Well, right now I'm making six figures a month in profit. Your total following is around one point three million. I went from zero to three hundred thousand total followers in like the first six to eight months.
Walk me through the process of how you're putting content out right now. Everything is art and science. If you were to approach organic content like a scientist, what would that look like?
The content workflow for short form is idea, research, script, record, edit, post. So at every stage, how can you use data to de-risk your failure? You did not set out to become a YouTuber.
You set out to create a distribution engine that you own. I wanted to figure out how to build a machine that could print a million dollars a month in net profit. Welcome back to the Creator Spotlight podcast.
My name is Francis Zira, and today we're speaking with Calloway, a creator and entrepreneur whose specialization is in helping other creators produce high-performing video.
He recently released an app called Sandcastles that helps other creators research what types of videos are performing well in their niche. Pretty interesting app. I had a good conversation with him.
I think you'll enjoy it.
What I understand, you make money in three broad ways right now, which are your creator income, which is mainly brand partnerships, your academy product, and then your short form video research tool, Sandcastles.
That's the three buckets? Exactly. Yep. Cool. And I can kinda break down-- You want me to break down like the logic behind it? Y-yeah, please go ahead. Yeah.
So basically, when I first started out making content, I knew I didn't wanna be like a famous influencer. That was never the goal, right?
So I, I often say, like, the only reason I started making content is because I knew that attention is the new oil, and my cars need gas, right? I said that to you before. You did. [laughs] That's a good one.
And my cars, cars being businesses, right? So, like, I had to learn how to make content, and I knew that if you make content in a high-value niche, eventually there is brand deal money there.
To what degree varies depending on the niche, the type of content, long versus short. But ultimately, like I wanted to funnel that traffic to offers because that gives you a lot more leverage, and you can scale uncapped.
So my whole vision was learn how to make content, build an audience, figure out what that audience wants, build an offer around that audience. So I started down this like tech path. I picked tech for two reasons.
One, I was interested in tech. Two, I knew the brand deals would be as lucrative as possible. So I knew that would be like cash flow to fund other things.
And a-as I started going down that route and getting brand deals, I quickly realized I couldn't build a product or service for that audience. And we can talk about like how I came to that conclusion, but- Mm-hmm....
this is a very common creator trap, which is you build an audience towards, towards an area you're interested in, but you don't really want to play in forever.
And you can't figure out how to build a product or service for that audience because the audience is super fragmented. Mm-hmm.
Uh, like they, they, they encompass a lot of different domains, demographics, and so you realize, shoot, I'm kind of stuck on this media treadmill where I can monetize fine for brand deals and affiliates, but I really can't build my own products and offers.
So I realized that. So I had to start from scratch and think, okay, where would the highest value audience be? That's typically business owners. Mm.
And then what do I have from a skill perspective that I can package and monetize in a product or service that a business owner would buy?
So I started down that road, and that's ultimately w-where we got to software is, is what I want, the kinda the business model and the, the kind of skill set that we could package.
So then I worked backwards from there to build a new audience. Yeah. But just to like kind of make it crystal clear, yeah, I've got three buckets: media,
info we'll say, which is like this membership slash, uh, curriculum model, and then software. Let's, let's talk about the numbers though. So you don't have to tell me precisely how much money you make.
Um, I know you used to do a bit of that in your blueprint newsletter. Maybe, maybe you still wanna get into it. Maybe you don't. Um, but between Sandcastles Academy, the creator stuff,
y-I would love to hear how much money you think you're gonna make this year.
But if you don't wanna say that, you can tell me maybe like the comparable, how it compares to your previous salary when you were working in consulting. Yeah. So right now I'm making six figures a month in profit.
We can, we can leave the, uh, degree of to which that is [chuckles] open a bit in terms of how, how big or small on the six figures. We'll, we'll leave that. It's, it's a bit fluid. Mm-hmm. Um, it's probably
in the five to ten X range of my previous salary is where- Mm.... I'll end up this year. Um, and I was a management consultant. So
the goal, uh, kind of like to set the stage, the game I set for myself was, could I figure out how to build a machine that could print a million dollars a month in net profit, right?
So I was saying like ten million a year, but we'll say twelve for legit math. And so as I started down the journey, right? 'Cause you have all the puzzle piece options in front of you.
You can play any game you want in any way. I was just like, all right, let's start at the end. What's the objective? A million a month in net profit, and let's work backwards. And I, I wanted to give myself...
I'll play the game forever, like the whole, the whole point is a forever game, but I wanted to give myself ten years.
So basically like in year ten, could I build a machine that would print a million dollars a month net profit for me? That was where I kind of started. Mm-hmm.
And so when I-- The reason I say that is 'cause when you think in terms of salary, it's like not even-- It's, it's, it's almost like not even comparable, right? Yeah. It's apples to oranges. You're a business owner.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm in year-- I'm just, I just started year three of this path. So I wrote this down last night. So as we record, your total following is around one point three million.
