like, you picked the location. At this point, three months in,
I I did pick the location for the course, but that was like a mutual kind of, like, one off thing. But You nailed it. Three
months in, I actually had no idea your taste in what you
what you actually preferred in your locations.
And I sure as hell could not write for you. Like, you keep mentioning that you were writing these videos.
I wasn't actually involved in the writing till I think month five or six. Right? Yeah. I think so. I think it was like the three stages videos when we started it. Yep. And then now we write videos together,
which we'll talk about in a bit, I'm sure. But, like, at this stage, you were writing the videos.
A lot of times you were picking the locations and, like, sending them to me, like, what do you think? Can we what what is the setup you're thinking here? I have some contribution to that. I think a lot of people would expect that I am doing those things, and I'm writing your videos, and I'm doing all that things, but two months in, it is interesting
because it's actually the opposite. And it wasn't till month five or six that that started happening, and people do things differently, and I think we advise different things Yep. For different teams. But for us, specifically, I think what's made the content the best so far, and why it feels so authentic, and it's so deep, and so like, is because actually you're at the you're still so close to right now. Yeah. Which is really key, especially if you are starting out
in your first year making content with your personal brand. And it's the most frustrating thing for people to hear too, because one of the most common things that,
you know,
one of the most common, I should say, conversations that we've had with clients this year is a lot of them wanting their team to handle all of it. And I I love
the thinking. Right? Because it's like, we don't have a ton of time.
We're
trying to spend as much time on focusing on the business as possible. We don't have a ton of time. A lot of people I mean, me. I don't have as much time to write content as I did when we started. Right? The business has gotten a lot busier. Thank god. That's an amazing thing. I'm so grateful for it. But that means that I have less time for it, but I still fight
to be involved in it. Because the thing that literally was just having this conversation with somebody today.
If
and I mean this with all due respect to everybody who is behind the scenes behind somebody. But if your team
was capable
of writing this shit just as good as you would, why are they not the ones on camera? Right? At a certain point, maybe that'll happen. That's starting to happen now. You're starting to come on camera and stuff. But, like,
it still needs to come from me at some level. Now what we're gonna be working on, and we'll we'll talk about this later, is, like, this year, we're gonna start working on you getting the outlines to third base. Right? And then me rounding at home. But if we didn't have the year
of the first half of the year me writing it and then the rest us writing it together.
Right? Because that's how you delegate. You demonstrate.
You
duplicate, I believe, is what what I always talk about. Something like that. You do it together, and then you have the other person do it themselves,
and you observe that. And that's the phase that we're about to go into, and we can talk about that later. But I think it was a really good point to call out because it's an expectation a lot of people have when they hire a content director that they're just gonna write everything for them make everything magically happen. But,
you know, we've known each other for a very long time. You have a lot more context on me than most people do starting this position. And even in that scenario, we had to do this.
And we could have done it the opposite way,
but then it wouldn't be my words and it wouldn't be me. Right? It'd be an outsourced version of me. And so I think we we need to calibrate, and that's what a lot of people need to do is they need to go through that calibration phase, which is one that a lot of people want to skip, which I think is interesting. Super crucial. Yeah. I think it's
but yeah. That was so we we went in. We shot that video. Only,
like, a week prior having posted our first video. So we we recorded almost three videos before ever dropping one of them, I feel. Yeah. Which is crazy.
And, actually, we would not advise that.
A big thing that we preach is
you want to use
posted content to inform how you make the next content. And the thing that I always talk about, which is so funny, is the last thing you wanna do is batch content too much because then you have that sunk cost fallacy of like, well, we we filmed all day. We might as well post all this. But what if you learned that what you did in the film session was completely bullshit and it ruins the rest of the videos? Well, then why would you keep posting it? Right? But,
you know, we we worked with the reality that we had. And the reality that we had
this is the real god honest answer. I was fucking motivated, and I was stoked. And we took advantage of that. Instead of spacing everything out, it was like, in the matter of two months, we filmed three
three videos?
No. Four videos. We filmed that intro
video. We filmed the course. We filmed the media team video. And then in April Mhmm. In April, we filmed the
if you struggle with making content,
watch this,
which was a completely different format than the first three videos that we filmed.
Now we're saying this, but the video I'm describing, if you struggle with making content, please watch this, that was the third video we released. This is moving into April now. Can you kinda share
why
we did that and why we approached that video the way that we did? So let's tackle the order of upload because we filmed the media team course, and then we filmed this, but we uploaded them differently.
Explain that.
I mean, the media team course was a two two and a half hour video. It was gonna need more time in in post production,
especially because I was handling the post production entirely on that video. We weren't outsourcing to a contractor or something like that. And that's something you'll kind of notice,
my buddy. That's something you'll kind of notice for
all of our like, we did one video
every month of our first year. Only one video. Which to some I mean, when they look at the run times on those, to some it's impressive, and to others, it's like one video only.
But that is the resources that we had
on a solo team. And the cadence that we felt like I could stick to. We wanted to do something that we would do the entire year. Sustainability
going into the if you struggle video, that was the biggest thing for that video is you I remember when
in the first few weeks, it was like,
wouldn't it be cool if we started doing some crazy shit? Like, we got a a car mount, and we did a video on my bike. All of you'll notice this is a theme. All of our videos come from, like, one of us being like, especially especially
Kayla being like,
wouldn't it be crazy if and then we actually do it. And then we set we set a date and we actually do it.
But the the biggest part of that video was sustainability. It was we wanted to make a video that we don't actually know if it's gonna do well or not, but it's just something completely different. We
that video was a shot by shot,
just
it was that was scripted. It was completely shot listed. We're a 100% shot listed,
and that was our first video that we actually did that. It was insane. The other thing too is I remember we were
about to upload like, we were planning on doing the media team video, and then we were like, oh, shit. Our first video was fifty four minutes. Our second video was six and a half hours. And if we upload this next, our third one is two hours. We're setting the expectation
that we only upload
mega videos, which if you look at our channel, a good percentage, I'd say there's three there's three mega no. Four. Four mega videos now. So of the eight videos or 10 videos that we released in 2025,
I'd say four of them are
pretty beefy long videos.
But we didn't wanna set that expectation that that's all we were gonna upload.
I remember the other thing that we talked about was, like,
I wanted to see how many different styles can I do? Like
and this might
I'm gonna share this. This might sound a little egotistical,
but I promise it came from a place of not knowing, and there was no ego involved here. But I wanted to see, like, can I show
the audience that I'm capable of communicating
in multiple different ways
in the very beginning of me communicating to people? That was insane. Like, I remember we
every single every shot is planned. Right?
We're resetting the camera, either you on the fucking Ronin or the tripod, resetting it in public with traffic,
with other humans,
like, everything. There was a moment where we're filming in a gas station, and I'm literally,
like, thanking the lady at the checkout.
And then I turned to the camera and started talking with her right there. And I'm she I gave her a warning, but she was definitely like, what the fuck is going on? This is so weird. Cause it was very weird. We're in this wasn't in, like, Downtown Vegas or anything. We filmed it in Vegas, uh, but this was on the outskirts of Vegas. This was this was closer more to, like, you know, the mountains and Red Rock and everything like that. And so they were looking at us like, what the hell is going on?
But that was an interesting one because this was the first time that we
learned a lesson that we'll learn again and we'll share with you again in this, but preparation.
Yeah. We ended up shooting this video over three days
wanting to get it done in one. Like, we flew out your best friend, Jordan,
to drive the truck while I hung out the back and grabbed
rolling shots of you on your bike. Yeah. And to be very clear for all the law enforcement individuals watching,
he was secured with a seat belt in the back. A singular strap that was like I remember Jordan looked at it, and he was like, I don't know if that is actually gonna work, but
do you feel safe? And I was like, no. I feel yeah. We're okay. Safe enough.
I remember realizing really quickly, when I'm setting up these cameras, like,
the first time we tried it, we said we shot listed this whole thing. We had a very loose shot list. Rough idea. We had not. And then I think the lines were there, but I think the shot list the lines that you wrote were good. The shot list was just like,
probably
a medium shot somewhere in this gas station.
And we didn't I don't even know if we picked the gas station. No. No. We just, like, saw it. We just were driving and found the coolest looking one on our route. And
we got to the sun was starting to go down, and we had maybe we had our rolling shots, and I think that was it. We barely had any audio. I remember we literally there was a moment where
we were trying to figure out the next shot quickly,
and we realized this is not a good idea. We should just lean in fully to rolling shots. Mhmm.
Which I which was an amazing pivot. I think that was your pivot on on the fly. I think it was just out of I think we were all getting frustrated that, like, this is not going very well. Yeah. And it's because we didn't prepare.
And this is a lesson.
Spoiler alert. We'll learn again a little bit later. But, like, pouring
dozens of hours into a video that's ten minutes long
is essential. Like, for this video, we then went back to the drawing board, and I think Jordan had to fly home, we had to do it on a separate day, and I think we recorded two other days. But
we went back, and we spent
a handful of hours
shot listing this every shot, shot by shot. This is gonna be here. We are going on Google Maps. Yep. And we're doing satellite images, and, like, this is the gas station that we want. And I'm thinking that this is the setup, and this is the shot where you know where we're shooting exactly where we're shooting it.
And we took a whole another day. We went back out
and shot at a bunch of different places. We had already gotten the rolling shots, the shots of me looking at the camera and talking while I'm riding with my helmet on, which by the way,
those are actually moments where I am literally saying the line. We rerecorded it in post for most of them because the audio was a little tough with my 2021
Harley Davidson Road King special as loud and as aggressive as it is. We had to rerecord them. But, like, a lot of those lines, I'm saying and looking at the camera as we're writing. But, anyways, now we're gonna film the talking shit.
So we go out and we're going to all these locations and doing this. We're filming in public. Like you said, we went to a restaurant.
The the
waitress was unbelievably kind. The manager on the other hand was not so stoked. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. At the end. At the end. But I was, like, standing on a booth getting that top down shot of you just like the waitress is super cool. I wish we had a behind the scenes photo because you would look into the booth and you would see I'm sitting there eating. And on the other side of the booth, Trevor is literally just standing on it with the the Ronin and the camera, like, to get those high angles and every I mean, we probably looked absurd to anybody, but but we did it. And one little tip actually that I'm gonna throw out there that I've never mentioned ever before is for anybody who is trying to film
publicly
around other humans where they're gonna be looking at you.
I'm telling you, sunglasses are your best friend.
You'll notice that in both of the videos that we've done like this, the one in Vegas on the Harley and the one that we'll talk about later probably walking around London and talking to the camera. I'm wearing sunglasses. If you're gonna film out in public and have people look at you and you're embarrassed by that, some people are not, and I envy those people, but I am not one of those. Like, lot of the comments on those videos are like, I can't believe you did that. I can't believe you said that in the convenience store, like, with people around you.