You've got forty k on one dormant YouTube channel, two hundred and eighty-eight thousand on your main channel, three hundred and ninety-four thousand on TikTok, three hundred and ninety-eight thousand on your primary Instagram, a hundred and eleven thousand on your separate tech Instagram, twenty-nine thousand on LinkedIn, a measly ten thousand on Twitter- [chuckles] Yeah, Twitter...
undisclosed amount across, uh, your two newsletters, one of which is dormant. Yeah. Um, so that's a lot. Tell me a little bit about your channel mix and how these work together for you. Yeah, yeah.
So to give, to give the arc, I started with tech short form.Tech because I wanted the brand deals, and I was interested in it. Short form because I could learn the fastest. Okay, cool. That was like pod number one. Yeah.
So I had like Instagram tech and TikTok. Brand deals started coming in and after five or six months or whatever.
I kinda-- I think I went from zero to three hundred thousand total followers across those two, mostly TikTok, in like the first six to eight months. And again, it was easier then because there were so few people. Yeah.
So if you just hammered volume, you could grow faster. So that's what I started with. Then I tried to do tech YouTube, but YouTube was super hard. The, a lot of it was editing, which I didn't wanna do.
I didn't understand thumbnails. I didn't understand the packaging. So I was just like bad at YouTube. So I had short form working, but like long form tech was not working, so I kind of just like abandoned that.
I had like a rogue interview with Zuck, uh- [chuckles]... that I put on the channel, which like grew a lot of it. And Daniel Ek as well, right? Yeah, and Daniel Ek.
So like that was my, my two-episode interview, uh, era was those two. [laughs] So like I had that, right? But then to the point before, I wanted to build proper businesses. Mm.
And when I looked at the landscape, I was like, "Oh, shoot, I'm kind of capped with respect to what I can do with this tech audience." Mm. So the way I look at it is like it's a house on the beach.
I make organic videos, which increases the property value. Occasionally, I have a tenant come in, that's a brand deal. They'll pay me for a video.
They rent, they rent the house for the weekend, and that's like a good property that spits off, uh, you know, one to two million a year in revenue. That's great. But like I'm capped there because- Mm...
there's only so high you can go with these brand deals. There's only so much that a brand is willing to risk on a single video, and so I'm, I'm pretty much at that cap, you know.
So I could always increase volume, but the pricing power is like limited. You're, you're capped out.
So that's where I was like, "Okay, I need to build a second audience, but this time I need to build it where I can actually sell a product or service that I want to build." Mm-hmm. So I knew...
I kinda started with the business models. I knew the two business models that I was interested in most were like a premium membership, premium academy, and a software. Mm.
Those are the two things that I wanted to build the most. But I wanted to build them for people like me, business owners, entrepreneurs.
And so what I'm uniquely gifted at, better than most people I've come across, is taking a complex thing, distilling it down, and explaining it into terms where people can apply it.
And what, what, what the truth is, is like every business needs more lead gen. Mm. The most important thing for a business is leads.
Content is the best way, the easiest way, the cheapest way to get high-quality leads, so that's the number one thing they're all focused on. The most important thing happens to be the thing that I'm
world-class at, and I'm really good at explaining. It's like it's a perfect fit for what I'm good at. And so that's why I started down this path of like, "All right. I don't wanna do a course.
I don't wanna do the info thing. I just wanna build software for these people-" Mm. "... 'cause I wanna, I love product. I wanna like get really good at product."
So at first it was just like I need an audience of, that I can attract business owners. I'm gonna build software for them. I'm starting at scratch. What do I do?
I could either do another Instagram, TikTok thing, or I could try YouTube. So I was like, "Well, I think YouTube is more valuable, and I haven't learned that skill yet, so let's go YouTube."
So that's why I started building the Cali Marketing channel on YouTube. A, 'cause I wanted...
I, I thought it'd be more valuable and you just have more sell-through ability to the software, and B, that was a skill I didn't have yet- Mm... in the content repertoire, and so I wanted both.
So I started down that path. Pretty quickly, I was like, "Oh, we could just build a software that w, you know, productizes the, my full short form sauce, like the Lego bricks, essentially.
We can build a software for that." So we started working on the software, and obviously that takes time to build.
But what I realized is it's really hard to build software in a vacuum when you're not talking to the customers- Mm... every single day. So like me as a creator, I'm customer number one.
But us building software just based on me alone is not fully de-risked.
A better way would be to get a group of people that would pay for the software to test it iteratively on the way and verify that everything you're building works, obviously, right? Like you wanna test it.
So that's where, that's when I added the academy layer in the middle, 'cause I was like- Okay. Wait, wait, wait.
So the academy layer, uh, uh, uh, 'cause I, I haven't been able to find as much information on, uh, on this publicly, right?