And the reality is is I am probably more terrified of what other people think of me than most of you watching or listening to this.
That is a very real, like,
real reality is
I am very uncomfy
talking to a camera when there's other humans around. It makes me
squeamish. I do not like it. But what I try to do is I just try to completely ignore them. I used to play basketball in high school, and for better or for worse, I would just completely blackout. I mean, there was literally one time where I remember I was going for a wide open layup, and I'm like, why the hell am I so wide open? Turns out it was the other team's basket, and my whole team was yelling at me, Caleb, Caleb, and I couldn't hear. And so I try to channel that kind of same energy when I'm filming in public. It's like, how do I just completely ignore the fact that that dude over there is looking at me
very puzzled.
Because the reality is is it doesn't really actually matter. And more often than not, they're thinking about it in the moment, and then seconds later, they're driving and they're paying attention to the road or their kids screaming in the back and they don't give a shit. But I thought that was a very interesting video because
you got to exercise some interesting skills that you have not ever in the past, which is you probably did
I think we could comfortably comfortably say 30 different camera setups. In,
like
Twelve hours. Yeah. Like, ten or twelve hours. Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm. Which was insane.
Real quick before we move on, let let's talk about that real quick. Like, a lot of people in the comments on that video ask about
what was the film setup? Some people think that I filmed it myself,
which that is wildly impressive on those walking shots. But talk to us about that. Like, what was that like? We've had to get very scrappy. And also in the past year, I think my my actual production
skills have leveled up so much. I used to do it all the time when like, I filmed quite a bit at
at my last role,
but all sit down talking head stuff. And then before that, I did some commercial work and and some stuff, like but nothing crazy. Like, nothing, like, super but, like, it's been interesting that we have some ideas. Like, you also have this one idea of going to New York and filming in the back of a taxi cab,
and I actually have, like, in my head how I shoot that and how I do that with, like, GoPros and stuff. Like,
there's been some interesting production setups. But for this one particular in, like, in particular, I think we rented
no. We bought we bought a Ronin. A Ronin r s four or something like that.
R s four pro. I think yeah. It's an r s four pro. Ronin, so knowing that, like, we have to basically be in and out,
this this restaurant or this convenience store will kick us out if we're not if we're there for more than
two minutes. And we officially got permission,
but they still they were like, make it quick. Every it's funny because, like, when you walk around with a phone and a camera, you're like, which
is something you can't you can get a phone honestly, it's something we we should have considered as a phone stabilizer and just shot with with an iPhone that would have been probably a little bit more inconspicuous. But we did a full r s four. I had wired earbuds,
and then I had you labbed up
with I believe the DJI Holy Land mics. Like, some something like these wireless mics,
the audio isn't the best, like the audio quality,
but for Run and Gun, like, everything that we're doing right now, it's not like a it's not like a wired Sennheiser mic or anything. We're going for speed. Like, remember you telling me, I know you haven't, like, you haven't done this much before, but, like, we're gonna need to be in and out. You need your white balance. Like, I think sometimes I even did auto white balance, because I'm not gonna sit here and, like, fumble with the settings. Like, you need to be in and out for a lot of these different shots. And you also I'm gonna say something here real quick. It was a little bit more dramatic and intense than that. They're at the gas station. I literally turned to Trevor, I was like,
you have two shots.
Two takes for each of these scenes. I'm gonna walk up, grab a Red Bull,
and you have two attempts to get it, and then we're moving on. Like, I I I it was a little intense. I was like, you have two tries. And if we fuck this up,
we're moving on. It it was it was very stressful. But I'd say by the time we got to the London video Yep. I had it mostly dialed. Like Oh, yeah. You can tell I'm in a whole different world, and I'm like but, like, we had the preproduction dialed. But that that was the setup. It's the most basic, like, what can go wrong. I'm on autofocus. I have, like, auto settings. Like, anything that I can eliminate going wrong in those scenarios,
I learned that, like, we need to do it. We also just had a certain amount of daylight, and so setting up, I think was that the video that we had a monopod for? No. That was a London video. Yep. But
we had very quick we've I I almost very rarely, I think, used an actual tripod. Yeah. And I went handheld
with the gimbal just like this. I mean, and just sitting there.
Like, shot like, the we're gonna do a top down shot. Cool. Holding the gimbal right here, like, and we're gonna go and roll. Very
interesting production challenge, but but, like, that's how we did it. And we're scrappy with it too. Like, I think we taped a mic to the inside of your helmet, and that's how we recorded the audio there when we drove down. Like, I just had you roll through the neighborhood on your bike, and we recorded audio a different day, and I just, like, taped a mic into your helmet or something. And we wanted it to sound real,
but
we also wanted it to be hearable and legible or not legible, but hearable, understandable. You know what I'm saying? And so what we did
for the the real nerds out there is we did not record that audio on the same bike. We actually I'm kind of a weirdo, and I have a couple Harley Davidsons that I love.
And we picked my quiet one, the Pan Am, which is it sounds like a sewing machine, basically. And so it would still have the sound of being on a motorcycle, but wouldn't be quite as intense
as the Road King. And then in post, I remember you added,
but more like, you had control to separate my audio from the bike audio, but you added in the Road King so that it was authentic. So, like, if you are a Harley nut and you watch that video, all that shit is real. We recorded all of that folly. Like, when I take off and you hear the exhaust get louder and lot, like, we recorded all of that on the third day, I think. Right? Yeah. All planned with preproduction. All in, like, this is how I'm going to tackle this and how this is how we're gonna do it. And that's probably the biggest lesson that month. We all I think we also launched the course. Yep. Yeah.
April 4, we launched the course,
and it didn't do that much in the beginning. Like, it did better than we expected by all means. But compared to what you guys see now,
that first month gave us no indication that it was going to take off and go
in our world intergalactic.
Right? Like, we did not see that. So we go from April into
May,
and May was interesting. There was a lot of different things, but I think the cool thing that we could talk about is
there's there's two things.
The second thing will be this is the month that the course did start taking off. But the first thing that I think we should talk about, Gary Gary Vaynerchuk.
Uh, if you don't know who Gary Vee is, what rock are you living under? Um, this man pioneered the whole space of being a entrepreneur who's creating their personal brand online and making content at scale. Like,
he pioneered the whole thing. All these individuals that you probably watch and learn from right now that you admire,
they are here because of the trail that he blazed.
And Gary for the last couple of years has been focused, as far as I understand, far more on VeeFriends and VaynerMedia
and really operating those things. And
he wanted to do something really fucking cool in May. For VeeFriends, they had a
massive release.
They partnered with Topps,
the card,
like, playing card collector card maker,
Topps. And I'm a little ignorant on this world, so please excuse my ignorance. Anybody who's really in it, you can roast me in the comments. But Topps has a limited edition
version of their cards called
Topps Chrome
cards. I think it's something like that. And VeeFriends was doing a Topps
Chrome release,
which as a side note, y'all, is fucking wild. It was not that long ago that Gary was drawing
these characters on a piece of paper and had this idea. And within
less than five years,
that dude is doing a partnership with the number one card maker. I could go on. I I really admire Gary. I love him to death. He's the best. But he wanted to document that month of releasing that
by bringing back DailyVee,
which was a series that he did, a vlog series on YouTube, where for a very long time, he was uploading almost every single day of vlog from the previous day, usually literally just twenty four hours prior because the team would stay up all night, edit it, and then release it. Bunch of savages.
And he wanted to bring that back, kind of like a nostalgic play to document the whole process. And in doing that, he invited all the OG characters that had been videographers
over the years, which was so cool. Like,
I know that Justin Dalfrez came back and filmed
David Rock, obviously. Tyler Babin, Jason Marina. Right? Dustin Lee did an episode. I did an episode. It was awesome. Stephane did an episode from ask Gary Vee days. Like, it was it was awesome. It was so cool. And I felt really honored to
be invited.
But then I felt a little insecure because
I have not edited
a video in years.
I mean, years. I've cut maybe, like, a short here and there and stuff like that. I did a couple of short edits. But for the most part, I hadn't done any editing.
And we were the plan was like, we're doing quick turnarounds.
I have historically
that one of the things that I I think I tried to build my editing brand on when I was an editor is like my speed. I was really fast, but now I am not.
And I wanted to deliver for the man. Right? Like, Gary's asking me to come out and stuff, and so we tag teamed that. Mhmm. And that was really cool because you've been a Gary fan for a while now. Right? That's how I got introduced to you. Yeah. It was through a fellow. Yeah. I was
doing
intern esque work for
it it was Tyler Babin. Gary's original videographer after DRock? Yeah. He came in after DRock. Yeah. Right after DRock. I was doing some some work for him back
years and years ago,
and that's how we actually connected. But, yeah. I literally grew up sixteen, seventeen. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing right now is because of Gary, which was a very surreal being in a car with him.
And, yeah, that was weird. That was so cool. And so what we did is we tag teamed it. I filmed,
and then I was giving you the footage, and you were editing. But let's be real. In addition to that, Trevor was also helping me because, again, I have not I haven't been the person on the go filming in a long time. And what people don't realize,
that man is a mutant.
He has energy like I have never ever seen.
If he has coffee or he doesn't have coffee, the man is electric. It's crazy. He's go go go go go. To this day, he's still that way. Right? I saw it. I witnessed it. Yeah. I had heard stories. You had on
like, at our on our last team,
you
so many times were like, I've been in this scenario. Trust me with Gary. Like, bro, Gary would have me up for three days straight, and I'm taking our private jet flight trying to sleep and edit at the same time. Like, I didn't like, I heard it, and I was like, yeah, Like, yeah, you worked hard, but like, I don't know if I realized the extent of how this man moves until I'm traveling. Because you
I was editing, but I was traveling with you while while we were going. Yeah. Like,
Trevor was helping me carry the bag with all the fucking
camera batteries and stuff like that. Like, you were helping me with that. You were helping me
grab headphones, like all kinds of things. I mean, I remember we were standing in the auditorium where the the convention was happening,
and
I hadn't eaten in, like, nine hours. And I I have a fun little thing where if I don't eat for a super long time, I get, like, low blood sugar shaky, and I end up fainting. And so Trevor, like, ran and grabbed me food and stuff like that. Like, that was super helpful. Back in the day, I didn't have that. I would just grab, like, a you know, my blood sugar was low, so it'd be like, oh, there's a Snickers bar in the Green Room. Cool. I'm just gonna down the Snickers bar real quick. And one thing that I wanna mention that that to be super clear here. It wasn't that Gary was demanding these things. It's that I
respect that man so much, and I would see time and time again, we'd have a full day where he's, you know, shaking hands and answering questions for hundreds of people.