So the academy layer is really just a focus group for the software where you're probably providing hands-on, you know, services and like help, like coaching people a little bit. I don't know. You'll get into it.
But the ca- academy layer was a solution to building the software, not- Exactly... just people demanding that you educate them in a different way than just content. Ex- exactly.
So the reason you don't see it anywhere is 'cause I don't push it anywhere. Nobody knows I have this. Like the only way you would know is we launch it a couple times a year via my email list only.
I never post publicly about it, and that's because I'm very conscious that I don't wanna be branded as like the course guy. Yeah. I don't want that to negatively taint my brand.
And so, b- however, I had a YouTube audience of business owners. I had a software for business owners. But to make sure the software was built for what they need, I added a focus group layer in the middle.
Now, instead of me paying to get that focus group, I'm having the focus group pay me so that I'm double-dipping, right? [chuckles] So you turn your cost center into, into a profit center. Mm-hmm.
So what would I have to offer that focus group to make them pay me and it be a win-win? Well, I could give them the full system that I have codified in notes/videos. That's basically a course.
I can give them real-time feedback. I can give them access to me one-on-one to help with their problems. I can also give them free access to the beta versions of the software to like get their feedback.
And so when you start to put it together, you're like, "Oh, any company building software would love to have a group of 100 to 200 people that are paying them to give them feedback," and that's esse- that's effe-effectively what it is.
Mm-hmm.
And so that's how I got to, oh, I have content, YouTube, I have the academy, which I take all of my formulas and I test them via info to people to make sure they work, and then we take that and put it in the software, and so that works, it works pretty well.
Yeah. One thing kind of as an aside that I'm seeing here, there's this pattern.
You're, I don't know, maybe third, fourth, or fifth person I've had on who is aCreator who's really kind of entrepreneur first, who comes from a consulting background, whether it's Deloitte or whatever, and there's a very clear pattern.
You were just saying, you know, a few minutes ago that a, a, a big strength of yours is articulating these ideas and presenting them, right? Which- Yeah...
to me, from what I've seen of creators who come from a consulting background, like that's the skill. They're really good at building these systems that are focused on the monetization before the content.
You, you have the spectrum you've talked about, the, the artist to engineer spectrum.
I've called it the artist to businessperson spectrum, but it's basically the person who it's all about the idea and making the thing versus reverse engineering the thing basically to make money.
Um, but it's, it's all coming across in the way that you're ar-articulating this and your skill in articulating it, right?
Like I, I kind of see this is kinda like a subgenre of creator [chuckles] that I'm, I'm kinda making this up kind of as I go. But that- Yeah...
that I've, that I've noticed, like people like you who really, who really know how to build the skill. You're talking about de-risking, you're talking about double-dipping, right?
Like this is all very like this is how you see the world as a consultant, and you're applying these principles to the creator economy w-with content as the tip of the spear. It's like how do we- Yeah...
build a system around this? It's a huge-- It's, to be honest, it's a huge advantage. Like Hormozi was a management consultant, Cody Sanchez was an investment banker. Mm-hmm.
If you're, if the people with backgrounds in investment banking or management consulting who end up going into this like online business creator world, they have a huge advantage.
A, the raw horsepower, like those jobs require seventy to eighty hours minimum. Yeah. And so you're just like trained to work more and get more done in less time. You're just trained to do that.
B, like you said, my brain works top-down, like I think in- Yeah... frameworks and systems. And so I think some of the articulation you're, you're forced to learn in that job, which is, which is helpful.
Some of that like is, is more nature, like just fortunate. However, I'm not an artist, so like the, this vibe you see, if you like it, like some people may look at this and be like, "That dude's a douchebag."
[laughs] But you, you, you can see the vibe. Yeah. Like it takes a lot of work for me to get the art side of it to look good. Mm-hmm.
Like fonts and colors and like, uh, sets and aesthetics, like my taste comes natural, but I cannot execute that with my own hands. So it's, it takes a lot of work for me to get that to the point where I'm proud of.
But the other stuff comes super naturally, the, the frameworks and the systems and like how one thing connects to the other, how to explain stuff with metaphors. So yeah, I, I think
those, those, those-- the typ- the typical corporate tr-track is like the Ivy League into investment banker consulting. Yeah. That gets a bad, a bad, uh, a bad rep, but is it bad rap or bad rep? I could see both.
Uh, you know, I've, I've heard, I've heard it both. It, I, I think this is different than like a should of versus should have situation- Yeah, yeah... where it's should have. I think this you could say rap or rep works.
Okay. They both work for me. [chuckles] Maybe it's bad, m-bad like a, yeah, I think it could be either. But the point is those get hate on, uh, those get a lot of hate, but huge advantage. Yeah. Okay.
Well, there's some other things I wanna talk about before we get too deep into Sandcastles, but this is, I, I do wanna mention it briefly because the way I see Sandcastles, your tool, is that it's essentially the kind of tool that I imagine a consultant would if, you know, let's say some media business hires a consultant, we wanna get better at short-form video, and this is the kind of tool, an internal tool that maybe they would build, right?