And then immediately on the next, you know, four hour flight, he's on his phone working the whole time. And it's like, god. How can I not
you know, I remember at the time, I think when I was working with him, I think he was, like, 44, 45, and I was, you know, 24, 25 or something like that? And I was this dude's almost double my age, and he has triple the energy. This is insane. I'm at the point in my life where I should have the most energy and be the most willing to stay up and scrappy, and I was, but it was wild. And so the the thing that was really cool, though, is you got to edit two different daily v's.
The series that I watched in high school. Yeah. Yeah. That was cool. That was an amazing moment. And and one thing that was really cool too is I think
we got to work with team Gary as team Gary is now. And that was also really cool. I mean, like, Sid, obviously, great individual, great human,
did a great job of corralling all of us crazy characters because, you know, Stephan,
David, Tyler, like myself, we all have things that we're doing. Right? Like, we either have jobs or we're building our own businesses.
And
the fact that
Sid and the team were able to help corral Nurea, everybody was able to help corral all of these moving parts and make this actually happen. Right? Like,
shout out Victoria. Like, awesome EA. Like, that was super helpful.
Aaron on the team managing YouTube, like gangster. Like, that was it was so fun, but it was also so interesting for me to see how things have evolved, right, as they should. But that was that was kind of an interesting moment, but it was cool for you to see some of the behind the scenes of the stories that I've told and stuff like that. You know, the war stories. It was all true.
He just moves. He just doesn't stop. He is awake
three hours like, I remember we did, like, five cities in three days or something like that. Wild. Like,
somewhere in Canada
to
Somewhere else in Canada. New York. Yeah. To somewhere else in Toronto,
New York,
Orlando,
Atlanta, back to
insane.
And he just moves. He just doesn't stop. Don't meet your heroes, but my respect for him only grew. Yeah. Of just like seeing him interact. Like, he always makes time for people. He never stops.
At that booth, I remember he never who walked by when we were at the at the booth? It was
Oh,
fuck. Why am I blanking his name? I know the rapper. Yeah. Waka Flocka. Waka Flocka.
Just walked by the booth, and Gary doesn't go and talk to Waka. Like, clearly, I think Waka, like, wanted to, like like, hang out or do something, but, like, he just They had talked backstage. They had connected. Walker was like, yo, I'm gonna stop by the booth at some point, and Gary was in the middle of a conversation with somebody who
was in a, I'll just say, a wild scenario.
And
this would have been a really good moment for Gary and for VeeFriends, and he could have easily stepped aside, taken the photo, then come back. But instead, he focused all his attention on this person who
was going through a wild scenario and
really looked up to Gary and got a lot from him. And I remember, like, both of us, that, like, was a a crystal clear moment. The thing that I noticed too is, you know, we've been able to work for some great people. We've been able to work with some incredible characters this last year, and a lot of them have huge personal brands and are talked about a lot online.
But there has never been a human that I've walked through a public place with,
not one person who has more people
stop to ask for a photo, but even more than that, people whispering, being like, oh my god. That's Gary Vee. I don't wanna bug him, but wow.
Like, I've been watching him since I was in junior high. I've been watching him since I was in high school. Like,
incredible
to see.
And I think for me, it was a moment where this was about halfway into us building my personal brand. And I just remember
I never have ambitions of ever being at Gary's level nor do I think that I'm capable of doing that. That man is on a different level.
But I remember thinking, okay. With the audience that we're building,
I really want to act like Gary and do what Gary does, which is put the audience first above his own
self interests.
At times where it is so clear how much it would help him,
he still chooses the audience. And I just I I thought that was so cool, and that's something that we've tried to take into the content that we make. Right? Is like putting the audience first.
Like, for example, we got my dog here who's kinda disturbing things and stuff,
and we didn't have really any time other than now to film this podcast.
And it's a little distracting, and this is your third podcast. And you've been doing this despite him being like in
the background. And that's distracting. See, that's distracting. But we're still trying to do this because we've never done anything like this. We've never shared this kind of information on our approach to growing my personal brand. And it's a tiny little way. It's an insignificant example comparison to what Gary has done, but it's it's one way that we're trying to apply and live that out in what we're doing, which I think is the coolest thing. So May was fun getting to work with Gary again and hang out with him and travel with him and seeing him in action. It was really fucking cool. Trevor also edited those daily v's. Like, we got done with that trip, and like he said, it was, like, five cities, six cities, something crazy in a very short amount of time, like three days. And we were exhausted.
And I turned to Trevor. I'm like, oh, man. I'm so excited to go home and get cozy in my bed and sleep. And he's like, I'm so excited to go home and get cozy with the editing because he still had the videos to edit. So shout out to Trevor. And shout out to all the editors that
don't get mentioned,
but stay up all night
editing content for the people who are in front of the camera.
You deserve more acknowledgment in my opinion. But beyond that, we go into June, and this is when like, May
is kinda when I felt like things started picking up. Because the other thing that I forgot to mention that we'll just hit really quick is in May is when the course took off. May 1, the course was at 49,362
views.
So that was after a little less than a month of being up, and it for a while there, it was looking like it was actually flatlining Yeah. On YouTube. And to be clear, 49,000 views in the first month is fucking absurd. We never could have dreamed or imagined. Yeah. Like, so that's where it was at as of May 1.
As of May 31, it was at a 165,161
and climbing every day. I mean, to this day, we're still getting anywhere from like two to 4,000 hits a day. Like, that's where the curve absolutely took off, and this thing just took on a a mind of its own. And I think with that,
also put the
because we made a workbook associated with this course. I
don't know if we've actually talked about that.
It was completely free. All you needed to do is just add your email. We actually ended up growing our email list. Like, right now, I think we're at, like, 44,000
people on that email list, mostly from the course alone.
But that was when,
I think, up until this point, we've been we've been spending a lot of our time
in
preproduction production for our YouTube videos and having fun,
and this is, I think, to where I think you're about to go with this. Like, this is where along with that video,
things started to change. Yeah. I'd say up until this point,
probably
65 to 70% of my time was spent on the amazing clients that we partnered with from the very beginning, and that was awesome.
And then, like Trevor said, we not only were racking up all these views, but there was a lot of people, a high percentage of the viewers were downloading the workbook.
And with that, we were also getting a lot of people going to the homepage on our site applying to work with us. Like,
in the first year alone, we got over 800 companies that applied to work with us. Like, that was insane. We had so much demand. And I remember we got to a point where I started to feel pretty, like,
a little freaked out because I didn't know what to do. And I had all these people being like, how are you not sending emails? How are you not doing this? And I had so many people, which I'm grateful for. These are like gangsters in business that for whatever reason care about me and what we're doing and are giving me advice on what we should do. But it was a lot of different voices with a lot of different ideas.
And I just remember
end of May or no. Actually, like, beginning of May, I'm like, I need help on the operation of this.
And what I thought I needed was an EA. And so I think it was in May when we posted that I was looking for an executive assistant.
And
I started running interviews and everything like that. Well, come June
or actually really end of May, I was conducting
quite a few of these interviews.
And one in particular really stood out. I interviewed Kate Podoba, and I won't go into all the details to to spare her privacy and everything, but it was fucking unbelievable. Like, I had a lot of good interviews, and a lot of the people that I talked to, I loved, and it was amazing. Like, I was so grateful at the quality of individuals that were coming through. But Kate stood out.
And I remember
we ended the conversation basically being like, this isn't gonna work out.
I'm not gonna be able to figure out how to afford you, all of those things.
And
this was the craziest part.
I remember later that evening,
Kate followed up via email saying, totally understand that this isn't gonna work moving forward and everything.
I love what you're doing.
I remember you mentioned that there's all these new people coming into your life, and you're having a tough time managing all these relationships. You wanna check-in with people. You want you know, if it's their birthday, you wanna send them a text or you wanna send them a card or a gift or just different things. Right? I was just suddenly getting an influx of humans in my life. And you know me, I'm pretty introverted. And so, like, I don't necessarily naturally have the gift of doing that. And so she said something that I built for the executive that I work for right now is this
simple Google Sheet,
but it was incredibly
useful. It was the relationship database that she used to manage all the different people in her exec's life,
whether they were professional, personal, whatever, family members, all of that. And she sent it to me, and she said, feel free to duplicate this and customize it to yourself.
Any good EA will know how to use this. And I remember I probably texted you within seconds of seeing that. I was like, fuck.
I gotta figure out how to get Kate.
And
through a series of meetings with my CPA and coming up with how we were gonna make this work,
we determined that
we didn't just need an executive assistant. We needed a chief of staff, somebody to help with the operations of everything. Right? Not just the operations of my life,
both personal and professional, but the operations of the business because now it was turning into a business. Before, it was kinda like I had a a cool job,
and you were helping me make content to get more jobs.
This was the moment where we started turning into a business. Now mind you, I'm not saying we're like some big
business or anything like that. I hate when people pretend to be something that they're not. We are not that. But it was way more serious than what I anticipated in the first year. And so we brought on our chief of staff, Kate Padoba, and that's when I feel like things started to get a lot
crazier.
June is kind of the moment. And I remember turning to Trevor because I didn't I don't think we filmed anything in June. I didn't really have any time. Like, I I'm looking here. Yeah. We had nothing that we filmed.
In June, I went on a long motorcycle trip, like a week long motorcycle trip. That's something that I've never been able to do in my entire career. So as a side note, the really cool thing about this year is not only did we do a lot with the business content, but I also got to live, which was fucking
wild. It was a crazy time in years. Yeah. It was so crazy. I just spat everywhere. Like, it was it was amazing.
And so June was a little bit slow from a content perspective. We didn't have a ton that we were working on, but things were starting to ramp up with the offers we were working on and the plans that we were building for what we were gonna do for the second half of the year. So June, I'd say the biggest thing is we hired
Kate. That was awesome. She is the fucking best. We're so grateful for her. Moving into July,
we
went to
Mexico. We went to Cabo,
and I spoke at I love that little dance move right there. Yeah. We'll we'll we'll get that a survey said.
I did have a few survey says. You just kept seeing that. It was my favorite. Yeah. In the car.
I remember for a month after that too, you just just
one more, please. One more. Yeah. I mean, there's there's something about sipping a corona with lime in Mexico that just hits a little bit different. But we went there
to do my first
public speaking
moment ever. I had spoken in front of, like, teams internally
at the companies that I've worked for, but never done anything publicly like this. This was the first time that I was gonna, like, talk on, a stage,
and it was it was crazy. And it it wasn't like it was a massive group. Right? Like, was it was talkies. Like, it was a group of, like, a 100 people, and I was freaked the fuck out.