Uh, I, there's this forty-four minute walkthrough video you have, and I wrote down something you say right at the beginning that I think articulates this really well.
You say, um, regarding successful short form content creators,
that they're, I'm quoting you here now, "They're all building a system where they study the winners, what has worked, either in their previous videos or in the category.
They study what works, e-extract those components, the title, the hook, the concept, the idea, the storytelling.
They're extracting components, and then they're using them in future videos to try to de-risk their effort so that they win more." Which is real consultant speak at the end there, right? Exactly, yeah.
But, um, but that's what this is. Like, I mean, you know, if, if people want, they can go and watch this full forty-four minute video. But it's basically this machine that, let's say, you're studying short-form.
What you're gonna do is you're gonna have your list of creators that you admire, that you wanna mimic and learn from, right? And you're gonna have a spreadsheet of like, oh, this is the hook they did, and this is that.
Like if you're smart about it, that's what you're gonna be doing. And this basically automates that.
So it's like instead of, you know, going to the Goodwill bins to dig for vintage clothing or whatever, you're just going to the vintage boutique, you're paying more, but the good thing is right there, and you can just do it a lot faster.
Um, that's kinda my v-version of what the tool is, is it's, it just helps you study short-form video and then make your own from it much more quickly. Um, maybe you can explain a little more. Yeah, yeah.
No, that was a, the vintage boutique to Goodwill is a good metaphor. I like that a lot. Yeah, basically the, on the, everything is art and science. So what does the artist do?
The artist wakes up, and they're like, "What am I gonna make a video about today?" And they like come up with an idea, and they just let it rip. Like everything is from their brain original. They shoot it original.
They're not looking at inspiration. They're not looking at like references. They're just going. That is amazing. Like, if you're an artist, it's a, it's m- it's magic. Like it's modern magic.
But the reality is most- Ancient magic even. Yeah, yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people cannot do that. They don't have the taste or the raw creative horsepower to be able to do that.
So the other end of the spectrum is more science, which is what most other facets of marketing do. Like paid ads, this is what they do.
They're putting money at stake, so they go and they look at the data, what's performing better, and they double down on the winners. And so for me, it's like organic content just lags the like science adoption.
But if you were to approach organic content like a scientist, what would that look like? Well, you would look at the people in your category that are already winning.
You would study the videos that outperformed, 'cause everything's eighty/twenty. You would take the twenty percent that are doing eighty percent of the views.
You would reverse engineer those winners, and then you would figure out which ones you have to tweak to make it more uniquely you or improve upon their rep but hold everything else constant.
That's, that is the science-based workflow for how you'd approach content. That is what all the, the gurus, that is what all the people that are good at this are doing.
And so my thought was-Sandcastles is a workflow to do that process faster. Mm-hmm. Right? So if you go through every stage, like the, the content workflow for short-form is idea, research, script, record, edit, post.
That's like the six-step workflow. Every video you gotta run through that loop. So at every stage, how can you use data to spe- to de-risk your failure, right? So it's like, what's idea?
Finding the list of creators that are already doing well in your space. How do you do that?
Well, right now we're building a feature in Sandcastles where all you have to do is type in a couple words to describe your niche, and we will give you the list of creators that you should follow.
Boom, we de-risk that, like, searching process. Not even de-risk, we just took the effort away- Mm-hmm... from a couple hours down to zero. Okay, perfect. Then once you have that list, what do you do next?
Well, you need to look at all the videos that those people have made, either as a cohort or, like, one by one, channel by channel, and figure out which ones outperformed. So that would be outlier score.
If you go on Instagram, you can't re-sort the videos in order by performance. You can only sort them by, by post date. Yeah.
In the Videos tab, you can go, and you can sort by outlier score, by views, by post date, by a bunch of other metrics that you can't get access to. And so what that-- what does that do?
It bubbles up the winners right to the top. So again, instead of you scrolling and scrolling and being like, "What were the winners," we took all the effort away.
So then from there, it's like, okay, well, how do you look at a video and dissect it? That's what we're building now as well.
We're trying to build, like, an automated process for you to press one button, and we just go do that discovery for you. Okay, nice. What do you do from now?
Well, if you wanna actually make a video on your own, you need to go to the Scripts tab and then write in the one-liner of your idea.
So, like, if a hook is working for someone else in your niche, could you save that hook as a template and then use it in the scripts? Yes, you can. We have, like, a vault feature that allows you to do that.
Same thing with the story structure. So really what we're doing... A-and yeah, it is kind of like a, a consultant would approach productizing organic content- Yeah...
is taking those Lego bricks and then allowing you to get through that workflow as fast as possible. Mm-hmm.
Okay, I, I wanna go, get back into this in a little bit, but I do wanna talk more about your specific process for making videos right now, which I, I understand that basically what you've just described, what Sandcastles is, is kind of productizing your research process.
Um- Yeah. But tell me a bit more about your, like, I don't know if a week in the, a week in the life or a month in the life here is, is a better, is a better frame.
But for you, from ideation to postmortem on video performance, like walk me through the process of how you're putting content out right now. For short-form or long-form? Let's start with long-form.
Let's start with long-form, and then we'll do short-form. Yeah. So for long-form, YouTube is a monster. Like it is really, really hard to produce one quality YouTube video per week. Mm-hmm. Very hard.
And so you either have to spend literally thirty to forty hours a week yourself, or you need a team. And so for YouTube, I kind of approach these differently.
Like short-form, I di- I did all myself, and then I slowly hired myself out. YouTube from day one, I started with the, the A team. Mm-hmm.
I, like, was not willing to do it myself 'cause I knew it would be too much work, and I didn't- Well, this is what you said, this is what you said like twenty minutes ago, is that the whole ti-- you just didn't wanna become a YouTube video editor.
You wanted to make, put the content out there, but you just, it's just not what you were interested in to make- Exactly... to do, to edit the videos for thirty hours or whatever. Yeah.
And so the reason I, I start with that on the long-form is, as I walk through the workflow, I'll call out, like, who on my team does which pieces, and it's helpful to understand, like, how much or little I do in that workflow personally.
Yeah. So YouTube is kind of a different beast where it's mostly a packaging platform. It's not really a video platform.
The, the title, the thumbnail, the actual premise, the idea, the click confirmation in the intro, that matters 100 times more than the actual video itself.
And so right away, most people are like, "Oh, YouTube, the people that make the best videos win." It's like, that's not actually true.
The people that make the best- Well, then this is where we get to the difference between the engineer and the artist again. Mm-hmm. Exactly, yeah. So and that's the thing.
An artist will make an amazing, elaborate video and then throw away a random thumbnail, and their videos do poorly on YouTube, and they're like, "What? It doesn't make sense. My video is amazing."
YouTube doesn't actually reward amazing videos. It rewards amazing packaging, where the intro of the video supports whatever the psychological expectation would be in the package.
But you know, we, we, we, we can go down that rabbit hole as far as you want, but the point is, I have an ideas guy or, like, an ideas team. This guy goes out and canvases the social media growth space.
It's like the niche that I have on YouTube. He figures out the titles, the thumbnails, basically the ideas that will work well from a packaging perspective.
This is agnostic of, like, me, what I know, what I think would be good. Like, he's doing this independently.
Once a month, we have a call where he basically goes down the list and says, "Okay, this would be a really good package, very clickable package on YouTube.
Do you have something to say for this that would be compelling or not?" So I then can say yes or no. Like, I've kind of had like a veto power. If I don't have something useful to say, we'll kill it.
But the ones that I do have something good for, we'll keep. He organizes that list for me, and then that's what I use to decide which ideas I actually make on YouTube.
So that f- that whole first part of, like, researching, coming up with the idea, coming up with the title, I don't personally do any work in that. This guy does it.
And, and, and it sounds counterintuitive 'cause you'd be like, "Well, if YouTube is your perspective, why are you not coming up with the ideas and the titles?"
And that should just click in your mind of how important the packaging is for YouTube. Like this guy and the team I work with, they live and breathe YouTube twenty-four seven.
So they just, they see the patterns that are working. It's, it's more of like a psychological thing that they- Well, a-again, going back to the very beginning, you did not set out to become a YouTuber.
You set out to create a distribution engine that you owned. That's the goal here. The goal here is not for you to get 500,000 views on a YouTube video that you put your, you know, blood, sweat, and tears into.
It's to get 500,000 views on a YouTube video on a topic that's related to what you wanna sell. I would say I, I, I do put my blood, sweat, and tears into it.
[chuckles] Well, yeah, not to, not to say that fully, but yeah. No, no. Yeah, the point, the point, your point is b- is right, which is basically like I'm divorcing my-... hours spent from, like, the self-value- Yeah...
the self-reward that I extract from is. Like, my goal is to spend the minimum amount of time to get the output, not the maximum. I don't, I don't value the time in as like- Yeah... the, the metric that matters.
So yeah, so, so he does all the idea stuff. When it comes time to make a new video, like, I gotta make one a week, I pull up this document we have. I go to the top idea on the, on the page.
I look at the title, and I'm like, "Okay, what should I make this video about?" Like, like, "What should I say in the video that would map to this title?"
Most people would think it's the other way around, but that- Mm... this is how pro YouTubers do it. So then I just open a script doc. I've got intro, outline, outro, is like the three sections.
So I start with the outline. Every YouTube video really is a listicle to some extent. It's just breaking down things in a list. People, humans perceive information or comprehend information in chunks.