I remember really trying to hide my anxiety as much as I could, but there was no hiding it. But let let's talk through that because that was an interesting trip. Because not only did we capture that talk, which we uploaded,
which was a funny moment where I thought I completely bombed it. And then I watched the footage, I was like, oh, that wasn't half bad. That was actually kind of decent.
But then the second thing, which was interesting, is we developed
a very interesting view that now I preach as, like, gospel.
But in the hotel room, I remember we were jamming and working on something, and that's where the whole contrarian take came.
Do you remember that? Mhmm. Yeah. I feel like we we get some gold when we go on trips. It's funny. I've discovered, like, when we're traveling
for all these shoots, because throughout the year, we basically have shot, I think, like, what, Two videos in Vegas itself? Yeah. And the rest has been Airbnb's, and Joshua Tree, and Utah, and all these different places that we go. For some reason, I think it's just because we're in the same room together. That's where we come up with, I think, some of our best ideas. One of them was like, we were analyzing
why
you were talking through why certain brands or personal brands can blow up when others don't. And I think that's when you discovered
the the three levers of brand positioning. Yeah. The contrary intake, the delivery, and the wrapping paper,
and the most important being the contrary intake. We were just, like, looking at the the clients that we've worked with this year. Who was having crazy results versus, like, mediocre results? Because that's the reality. Not everyone was like a fucking banger this year by no means.
And the big unlock that was so wildly clear was all the ones that were doing a really good job had a contrarian take. Either a belief they held that was fundamentally different than the other people in their industry
or a contrarian action.
Right? Like, they were building
a luxury tree house hotel
in a world where, like, luxury and outdoors is not typically associated. Right? They were they viewed that you could build a strong business and manage a big business
effectively while also prioritizing your family and spending time with your like, these were contrarian takes. And we were starting to notice like, oh, man. These things are really standing out. Then I started looking at people that I've worked with in the past or worked for in the past or other creators that I admire from afar and started looking like, woah. All of them came onto the scene with a wildly different view than a lot of others. And at this point, like you mentioned, we were starting to have some success with our content,
and it was way more than we could have ever imagined in our first year. And so we're like, why are we having success? What is it that is like,
you know, I I tend to be self deprecating, and I like that kind of humor. I'm trying to work on it to be a little bit less self deprecating, so you might notice that. But I've never thought of myself as a really articulate and clear communicator. Now a lot of people are DMing me and saying that in the comments. I appreciate it, and I'm really trying to,
like, let that sink in and really receive that. But up until this point, I did not think that was the reason why anything was working. And I do believe the main reason why is because we came onto the scene from the very beginning talking about optimizing your personal brand around trust, not virality.
In a world where every other video
that was served on the right side of our videos suggested,
every video competing with us on the homepage was talking about how to go viral. And not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think that's the way to optimize.
That was our contrarian take.
But to your point, I think an interesting thing that we've recognized is we need to be sometimes in different environments in order to get new ideas. And so that's something that we have operationalized.
It was something that happened. It was a happy accident. Back to earlier, your Bob Ross reference.
It was a happy accident that we recognized,
but it puts us in a different environment.
I find that we think differently. And, also, I'm gonna be real. For me, at least, I fucking love my little family that I'm building here. My girlfriend, my dog, and I really find that
if I don't go away
to do some of the really deep writing,
I
get pulled not because they're pulling me, but because I wanna go hang out with them. And so sometimes I think it's really nice to carve out
time where I'm not going to and I don't like I prefer not to call my family a distraction. I I used to think that way, and I think that's a real
interesting way of thinking.
Family is wildly important,
but I am more prone to stepping away from the writing process if I'm at home. And so something that we have done is we got Jesse Itzler's big ass calendar, which is fucking awesome. Shout out Jesse. Shout out Taylor who runs all that shit. She's a gangster.
Big ass calendar. Highly recommend that you purchase this. We planned out our film sessions, our writing sessions, and writing retreats. To your point, we're going away for a week next week, but we're not just doing that next week. We're doing that several times throughout the year because we noticed that was something that led to great insights
and new concepts. Right? And so I think the lesson for everybody here is it's it sounds so weird. Observe yourself in your process. If you are doing something that leads to something great and it happened by accident, turn that into a process.
Operationalize that shit. Right? So I think that was very interesting.
Huge. No. I mean, that's what it is. Like, all year, it's been constant iteration, not only on the content of like those little things of like, oh, we can we operate better this way, or I we like to do things this way. That's constant iteration there.
Also, constant iteration on the concepts and things that you were talking about in the content. Yes. Every podcast that you've done, I've watched you articulate
better and better the brand journey framework.
Like, all of these different things that you talk about articulated
much more clean like, you were talking about the levers of brand positioning in the last few podcasts that you've done, and the latest one was so
much better than the first time you talked about it, because you're constantly iterating on that content. And that's probably something you'll see, like, the number one thing that I can give us props to, I think, this year, is just the constant iteration. Like, we we set a date, we did it to our point earlier,
and we iterate on it after that after we've done it, and after we realize we like to do things a certain way. You like to do things this way, like, this is how I learned how to book I I pick our locations now for filming and everything. How I learned was I picked a location, and Caleb didn't like it. It was a really ugly studio.
I was trying to be cheap.
And Caleb was like, no. I get more reinforcement
being
in really dope filming environments. So I'm like, cool.
Oh, got it. Now I can pick locations for you. Something that I had to learn the hard way is a lot of times
creatives and me when I was more immature and younger and and earlier in my career,
I viewed what now I've call iterations and how you're calling it. I thought it was like indecisiveness.
I thought,
you know, people that I've worked for, I thought they were constantly just changing their mind and just couldn't make up their mind. But in reality, they were pinballing,
iterating
their way to the ideal
end product, and that's what we do massively.
And something that I think is a good takeaway for two different groups here. For the person who's behind the scenes, the the creative who's making the content,
be more flexible. Understand that that is
crucial.
And
why would you wanna be in an environment where everything is always staying the same? Like, you wanna constantly be improving and constantly be getting better. And two, for the talent,
I would say,
I would urge you
make real changes after each film session. Take note of what you liked, what you didn't like, put those into place, but also have some empathy for your team to know that,
at least this is the way my brain works, I've been thinking about this for a long time, and they're just hearing about this. And so, yes, the team needs to adapt. Like, when I come to you with a crazy new thing that I want to do, you do need to adapt to that, but you do a good job of doing it quickly. But I also think, at least I think, I tried to contextualize it for you. I tried to address the fact that I know I'm changing my mind. I said the exact opposite last week. This is completely different. Know I this is a pain in the ass. I know you've already sunk twelve to fifteen hours into this project, and I'm telling you we're doing it completely different where we're scrapping it altogether.
And that's fucking painful.
But I think if both parties
have a little bit more empathy for each other and a little bit more understanding that ultimately both are wanting to make the best product,
it will be viewed less as whiplash
and more just as you said, iterating.
I think that's probably the number one takeaway so far in this entire podcast. It's like, if you can operate like that for your first few years of your personal brand,
you will grow. Like, I take notes when we do this thing. I'm I'm taking notes, and we're iterating, and we're just like,
those
things,
time and time again, if you do one, two, three things better on every every shoot that you do, you eventually get to a place that's really
you're in a really good spot. I agree. I completely agree. So stop staying stagnant, everybody, and stop doing the same things over and over. Right? What is it?
Definition of insanity. Everyone talks about us doing the same things over and over and thinking you're gonna get different results.
Like, stop doing the same shit over and over if you want different results. Hey, you. Watching this video right now. I know that this is overwhelming and a lot for you to take in. If you want to go deeper
in a slower paced environment, we designed something specifically for you. Ralston Select is your one stop destination
to not only learn, but to actually implement. We're talking preproduction, production, postproduction,
and platform strategy,
all through the lens of educational content. Click the link in the description below if you want more information. Now let's get back to the video. Moving into August,
we have two things that we should cover. The August video that we released,
let's talk through that one.
Do you remember which one that was? That was the respecting the audience's time.
Ah, we learned our lesson. This is what we teased earlier, learning our lesson a second time. Yeah.
Yeah. We had we'd filmed footage with a client of ours earlier
in the summer
getting b roll behind the scenes. Our idea was to make a what we were literally just talking about of like, I know
how to show up to shoots with Caleb, I know what to bring, I know all these different things.
We have a whole, like, SOP on that internally for how to film with talent. Pretty hefty playbook, actually. Like, everything we've learned over the past few years,
everything you've learned, especially over the past few years of filming with different types of talent. And our plan was to make that into a video using that b roll footage and everything.
It was yet
another, I think, lesson where I, like,
I booked I think I booked a shitty studio. That was the first time that I did that. Because it was my first time picking the location after the course.
We went into it. We were like, I think both I developed like a series of questions to ask you.
And then it was like, we're gonna loosely follow the SOP,
and like, that's gonna be the video.
And we show up to film. He's leaving out the fact I did zero preparation for this. Every other video leading up to this, I had done at least ten hours of preproduction on minimum, way more for most of them. And this one, I did zilch. This is where we're, like, starting to you'll hear me talk about this in a minute. Like, this is where we're starting to stretched very thin. This is why we're bringing on the chief of staff that we just did, like, a month ago. Like, this is where things this is why
the month prior, we actually didn't film a direct to camera video. We had to film at the Taki Moore event and use that as our video, which actually did surprisingly well. But like, we're starting to have to be more creative, and we need but the thing we forgot is like, we still
the
twelve hours of
concepting this intro or this hook for this YouTube video, we forgot like, all this preproduction,
all this work that we put. That's what made the first few videos so successful for us, and I think I don't I got cocky. That's what it was. I thought I could show up and do a better job off top, because I think I'd
please hear this through a humble tone. I think I do a decent job on podcasts,
and I explicitly
tell the host, do not send me the questions ahead. It's all off the cuff. So I thought, well, we'll just rip a podcast. We prepared more for this podcast than we did for that fucking video. Now that I think about it, actually. We didn't even do packaging. We didn't even talk about packaging before we were gonna do it. Which is never the case. We literally never do that. Well, we learned a lesson. Yeah. We're just so busy, we're we're diving into things. But that, we sat down to film that, and it was very clear after an hour of not getting anything that I'm sitting here like, oh, god. I mean, literally, I was getting frustrated with myself because I just
he would ask me a question, I was just not answering it well. Or maybe some of the questions, to be fair, I was like, ah, I don't know if I love that. Like and I remember there was one point where I am a big fan of the Wim Hof breathing. And I literally was like, I'm just going to stop.
And right there with the camera rolling with Trevor right there, I just closed my eyes and turned on YouTube and put on the Wim Hof breathing
to try and calm myself down and get myself into the right headspace, and that didn't fucking work.