And so whether you're saying, "Here's the five steps to do something," "Here's the six ways to do something," "Hey, I'd, I'm gonna go on this trip, and here are the five things we did," it's all a list, right?
It's all just, like, a list of things.
So the outline in the video is me coming up with what are the five to eight things that I can say that will most, uh, transfer the most value and accrue the most trust to me relative to this topic. Mm-hmm.
And we can get into, like, what that actually means. Like, what does value mean, and what does trust accrual mean? 'Cause I can go all the way down to the studs on that.
But basically, I write the out- I write the outline, I come up with the points. I fill them out with, like, a specific structure. I write the intro. Then we've got the full script. I record that script.
I hand that script off to an editor, or I hand the recording off to an editor. He edits it. I don't touch it. I've got, I've got a, a team of two editors that are amazing. Mm. Uh, so they, they do it.
I'd never touch it again. And then I also hand that raw recording off to my thumbnail designer, who comes up with, uh, three to five different thumbnails, and we ABC test three of them.
So that's kind of like the flow for a YouTube video, uh, you know, from idea to post. Okay, yeah. Uh, uh, one thing I do wanna linger on the trust accrual bit, but maybe the angle into this, something I noticed.
I watched your most recent YouTube video, which is titled "Storytelling Is Easier Than You Think." It's twenty-eight minutes long, came out a few days ago, fourteen thousand views.
And I watched your most popular YouTube video, which is "How to Become a Master Storyteller," eleven minutes long, one point nine million views.
They're very similar, and this, you know, there's this similarity in a lot of the videos you make, which is it's, it's story. It's, it is storytelling advice, and it's this list format you're mentioning.
Um, and you know, it's some of the list is different, it's in different orders, et cetera, which is not a dig, right? Any evergreen topic like this, you're gonna be essentially talking about the same thing.
On this podcast, very often I'm talking to people who, if it's, like, a local media creator, right?
I've talked to a few people like that, and we're usually talking about the same topic, just a slightly different lens on a slightly different day, right? You, you end up talking about the same things.
But, um, what I wanna ask about here is the kind of reorganization and returning of these evergreen topics, and is this just a matter of your packaging people, your ideas guys, like, "Oh, here's the title.
I know that we can, that you have this beat, and you can kind of just, you know, write the script to this beat again, but in a slightly different way."
You know, people say that every author writes the same book over and over. That's kind of what I'm asking. Yeah.
I mean, the, the substance in a lot of the videos does differ, but I can see how from the outside, certain videos that are on the same topics could seem repetitive, right?
Espe- especially the intros, like the intros are fairly repetitive. So the reality is the best way to create new winners is to study your own old winners and replicate them. Mm.
If you don't have any old winners of your own, then you wanna look at competitor channels. So it's like when I first started out, if you look at those videos on the, the bottom of the YouTube channel,
we didn't have any of our own winners. So we're looking at competitors, and we're trying to figure out like, "Okay, how can we pioneer a new lane with, but still leveraging what's already been proven to work?"
But once we have proof of winners, you wanna recycle those winners as much as you can- Yeah... from a packaging perspective. The actual meat of the videos are completely different.
Like the, the one I just posted was all about this fra- this concept of story loops- Mm... where I explain this, like, loop concept. I'd never talked about that before.
The one point nine million view had, like, six things about storytelling that I had never talked about before at that time. They're completely different videos, but they're both about storytelling.
And so the, I, I think the, the first thing is, like, if you have winners, you wanna try to replicate those winners until you have proof that those winners cannot be replicated- Mm...
which maybe this latest video is proof of, of that. But the, the, the reality is for YouTube, you have your niche. So mine is, like, social media growth.
And then the way you come up with title formats is you derive, it's called interest topics in your niche.
Interest topics are just like the sub-bucket of things in the niche that people struggle with if you're doing educational content. So for social media growth, what are the interest topics?
You could have scripting, storytelling, editing, uh, growth, posting tips, idea tips, the algorithm, right?
These are like the core topics within the social media growth bucket that- These things that are always worrying the creator- Yeah, exactly... that they need to learn about.
And, and, and so within those things, there's a bunch of pain points for each one that people struggle with. So like for scripting, it would be like, "Okay, how do I actually write the script?
How do I write the beginning hook of the script so that it actually works? How do I keep attention throughout?" And like, you, you keep going down.
You could have a list of like five to ten pain points for every single one of these interest topics. And so
the, the, the idea guy's job is to figure out what interest topics within this niche work the best in terms of driving the most views.
And then my job is to figure out what are the pain points in those interest topics that the people are struggling with, and what can I say to close the gap on those pain points.
So the reason you're seeing so many storytelling videos or so many hooks videos is because for my niche, what we've gleaned from the data, both from my own channel and competitors, those are the interest topics that people watch the most.
Yeah.
So the reason you don't see that many editing videos or ideas videos on my channel is 'cause I've made a couple of those before, but the video, the views weren't that good because those, those as a percentage of like view share is lower.
And so it se- it'll seem repetitive when you analyze it-At a, at a channel level, like you zoom out Yeah But that's why we're, we're doing that is 'cause, like, storytelling's a hitter. It's been hitting. Yeah.
No, no, no, certainly. So we get... Yeah. And I wanna say too, it's like, I mean, the, the viewer, right? Is like, th-this problem never becomes irrelevant.
Like, I watched both of those back to back last night, and I wasn't thinking like, "Oh, this is boring," like I just heard this. It's... Uh, what I'm thinking is, "Oh, he's right.
Like, I need to try doing that thing, and I'm still haven't tried it since the last time I watched that video." Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And over time, the subscriber to your channel, you know, they, they watch this video that maybe has two or three of the same items in a list a couple months ago, and they're watching this video now that has a couple of those items again but in a different order, and they still have that problem, and they still haven't figured it out.
Exactly. And they still want you to tell them, "Here's the thing," because they forgot what the thing was, and they didn't do their homework, right? So that, that's what I'm saying.
It's like, that's just the nature of this kinda thing. It's, it's what I do too, right? Like, a lot of the...
In the newsletter we do, the steal this tactic section at the end where it's like, uh, what's one thing that's really actionable that we learned from this creator? I've been doing...
I've done 100 almost of these, and so there's not... You know, it's, there's only so many. There's not that many new ones. There's not that many. Yeah.
Yeah, just different contexts and a person doing it in a different niche or whatever. But there's lead magnet six or seven times just done in a different way, right? Right. So that's what I'm saying.
It's like, that's the nature of making this kind of educational content is you often are saying the same things time and time again, just in a new moment with a different context, and it doesn't decrease the value if, if the audience is, is receiving it well, right?
Right. And the reason, the reason why it, it can seem repetitive is 'cause, like, I've gleaned in my own worldview that, like, to solve X problem, you need to do A, B, C, and D. Yeah.
If I believe that to be true today, and then six months from now after everything I've done, I still believe those four things to be the solve, then it would be, it would be a injustice of me to make up E, F, G, and H when that E, F, G, and H is not what you need.
You need A, B, C, D. Yeah. It's like the people haven't learned A, B, C, D. [laughs] So it's like me saying A, B, C, D again with different examples is more me trying to improve the absorption rate. Yeah, yes.
But not needing... But I don't need to substitute the actual meat of it because I still believe that to be the answer. So that is- Absolutely...
to, to your point, that's something that I've struggled with on YouTube is like it's not that I've said everything there is to say, but, like, the answers are there. Yes.
If you want to win with content, there is no better place than just binging my channel.
Like, all the answers are right there, but people still struggle because the absorption rate of those answers varies depending on- Well, this is actually-... you know, if you're watching it on 2X or...
I mean, you having, like, the, uh, the academy product too, right? Like, that's then where people...
That, that's where the absorption rate is much higher because I imagine there's, you know, some kind of cohort or community thing going on. A, a classic example of this, I had Matt McGarry on almost a year ago.
Um, he's, you know, the, the newsletter guy is, is his- Yeah, yeah... his thing. And he has his newsletter where he tells people how to grow a newsletter. He has his, I think it's like 800 bucks or some...
I don't know, his course where he- people can join, and it's a higher ticket and, you know, a little more of their time, and there's more accountability. And then he has his agency, right?
And it's just how much of your own time versus your money are you willing to trade to get the results? And usually, if you give the money, then you have access to a group of people. There's more accountability.
The absorption rate is higher.
Uh, but so, I mean, so much of, like, watching educational content comes down to sort of like entertainment and, like, just kind of dreaming and fantasizing about doing the thing as opposed to doing it, right? Right.
Which is, uh... But we, we should move on from this topic. One thing I, I do wanna talk about briefly is the, the voice that you do.
You're really good at this voice, and talking right now, sometimes when I, when I'm podcasting with people and they haven't really done it before, I feel like I'm so pro and, you know, my voice is, is great.
[laughs] You right now I'm like, man, you're like, you're running circles around me.
You're so good at articulating, saying your words very clearly, which I'm now trying to do and focusing to break the fourth wall a little bit.
But, um, I know you used to be a rapper, and we were talking when we started, I think before we started recording, about how you do put this on and your brain was trained on, on making all the short forms.
So now even in the long form, you have this voice that you do, which, uh, we could call it video voice, we could call it creator voice. It's not just you.
It's, it's, it's a norm in the space, you know, that I've seen like- Yeah, yeah... SNL skits making fun of people doing it in various ways.
Tell me a bit about video voice and how you got good at it because you didn't have it in that Figma design tip video I brought up a little while ago.
To be, to be fair, I, I hate that I ha- I hate that I have the video voice. [laughs] So I, I think there's a difference between enunciating your syllables and then performing with like a performative tone.