And we It did. What? I think it did. It calmed me down a little bit, but we still tried to do the video, and it was still like That I think that that brought about the pivot Yeah. Which was like Good point. You know what? We're not getting this today. Like, we are not we're not gonna get this video. Not to the we can get a video, it will not be something we want to release Yeah. At all in the slightest. Not nowhere near the level of the first five or six videos that we've done.
So I think you, like, I think you had the idea to pivot into, you know what?
Here's what's happening. You turn to the camera and you were like, I just tried to film a video, and if I had tried to
put this video out, I wouldn't be respecting the audience's time.
And it was like a one minute insert of just talking about that, and talking about how, like, I'm not gonna put this on you. This is me. I promise I'll show up better than the next one, and that was the video. Was like a minute and thirty seconds. And we posted that for that month. We wanted to stick to that goal of
one a month. Yep. And that month was a one and a half minute video. Me admitting that I had not shown up,
and I had not respected the audience's time. I chose my time over the audience's time. And it was a moment
I remember so distinctly too
just
pounding into my head as I was sitting there in front of the lights with nothing to say, being like, this will never happen again. I will not make this mistake again. Yeah. That was a it was a big lesson for us. We have not made that mistake since, and we have promoted like, we have we have dedicated so much time now into preproduction.
We're We're like, I think the next video or maybe it was the one after that. I think I wanna say we put twelve hours into just the intro of just, like, beating up this intro for a whole day of The next one was the the brand strategies video. Oh, well, that one was like a full day and a half. Which we filmed, like, two and a half weeks after this moment.
I remember that. And I had spent before
so we we rented an Airbnb,
a sick one that you chose, because the studio was like a a Bobo. Yeah. Studio was Bobo, but the next location was fucking sick. I remember I walked into that Airbnb. I wish we had that on camera because I was like, oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Like, it was so cool.
And
leading up to us being out there, I had probably
written put maybe, like,
five to eight hours into
the rough outline. Like, the overview,
not details. Right? Just an overview.
Because
we did not have that much time. Like Trevor said, I was really fucking busy. This is a point where, like, things started getting crazy, and so I didn't have enough time to be able to do this. But I put enough. I put, like, an evening and a Saturday morning into it. And then I think we went out on a I wanna say, like, a Wednesday night or something like that. Thursday morning,
we woke up, and what were we doing?
We wrote the whole video. I think we just rewrote it. Rewrote it. Yeah. That's actually a a trend. We have Big trend. We've like you've taken, like, the first stab at it, and then we sit down. From this moment on, I think we've done that with almost every video, which is like you do, like, a a rough draft at it, and then we have a full day or two of sitting down and actually writing the video together. Like, scrapping the original version, being like, that's dog shit. Cool. Now that's out of the way, we can actually write the video. Looking through our wrapping paper library, coming up with the packaging beforehand, like, lessons all learned, but, like, that's that's started now. Like, to my point earlier of, like, I'm still being onboarded, it's only month six now, I think, that we're now sitting down, and we write these videos together, and I'm seeing your process, and how you structure the videos, and how you like to flow, and the disclaimers you like to add in certain areas. Yep. All of those things now start to happen with this video. But we wrote that video in
it was like a long fourteen hour. Yeah. Fourteen hour day. In that Airbnb,
Uber Eats for meals so that we wouldn't take a moment away from riding.
Like,
yeah, plenty of Red Bulls. That's for sure. Like, that was but it was fun too. Like, we love those favorite days. Yeah. They're the best. But we did that.
Wrote it in fourteen hours on Thursday, and then Friday We filmed it. In fourteen hours, I would say, probably. Like, twelve to fourteen. That one was, like, eight hours of raw footage. I remember. Yeah. This is where my brain now starts to come back to me, like, this at this moment in time. But, yeah, that was, like, eight hours of raw footage.
Our second biggest video that we had done, I think the video ended up being three and a half hours. Yep.
Yeah. So eight hours down to three and a half hours. So we did that. We did the multiple scenes like we had done in the other videos.
And then we also made a workbook that went with that. So that was really cool. You made that workbook. The one that we did for the
personal brand course that we released in April,
I wrote that. And then Vin
Vin Calabrese,
an amazing designer,
gangster,
did that. And then for the brand strategies video, you did an amazing job of taking all the exercises that I walked through in the video and translating that into a workbook. Because, again, I I didn't have any time, but we knew that we wanted this was like you we're talking about zero to a 100 k, 100 k to a million, million to 10,000,000.
There was a lot of actionable shit, and so we wanted to give people the ability to actually take action. And so you did that whole thing. You created it and designed it. All of that. We put that out in August. No. No. That was released in September. Right? I think it was released the next month. Yep. But, yeah, that was, like, the first time I actually written, like Yeah. Something in your voice too. Yeah. That was like, it was your it was your words, but it was Oh, but those cover letters, like the intro letter, you wrote that. You 100% wrote that. I read it, maybe made a couple tweaks, but like, this is when I remember this was the first time because you had submitted some, like, LinkedIn posts before
and stuff. And they would get close, but I I never felt like it was, like, there. This was the first time where I read something that you had written for me. I was like, oh, shit.
That sounds like me. I'm good with that. So that was cool. Took six months, but that's that's what it like,
now you're note like, this is the moment where I'm starting to, like, come online, almost feel like. Like, you are getting busier. Oh, I know how to pick locations now, because I have fucked up picking a location. Yes. I know how to write, like, we've written a workbook, Now I can take this, and, like, I understand our workflow. I understand this is video number six.
I understand now a lot of these things, and I can actually dive in and get my hands dirty. Yeah.
And then
we're about to get to September, but the last thing that I thought was really cool in August was I
and we've been talking mainly about the content, but this was a cool thing with a client that I I figured I would share.
I went out to one of our clients and did a content workshop, and that was fucking awesome. That was so much fun. I think we kind of revamped the way that they went about making content,
helped improve some some efficiencies
around
their normal content flow, but also introduced a couple of really fun variations of how to make content and pair it with something that you really enjoy, an activity, a hobby, whatever. But then the other thing that we worked on, which I didn't expect going into it, but we actually rebuilt their editor onboarding plan. And what usually took two to three months to get an editor up to speed, now it takes them two to three weeks, which was incredible.
That was really fun.
And I remember on that trip, it was another moment where being away from home and being in another environment, I got a couple of really good points and ideas that we later end up talking about in the content. But, yeah, let's go into September because things start getting a little crazy. September,
Trevor got the greatest bicep workout of his entire fucking life. Talk about filming the career advice video in London. So this was similar to the if you struggle with video that we did a few months prior.
We, like, I think we enjoyed that so much, we decided to do another one. We're in London with a client. Yeah.
Doing doing some it's so fun. How can we get a video out of this trip? Like
like, could we do a vlog? Oh, we're with the client most of the time. Like, let's give them our full attention there. But we had a free day. To be clear, the free day It was one day. Was one day,
the day after we had done the flight from Vegas,
and we arrived to our hotel rooms
at 11PM.
And the next morning we're getting on a train
at 6AM.
And I don't fly internationally that often. So like jet lag was fucking real. It's crazy. You had the you had like a a nice seat too that you could sleep in. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you. I don't know. I literally was
shout out to KLM. You can actually a full six seven human can lay out completely flat. It was amazing. Crazy.
Yeah. We did that, and then we took a train into London because we were staying up north.
Then we took a that morning, we took a train ride.
The Birmingham.
Birmingham.
Yeah. Our horrible accents. Yeah. We took a train out to London, and our goal was we have one day to film this, we can't reshoot this, Not like the first video. We we were basically condensing what we did with the first video in three days, and we're like, let's do it in one day, because we've we're better at this now. And not even, like,
like, not like our normal, like, twelve to fourteen hour days. Like, we had, like, ten hours. We were finishing the last scene for that on the plane.
I wrote the shot list for that. I think one of the scenes Yeah. On the plane Yep. Going there. Because this is still at a time where, like, we, I think in recent months, have gotten much better at two months prior starting production,
pre production on a video. But right now, we're in the thick of it. We're still,
Kate's being like, Kate's brand new onto the team. We're in the thick of it right now.
So we're we're writing. We're still finishing videos the day before.
But we
did that in ten hours. We went to five different neighborhoods in London. We're filming
on the on the tube, in the tube. Yeah. We're filming Front Of Big Ben. Big Ben. Yep.
Piccadilly Square or Piccadilly Circus. Sorry. All those things. And,
I mean, we we learned a lesson. Same, like, this time we, like, we just went, like, gimbal or monopod, and we're just running around the city, setting up shots really quickly.
Audio was a very big
issue with that shoot that we had to reorder some some new mics.
But, yeah, that was an insane but we got a video out of it. To be clear, the lesson that we learned from it
was,
maybe next time don't try and jam
like a wild video to shoot with many different scenes
in one day
after you have a really long flight
in a city that Trevor had been to once and I had never been to? I think one of the only, like, things that made that possible was, like, three months prior, I was there. Yeah. So I knew roughly where we wanted to shoot. We got lucky. I was like, I know that we could shoot it here. I don't think we're gonna be able to like, in front of the palace is all get it off.
But, yeah, we shot that all in one day. It was a bit too much, but we got it done. I remember we ran out of time, so we had to film the last scenes at the train station. Yeah. And we were just you were falling asleep. I was shot. You were just it was gone. I was in
pain.
I was in pain. Trevor was physically ill. I was mentally ill. Like, it was it was wild. There's so many other things that people don't realize that you're managing in that. Like, you have,
you know, every once in a while, security coming up and being like, what are you doing here? Right? And then one of us has to navigate that conversation.
I'm trying to remember these lines and say them correctly.
And then half the time, the audio, the fucking mic that we were using, the and HollyLands are great, but not when you're out in the wild with a distance between you because
those were cutting out constantly. I mean, there were so many times where I'd be across the street, not that far across the street.
And I would deliver the line and Trevor be like,
run-in again. I was like, oh my god. I could see the frustration of the light. That sucks is like, that's not Trevor's fault. That's neither one of our faults. I remember it was so bad at one point, you were, like, considering trying to find a camera shop to buy a new lav,
like a new mic.
Yeah. That that was wild, but it was fun. We had a blast. I think the lesson though is we would probably spread that out over two days next time. We did learn our lesson of of preproduction. Yeah. From this, henceforward, we never had an issue with that, and we kept getting more and more like, this was finished the day before. We keep getting more and more in advance of the video Yeah. Actually finishing the video. That was that. But we got a video out of it. It it in this season,
you're still in this season, really. Hardcore. It's getting very
difficult to find three days to go out to Joshua Tree and film a giant six hour video.
How can we come up with what can we do to get content on the fly? Yeah.
Which brings us perfectly to October. Because in October, we started writing
the December video. This is the true moment where we started being two months ahead. Let's go. We wrote this together.
What what was the video? Let's let's start there. The December video was
what
basically how you went about creating the course. Right? Yeah. Like, why we did it for free and all of that. Mhmm. Yeah. And we wrote that together.
This is the one that you mentioned earlier.
This is the video that we spent twelve hours on the intro.
I actually think was the London video.
Editor, Max, you can leave that moment in, please. That was a great moment as a side note. Thank you, Max. That though, like, I remember we started dedicating I think we dedicated a couple days just to that one, and that one's a smaller video for us. Yeah. Yeah.
We reworked that intro quite a few times, probably not as much as twelve hours, but it we went into it knowing it was a shorter video, but we wanted it to be really tight.
And the other thing that we were trying to focus on is
having this be the video where I am the most myself.
Mhmm. Were there a couple of things that we did intentionally to try and
make that possible for me? It's it's interesting now. I think that we're getting so in the flow of things that, like, a big thing that we,
I think, wanted to start showcasing is
this, like, this silly personality that you have.
I think when we're filming direct to camera videos, I think it's harder to to, like, to get a sense of who this person is, and I think everybody who's watching YouTube videos right now is like, yes, I can agree. This person sounds like a robot. Like, how do we inject more personality into our videos and start like,
you wanna enjoy the videos that you make, and you wanna show those sides of you. And it like, we talk about
seventy, twenty five, five. 70%
deep content, 25%
knee or niche wide content, and then 5% personal content. Yep. It's kind of the rough ratio that we like to do, especially in the first year or two
with our clients, and that's what we did. But the 5%
injecting that into
your content, that doesn't need to be it can be. Right? Like, I mean, Kendall Jenner makes probably 70 to 95%
personal content. But, like, it can be a carousel on Instagram that you like, here's my Harleys, and you've done that too. And we've we're starting to get more intentional about that stuff, or a little selfie video that you just toss-up. But also, that 5% can be injected into the content itself of, like, how can we make how can we show off Caleb's silly side while delivering this this this deep educational video?
We ordered, like,
a green wasn't it a green bathrobe? We didn't you didn't you didn't wear that for the video. Wear that ad. For Yeah. You wore that for the The ad for the lead magnet with it. Yep. Yep. You you wore that. You you got a, like, a Bob Ross mug. Yep. We set up, like, a cozy by the fireplace. We actually rented out a spot in Big Bear, California,
and we Cabin vibes. Yeah. We got this cabin vibe, fireplace. I'm having to stop every twenty minutes and stoke the fire, which is something I've never thought I'd need to do in Dog slippers?
You had the yep. We ordered you dog slippers so that, like, I don't know if I saw a comment on the dog slipper. Yeah. Shockingly, I don't think I've seen anybody call that out, which is wild. You can't resist. Texted me about it, but Your not feet are up. Maybe that maybe that's it. But,
yeah, it's injecting like, at this point, we have a cadence, we have a flow. Now it's like talking about iterations, we wanna start injecting more of that 5% throughout our content. And
that's where I think that was the first video we did it on, really. And it was an environment where I felt like
because of the almost coziness, I guess, of the environment, like, I could bring out the silly little isms. Right? Like, my my more gregarious side,
the the way that I'll say something and then comment on what I just said. And I think we've
we've left that out in some of the the content leading up to this moment, and some of it is I don't I haven't brought that out as much in the filming. It's not even that we've cut it out. It's just that I've been more in, I guess, teacher Caleb mode. And I remember oh, this is actually a really great point. I forgot about this. I remember telling you there was one person in particular
that I was making that video for because I was trying to convince her, I want her to do this in 2026 on her YouTube channel. And I was focused on her.
And I remember telling you, I want the vibe to feel like we'll see if I can accomplish it. But my goal is to feel like more like I'm sitting down for a nice warm cup of tea by the fireplace talking to her about
why I did it, the success that we've had with it, and how I think she could make it even better than mine.
And
I think having that frame
really helped. And it's something that I wanna
try to do with every video, which is determine
what is the the vibe really that I want.
How do I want the viewer to feel? Do I want them to feel like they're in a classroom? Like, the course, right, in this January series that we're releasing right now, like, that I want it to feel more like a classroom. I do want it to feel very much like,
this might be a little self aggrandizing, but like professor Caleb vibes. Right? But then that video, that December video, the one where I'm sitting by the fire,
I wanted it to feel like we're just sitting down and having a conversation.
And if you and I'm not saying that anybody needs to do this, but if you were to go watch it, I never say you guys. I don't generalize to the audience.
I don't generalize to everybody watching.
I talk to you specifically. I always say you.
You're probably thinking this. Like, I really was intentional with that language.
And every time that I would say
you guys or speak to the
group, I would stop myself and resay the line so that I was speaking to the individual person. And I you know, that's very
specific and granular,
but I think it's really useful for people. If you can pick somebody in your life that you know that needs this information
and you picture like you're sitting down to give it to them, it's amazing. The other thing and then I think we move on. But the other thing is
going back to some of the other videos that I've made, I do pick somebody that I'm making the video for. It hasn't been for the same reason. Right? But in the course, for example, a really good friend of mine that I I love and adore, Dustin, he was starting a new role. And so it was like, okay. Cool.
I am making this for Dustin because I think some of this information is gonna be really crucial for him, and he's gonna want this. Right? And so when I was fucking exhausted
and felt like blood was coming out of my eyeballs
and my throat was going to dry up from talking more in a single day than I probably did in the entire year leading up to that moment.
I just kept thinking this is for Dustin because I am not internally motivated. I am motivated for others.
And so by making it for somebody else,
that caused me to push through those tougher moments where I just wanted to say, Trevor, let's fucking call it a day. Having somebody in mind when you're making this video
is crucial to, like, how it's crucial into the language that you're using in that And I remember when we were filming that video in December, this was the first time I saw you very intentional about the use of like, you guys versus you.
The audience versus you. Again, on those iterations, you were also like, the camera's inverted. So you're also like, when you when you go from like, left to right, you actually have to go right to left. Right? Yeah. And that is another thing that you're picking up on, and you like
Shout out to Taki Moore. He texted me about that. All these little micro iterations.
It's just it it just keeps Ginormous.
Yeah. Yeah. That is a really good takeaway from the entire podcast is that is the meta theme of our year was
iteration. I don't think I realized it till till right now. Yeah. What a cool what a cool thing. So now we're moving to November.
And
outside of the content, this is when I roped Trevor really October and November is when I started roping Trevor into some cool projects that we're working on that are releasing year on this really cool offer that we're building that I think is fucking insane that him and I are putting an insane amount of of time, effort, and brainpower into.
And I started having you work on that. And so this is like a moment where, and I'll speak for Trevor here, where he's now having to navigate a wildly new skill,
which is how do I do the stuff that I know how to do and do all the time?
But then also a big portion of my time is starting to be like client delivery or this new exciting offer that we're building at Ralston. Right? And it's like, the interesting thing is
two points
for November.
We start writing
this series that's coming out right now. That's the two videos that have been released right before this one and
the video that comes out after this one. We started writing that. Right?
And in writing that,
knowing all the work that you were going to be doing in q one, the first quarter of the year
on this exciting project and this amazing offer we're putting together, we knew you didn't have the time to edit the January series because at this point, spoiler, not really a spoiler,
we have only released one video a month for the first ten months of making content.
And January 2026, we decided to release four videos.
We didn't have really probably capacity for that regardless of them working on this special project. Now that you're working on it, it was impossible.
So what did we do? Yeah. But I so the last, like, four months of 2025
have been, like, I'm progressively
hopping into more and more on the client side. I'm trying to, like I'm doing
I'm involved a lot more in preproduction, production. I'm doing the production, the postproduction, all these different things.
And we're realizing
as of, like,
I'm like, I'm jumping into this like, I think the month prior, I was like, helping redesign the website for this offer that we're like coming like, my brain is being pulled in so many directions.
And the first thing of like, when we talk about hiring, right, hiring off constraints,
or off of bottlenecks, like the first thing that we started, and this was a conversation long time in the making, but finally in November, I think we kinda turned to each other and it was It's like the last straw.
It's like, honestly,
there's no way, unless I get no sleep,
that we're gonna be able to go more than one video a month at my capacity with all the different things that I'm doing. We zoomed out for a second. We're not focusing on short form this year, and that's a great decision that we made pretty early on. Yep. After learning our lesson and trying to go more consistent on shorts, it was like, we're gonna be our primary focus is on YouTube this year Yep. Until we get some help. The help came in November.
We decided the most amount of my time
was going to editing these long forms. Right? We've now had to hire at this point a couple different contractors to help with motion design, because I just don't have time.
Because the next week, we're flying to London, and we have to go shoot this video that, like, there's no time for
this stuff. And so that's the biggest constraint that we had at that moment. And so we knew that we needed to hire an editor. So we did editor tryouts actually for, like, finding an editor. We
I think it was like, in two weeks,
we put all the footage together, we prepped everything, and we got like this funnel ready. You went on Instagram, you announced it, and you're like, hey, we are looking for an editor. Our kind of process for that,
which we've which I've seen you do in the past, this is the first time I got to lead it Yeah.
Was this editor tryouts.
In Rawls and Slack, like I mentioned, we actually have a playbook that walks through all of this that you can get, but I'll give you a high level overview. Basically, you use your own socials if you have a decent following to be able to attract editors.
And what you want is you want all of these editors to edit the same footage so that you can see who fits what you are wanting to do the best.
But you should promote this in multiple places. So not only did we promote this through social, we also did a job posting on ytjobs.co,
which
I talk about quite a bit to people. And, you know, to be fair, there's a lot of different characters on ytjobs.com,
and that's something I know they're working on refining and and and helping to make sure it's really clear who the best are and and who, you know, maybe the the early individuals in their career are.
But we promoted it over there as well. And we got incredible candidates through socials, but also some incredible candidates,
including the one that we ended up bringing on as a contractor, Max, through ytjobs.co.
Hundreds. There was, like, a few 100 people we went through. A lot. Shout out to Trevor for going through all of that.
But the point being is that a question I get a lot of times is, like, how do I go about finding these people? And I think you need to start
going where they are living.
And a lot of people go to ytjobs.co.
I'm not sponsored or affiliated with them in any way. I get no money for this. I'm just trying to help y'all out. That is a place where a lot of creatives go to find gigs. And so we also decided to post on there. It was a moment where I was like,
lacking ego. Right? It was like, no. We might not find exactly what we're looking for in the right scenario through just my socials. Even though I have a ton of creatives that follow me. Right? Now we got a fuckload of really good individuals that were awesome and amazing,
but something about Max just kinda stood out. His editing style was incredible. We loved it. Blah blah blah blah blah. Max, you're incredible. You're awesome. We love you. He's editing this video right now. That was amazing. And we did that
ahead of time preparing because as we were writing the series,
it just started to morph into more and became bigger and bigger. Basically, the original idea was like a twenty minute video, a twenty minute video, an hour long podcast, and we combine those two things into roughly an hour and a half to two hour long video.
And as we started writing this, it just grew and grew into a much bigger project. I rewrote it three times. And then on the fourth rewrite, we did it together, and that's where it got crystallized and dialed. This was the first time
where
I started seeing
comments,
but also messages from people. Not a lot. It wasn't like high volume. I mean, there was probably, like, four or five. And most of the time, I ignore
if it's just and I want everyone to hear this correctly. If it's just the audience giving feedback and they're not proven customers,
I try not to take too much direction from that. I try to take more direction from customers
than just viewers. Right? I love viewers,
and you are wildly important,
but I'm trying to build a business here too. And so I optimize my content around what the customers need or want more of.
But this was a moment where I saw some feedback from the audience that was saying, hey.
You're using the same examples over and over. It's it's a lot of the same stuff.
And that is kind of my point. Right? Like, I really believe that you should consistently say the same shit over and over in different ways. I believe that's how you build a strong brand is consistently pairing yourself with those concepts. Then you get known as being somebody who delivers those concepts and solves those problems.
But I also knew that I could come up with different examples,
and I had a couple other frameworks in my back pocket that I had not shared, that I had been maybe working on, mulling over, whatever. And so this was the first series where we took that feedback,
and I was like, my goal is to have
at least 60 to 70% of this be brand new shit that I've never shared. And so that was another cool thing and another fun exercise for us, which was like, okay. I've given the Nike and Michael Jordan example a million times. What's another way that I can illustrate this that not only might help sell the point to people who have heard the Michael Jordan analogy,
but also will connect with different people that don't give a fuck about sports. Right? And so we use the Apple and Johnny Ives example, and I'm not gonna explain it here. You gotta watch the video if you haven't to to get it. But we we tried new shit, and it was the first time where I I felt like I really pushed myself to
I had come up with new concepts for other videos. That's for sure. But share things that I've said before in a new light. And something that I think we'll probably talk about a lot more in future videos this year is, like, how do you continue to solve the same problems over and over in new and interesting ways with variety? It's actually something we were talking with one of our clients about literally this morning. What happened in December?
It looks like we hired Max and onboarded him. Let let's talk through that. We'll we'll hit on filming the January series, but I think the most important thing in January or in December, sorry, is how you onboarded
Max.
Like,
even he called it out. Right? And I'm trying to give you as much permission to toot your own horn here because Trevor did an incredible job. But please, like, let let's walk through how you did that. I think that's the most valuable thing that we could share from December. Yeah.
First and foremost, when you I mean, anyone who has started in a role knows the pain points and knows the, like and
Max is is a contractor right now, but I still consider, like, anybody who we're bringing into our team to work on something, like, I consider them in a way a part of the team. And
so I want to treat them as as though they are part of the team, as though they are, like, at any in any point. We don't view them as just a contractor. Yeah. Yeah. But we shout out how many times have we mentioned Michael this entire video? Mars,
who who edited
the three stages video. And did a phenomenal fucking job on it.
So
we brought him in. Mars is also linked down below as well. Every person that we bring in, I like to make it as clear as, like so I have an onboarding call with him where I'm going through we had the videos filmed. It this was a really unique situation. The reason we were in, like, a two week crunch to hire this person is because right as I gave him and sent him the contract
is
is when I'm like, the next day, hey, the footage is uploaded for you on a drive.
It is neatly organized for you.
Here is a sheet of What does neatly organized mean? I'm separating all this stuff into A CAM, B CAM, C CAM, at times, sometimes. I don't know if I did it for this, but I'm labeling all these things. I'm also creating a Google Doc,
Pointing out all, like, there was an audio issue towards the end. The camera lost or C cam lost focus for twenty minutes, and I actually couldn't I couldn't get to it, because it was on the other side of the room.
All of these things,
I'm noting. I'm noting, like, we filmed ads here, and the ads are going to be in this, this, and this, and this is how we want it. Like, same thing with that frame folder that I mentioned at the very beginning, I did that here too.
Which was the first thing I told him to do was like, hey, don't bother jumping into this, like, this is your first video with us, by the way. Absolutely nailed it, and like,
absolutely nailed the style of these videos in one version. But I was like, give us get us an a roll cut first. Don't worry about cutting shit out unless you feel like it's really not valuable.
Give us this a roll cut, and that's the first thing that we're gonna work on.
I will give you notes from there, and I will actually, like, I will guide you through the project from there.
You have all of these resources. I have a neatly organized Google Drive folder of all the Mogurts that actually, Mars, I think, gave us a bunch of Yeah. Mogurts for Shout out Mars. The passion. Jewels.
Yeah.
I have those in a folder. I have our branding, colors,
guidelines,
brand style guide, everything in a folder. Anything that this person like, zoom out when you're onboarding somebody like this, like, what are the things that they're going to ask for? And provide it for them upfront. And it sounds simple,
but I remember Max yeah. Max is like, oh, thank you. Like, it it's ready to go. Like, I'm ready to hit the ground running. If you want a six like, and then I have a two hour call with him walking through all these things, and I'm like, if you need me, here's this. We set you up with a Slack channel, and I'm going to be as fast as I can at responding to you. All these things just help even in a contract scenario, but especially with a with a natural hire, this is how you do it. Like, you give them all the resources, you give them all the materials, and you give them a lot of your time at the beginning as well. Even though the goal is to save me time with this project, and it did, I'm still dedicating a lot of time to doing this a roll cut, to organizing this folder, to doing all those things.
But it just set them up with like, yeah, here's here's how we roll. And I mentioned
this before, but the trust factor still plays into even the contractors that we hire. Right? Like, twenty minute of our call was, here's exactly how you're gonna see notes from me. I'm never gonna demand. I'm always gonna ask. I'm always going to trust you first, and I'm always going to, like, please and if I give you a note, I'm going to give you a reason for why I'm giving you that note. This is extremely important when you onboard editors,
designers, anyone.
The thing that you do with your feedback is you provide feedback, and then you provide the reason why you are giving that feedback. Oh, huge. When I was hiring this editor, all of the people in the interviews asked me, like, what is the number one thing you're looking for? And I'm like, communication.
Somebody who knows how to communicate, somebody who, like, I can give feedback to, and they jump on it immediately and understand it. And how does somebody understand something? It's explained to them. It's shown to them. It's like, yeah. So every note and this is I'm explaining this to to Max. I'm going through.
I am, like,
I'm going to explain every single note why I'm doing this, if we should do this in the future or not. That is the playbook.
100 fucking percent.
It's actually a playbook that, again, I'm sounding now like I'm pushing it, but that is a playbook that we offer in Ralston Select.
Like,
that is how you do it. So you can either do that or just literally list out, scratch down everything that you just said because you just gave it all away right there. There is two other things that I wanted to briefly call out for December.
One is we
filmed the January series. We went out to an Airbnb
and sprinted through that. Again, it was another, like, gnarly twelve, fourteen hour day. That was fun. That was awesome. But it's also exhausting. Right? Like, I don't wanna pretend here. Like,
they're very fun, and it's some of my favorite days. That that's like some of my favorite memories, but it's also exhausting. So we did that. That was awesome. That was really fun.
Side note, we rented an Airbnb that had more windows
than there are Starbucks locations in Downtown Seattle.
It was absurd.
And we had a couple reflectors and flags or whatever, but, like, we didn't have that much to cover it. But we went to Walmart and bought just a bunch of black sheets,
like king-size
bedsheets.
And
probably to the neighbors looked like we were cooking something illegal.
Won't mention what that is, but
it looked a lot like some of the homes in the area where I grew up. But anyways, out in the country,
we covered all of those windows
with
blankets. And then we took moving boxes that we grabbed from Home Depot, cut them up, and shoved them into the skylights to cover the skylights. Here's the here's the front door. Keeping the zombies out is what we're doing. Yeah. It was it was a very interesting setup. Very,
very scrappy working with what we have,
but we made it happen. And I I think that's another, like, big thing that I would encourage everybody is
I'd say very few times
has everything gone according to plan when we show up at an Airbnb, an uncontrolled location, all of these things. Right? Shifting light,
a terrifying spider in the the couch.
Yeah. That was I think you have the video of that. Yeah. Getting attacked by a ram? Yeah. We didn't get attacked by a ram. But almost got attacked. I mean, we got intimidated
by a mountain goat that was fucking freaky.
But, yeah, I I think the the big thing for us has been adaptability.
We've done a really good job of,
you know, maybe getting frustrated for a second and be like, fuck. This light is impossible to work with. And then be like, well, we could go get sheets and cover it. And is it gonna completely cover the light? No. But it gives us
95
control, and that's what we need.
What's really interesting on that point, just real quick, I'll hit it, is
it's the the stepping stones to that of, like, we have now started controlling the light in our locations
for film sessions.
We didn't care about that, nor did we have the means or the time or the headspace to think about that when we filmed the course. When we filmed the course, actually, the light changes throughout the entire course. I don't know if people notice it or not, but like,
sun up to sundown in that warehouse still had windows and like Those windows were like 20 feet high. In in LA, sunny LA, like, I don't know if it was sunny, but
this, like,
we don't don't try and bite off more than you can chew is I think a great lesson here of like, we're only doing that. We're only starting to control light in our setups like we had, like, here we have blinds actually, which is really nice. But
we're only now starting to shift and buying another light to light some other spaces, and we're starting to get little
batteries for the cameras so that we don't have to actually plug, like, all these things.
I think it just goes back. I've you're I'm gonna sound like a broken record here, that iteration, but, like, don't try and bite off more than you can chew in the beginning, and start stair stepping. Like, you'll see
even what we did for our first or second video was probably too much for somebody who's just starting out to actually handle Yes. In their fur like, the three camera setup is ridiculous.
Yeah. Like, let's be very clear here. When we started this,
it was my first time making a video for me, but I had been doing this for sixteen years when we started this. Right? You had been doing it for, what, like, six or seven years? Yeah. Yeah. We all come from production backgrounds. Yeah. We we definitely
had a little bit of an upper hand on that than your average bear. And even us,
we selected what we would focus on knowing that down the road, we'll improve that. But right now, that's not what is necessary.
It's it's choosing the things in the beginning that have the what is gonna get you the biggest bang for your buck? I actually we were just talking about this before this podcast.
One of the things I was talking to somebody the other day, they were asking for advice
on this editing workflow,
because they're like, it's taking me a really long time here.
And, like, they these
I'm really having a tough time, like, going through and picking music or picking LUTs or whatever it is. Like,
I
this is something you could do both for editing production workflows, but also just your content in general, feel like, is a priority list when you're attacking projects and content
is
in order of priority
I actually asked this person the other day, I was like, okay, so when you're tackling an edit, what's the biggest
what will move the needle the furthest for this educational
video and,
specifically?
They're like, well, it's the it's the cut, it's all the content in it, and like, choosing
like, how the video flows and the structure of the video. And I was like, amazing.
That's our first priority.
If we get nothing else done in this video, because we are all strained for time and all strained on resources,
like, that is huge. I was like, what's the next thing? Well, the next thing's probably it's like, honestly, it's not motion graphics, it's actually audio. Like, audio is actually a huge part, and I was like, I I completely agree. I don't know if I'm missing something, but like, I agree. So that's like and you can do that with content in general. You can do that with your workflows,
and I think you can do that with your brand. Like, what are the things that move the needle the furthest?
And, like, attack those first. That's what we did with the course is we're prioritizing. We hired somebody for the motion graphics too. Yeah. But the first thing we're prioritizing is, like,
we preproduction. That's actually, that's before the editing. That's preproduction is the is on top of the checklist and what is pre like, the packaging,
the idea, the concept, the structure of the video. All those things get attacked beforehand. So, like,
I don't know if I'm going on a tangent here, but, basically, I think it that huge thing of just that priority list
helps with shit like this. Mess. Helps with, like the controlling the lights, to be honest, is at near the bottom of that list for educational content. I don't know if it changes for any other type of content, but for educational content in particular, it's like,
no. There are 10 to 20 to 30 things above that that I would actually focus on before you tackle, like, okay, in this shoot,
now we should get batteries for the cameras that attach to the tripod in a really fancy way. But that's just that priority list is so key and so crucial. I completely agree.
Well, it's fun. I feel like we've gone into
a lot of granular detail, maybe so much that maybe we bored Bugsy to sleep here. He's finally sleeping.
He's been so active during the whole thing. And then now that we're nearing the end, he's just, like,
just chilling over there. We wanted to very briefly talk about what we're focusing on in 2026,
and there's gonna be a ton. And I'm sure what we share will change within three days. But as of right now,
what is kind of your area that you're focusing on for 2026 with our content specifically?
We spent the first year being very intentional.
Maybe we didn't know what we were doing at first, but we got very intentional very quickly in
iterating so quickly on that. Like, we've been very intentional over this past year building the foundation, building the sustainability aspect, how you're gonna stick with this Yeah.
How I'm gonna wanna stick with this. Yeah. 100 Finding
the holes in everything, finding out
where we're best at, where we need to improve,
getting this cadence down, getting these workflows down, getting organized, getting set up, bringing on an editor for our first constraint. Like, we've spent the first year being very intentional
with building the foundation, I'd say, of your personal brand. And I think
next year, especially,
it's now I mean, everybody talks about scaling. Like, I think it's not not necessarily scaling that. I think that the the media team will stay very lean even into next year. Mhmm. But next year,
I want to like, we're we have the goal of doubling
the amount of YouTube videos
at the same, quote, unquote, quality,
for lack of a better term there,
Going into next year, so we're gonna double that output. Doubling that output, and I now am going to have more time and attention to focus onto another primary platform, because we have support now going into Instagram and short form content. Like we've been repurposing. That's been our strategy, and it's not something that you wanna do. But like, like I've been making podcast clips for you here and there. We've been making some
promo pieces for our YouTube videos and stuff like that, but now it's time to get serious, and now it's like, okay. I actually cut my teeth on short form content for years and years. Now my brain is starting to open up and to be able to do that.
So that's my biggest focus is turning
the the eye of Sauron, as you like to call it, to another platform.
Getting that up and running, cutting my teeth again and getting getting a lot sharper in that area,
while still maintaining and actually doubling our output in other areas.
So that's that's been huge. It's a big one. I mean, that that that is no simple task. Right? That that's a lofty goal, but I think we
we did a really good job at the end of December of sitting down and planning out our year and what it'll look like and
and saying, okay. If this is our goal, these things have to be true. How do we make these things true? Well, one of them is we need preproduction time.
Well, then we should probably plan that on the calendar
in December for all of 2026. And, of course, it'll ebb and flow. It'll shift. We'll have to move things around. Things will come up, but it gives us a plan to operate off of that we can then break. If you have no plan, there's nothing to break other than yourself. Right? And so it's like, I love breaking the plan, but you gotta have the plan in order to break it. It's like breaking the rules is great, but you can't I remember Ruben Evans, my director when I worked at
Logos,
the software company. I remember him telling me, he goes,
great editors break
the rules all the time,
but they're only capable of breaking the rules because they know the rules.
And I think it's very similar with having a plan. You're always gonna need to be able to break a plan and change a plan,
but you can only change or break something if it exists.
And so us carving out the time at the end of December to do that and plan that out, I think, was huge. I think a big one that I wanna focus on that I wrote here, I'm reading it real quick. There's two things. One,
I think I've just scratched the surface of my ability to take problems that customers bring us, our solutions, and then create frameworks for the audience to be able to utilize in their content. I'm just scratching the surface of that. I have a lot more than I can do. I can get a lot better at that. And so that's something that I'm gonna be pushing myself on. If you look at my calendar, which none of you can because that would be crazy. But if you saw my calendar, you'd see a huge portion of my time this year is dedicated towards writing. I I've I've put, you know, probably
if you were to add it all up, there's probably three
entire weeks, maybe even four entire weeks out of the whole year just for writing,
which I think is really cool. So that's first thing. And the second thing is what we started to what we were talking about for the December video. I wanna bring more of who I am as a person, my silly isms, my quirks, the things that are going to
make the way that I communicate attractive to some people and turn off a bunch of other people, and that's okay.
I just want to be unbelievably
me. I think for two reasons, and this is how I wanna end this. The two reasons why I want to be unbelievably me in the content.
One,
AI content
is
very much
prevalent
and at scale.
And the only way in my opinion to stand out is to be human as fuck. I was texting a buddy of mine the other day. I think that would be such a cool brand as a side note to build human as fuck. I don't have the time. It would be a distraction. If anybody wants to take it, do it. But I think that is the way to stand out amidst the ever growing amount of AI slop. And depending on when you're watching this, it's only getting worse and worse and worse. The beginning of this year,
there wasn't that much of that shit on my feed. I rarely saw that. I didn't see the panda, you know, vlogging like I saw midway through the year.
It has gotten fucking crazy. So being unbelievably human is a great way to stand out. And two, to the point that we've hit on, probably second most to
iterating in this podcast is sustainability.
It's really hard to be a caricature of who you are. It's really hard to pretend to be somebody that you think your audience wants.
And if you are one of those unique characters that can keep that up for a long time, well, here's another motivation for you. The moment that you meet somebody who watches you online in real life and you are not that way, boom. Game over. You have ruined trust with that person.
And if that happens enough,
your personal brand starts changing, and the way that it is interpreted changes. So the more that you are who you actually are, not who you think your audience wants,
I think the longer you'll stick with it and the more you will actually stand out. That was great. That was great. This was fun. Thanks for doing this. Super fun. You killed it. Oh, you killed it. This was great. And that is what we do after every fucking film session as another note. There's another piece of value for you guys. The moment that you get done with filming, somebody on your team should fucking come up and dap you up and say, great job.
With that,
I think the next video that people should watch is gonna be somewhere right here in the middle. They should click on this somewhere right here. You'll get a lot of value from it. Hopefully, if you got value from this, we would love to know what your favorite moment was. Because let's be real. There's not a lot of you here, and so we're not getting that much traction off of sending you to another video. So the more interesting thing is actually if you can comment with either your number one question because we said all this shit and revealed a bigger question that you have or the number one point that you took from this. I'm looking forward to all three of these comments. Appreciate you all. You're the best. Peace.
Holy fucking
shit. We just built the foundation
for your entire personal brand. We got your brand positioning down. We've got your content strategy down.
Absolutely insane. You have your personal brand operating system.
You figured out your brand journey framework. Right? We figured out what is our end goal and does making content and building a public personal brand help me accomplish that or not. We figured out your brand positioning.
We built out your credibility
bank or if you're the student, we did your interest bank. We helped figure out how we're gonna avoid burning out. This is such a common thing for creators and we're figuring out how to avoid that. We figured out identifying
the pain that your customer is feeling and how you can integrate that into both your brand and the content that you make. We identified your contrarian belief. This is how you're gonna stand out. We figured out what your desired associations are going to be. We wrote your brand statement so that you can clearly communicate what your personal brand stands for, what it's about, and why you're different than your competitors. We then moved into content and we talked about the trust first strategy, optimizing for trust over virality.
We talked about building a sustainable system.
This doesn't matter if you quit after six months. You need something that you're gonna actually stick with. Then we figured out how the fuck do we come up with ideas? This is such a common problem that people have is like, how do I know what to make? Well, we figured out how you can come up with your content ideas.
We also worked on your delivery. Okay? This is a form. This is one of the three levers on how you can stand out. We figured out what you can do in your delivery
and lean into who you are as a human, not build some caricature
that you see online. We also talked about your wrapping paper. How you're gonna wrap this beautiful gift called your content that you give to your audience. We also went through how to repurpose your content. Right? Like, not only how to make the primary pillar platform content,
but we also use the waterfall method on how to get more out of what we're already doing. We also, and this I've never done before, but we actually went through what your first three videos can be
in building and amplifying your personal brand online.
Whew. That was a lot, but I am so proud of you for getting to this point. I know this is a lot of work. There's a lot of like self reflection,
a lot of pushing yourself,
a lot of asking uncomfy questions sometimes.
And so I just wanna say I'm very proud of you for getting to this point. I'm very excited to hear
the results that you get from taking action on what we shared in here. One thing I want to really quick remind you on. If you watch this and you're at this point now and you haven't been filling in that workbook, what the fuck are we doing here? This is what drives me nuts. Okay?
I'm not here trying to make entertainment content.
I'm not that entertaining. I'm little silly and wacky and fun, but I'm not that entertaining.
I'm here to change what you do. That is my goal here. So please, if you watch this all the way through and did not fill out the workbook,
start over, download that workbook. The link is in the description below. I've said it a million times already, so you already know. Get the workbook and go through the course and actually go through the exercises.
This is going to make all this time you invested into consuming this worth it for you. If you're still watching at this point, you probably want some more content to watch, more actions to take, and more information to digest. Click this video to watch it. It's the three stages of your personal brand. We go from zero to a 100 k, 100 k to a million, and a million to 10,000,000. Enjoy.