I hate that I do the performative tone. To be honest, most of the performative tone thing is just, uh, like being self-conscious that my average, my average vocal energy is pretty low. Like this- Yeah...
this is how I actually talk, right? Yeah. So if you listen to this, you're like, "Oh, that guy's pretty chill." Like, I sound very chill. He's relaxed.
But the reality is re- relaxed doesn't cut through when people are watching- Mm-hmm... a bunch of performers. So I have to elevate my... or I thought I needed to elevate my, like, delivery to be a little bit more energy.
So, like, if you're imagining blowing a certain amount of air through a, a fixed hole. [laughs] I'm just blowing more air through it, which is creating like a little bit of a louder, more punchy delivery. Mm-hmm.
But to be honest, I, I really don't like that I do that because when I watch it back, it seems one click disingenuous a little bit if you don't know that that's not how I normally talk. So...
Or if you know, if you know- Yeah... that's how I don't normally talk. So yeah, it is what it is. I, I think the real skill is the enunciation and the rhythmic flow of the words.
But you can-- like you said, you can hear that in my voice now, and I'm not doing the performative vocal tone. And so how do I get better at that? I think... You know that video with Steve Jobs where he's like--
he talks about the calligraphy and then how you can only connect the dots looking backwards? Mm-hmm.
That's like a big, a big thing he talked about is like he did all these weird things that don't make sense, but then they all led him to be able to make the Mac.
And when you look backwards, him dropping in on a calligraphy class at Reed College taught him about...
led him to be able to make fonts that were like not the typical one.I have, I have a similar-- I think most people have similar things in their life where they don't really make sense from their childhood or, or early, like, college years, but then they actually do influence their ability to perform well or progress in their career.
One of those is rapping for me. It's like I just... For whatever reason, we started freestyling in college. I kept doing it.
People would come to parties and, like, write down a list of topics, and I would just, like, freestyle off the top. And I would do that, and then I, I was in consulting.
I hated my job so much and, like, when I was traveling, I'd be alone in the hotel rooms after work, and I would just, like, write raps because that was the only thing I looked forward to. And, like, doing that so much
trained my brain to be able to enun- a] think in metaphors- Yeah... 'cause that's how raps work. But b] like train my voice to be able to articulate quickly and clearly. So yeah, it's tough.
I don't have a good, like, uh, tactic for training that into someone besides [chuckles] just start rapping would be, I guess, the tactic.
Well, I mean, it-it's like you were saying, even, even in those early videos, you didn't necessarily have it.
You-- well, you, you still had the enunciation and, and this, but you had this really relaxed tone that it does pop so much more when you do the voice and the tone, right?
Like, it's, it's just like a higher saturated image or, you know, higher saturated sound specifically. Yeah, it's more vivid. Yeah, more vivid.
And so that's-- it's just what stops the scroll, and it's like, yeah, we can, we can say like, "Oh, it's a shame that you have to do that," and [chuckles] it maybe you feel it.
You look in the mirror, you're like, "Why do I talk like that?" But, uh, but it's, it's, I mean, it's just the name of the game. And if you're engineering the game, you, you have to play it.
Let's talk about short-form though. We, we walked through the, uh, the long-form, the YouTube process. Walk me through the short-form production process as of now. Yeah.
So with short-form, I'm making short-form tech videos breaking down mostly new tech and AI, AI models, AI tools.
And so a lot of the short-form game, you either have to be first to cover something, or you have to be extremely unique in the way you cover it because of the, like, half-life of the videos. Yeah.
They just only last 48 hours or so until something- Wait... has been seen. Let me interrupt you for a second with, with something of your own.
Another of your videos that I watched on YouTube [chuckles] that I liked was, uh, I Cracked the Social Media Algorithm: Full Formula Explained. We got the packaging here. But, but it's good, right?
You know, the whole, it's... You, you can't really reverse engineer a viral video, but also you can, right? And the things you say, there's six things.
You say that you wanna have either a common idea and be first to market, or you find an uncommon idea, which is what you were just explaining.
And then you need a large applicable audience, and then you wanna filter that idea through a unique point of view, and then you need a world-class hook, a compelling story, and a bit of luck.
And so maybe, maybe I just, uh, totally said everything you were about to say. Yeah. [chuckles] But I wanted to give that a little overview. Yeah. There's, I mean, there's a good video on the channel.
That video you're describing, if, if anyone wants like a breakdown of how virality works, go watch that video. I think it's one of the earlier ones. It might be... Is it the first one on my channel?
It might be, uh- It's one of the first ones. Mm-hmm. One of the early ones. So go watch that, but, uh, on the Kalay Marketing channel.
But yeah, in general, it's like what I described with long-form is a similar flow for shorts. You just don't have to do the title and thumbnail, right? Mm.
So it's still idea, research, which is to find the angle, scripting, recording, editing, posting. Same deal. You just don't have to do that.
Is it still all the people involved, or is it, is it more less people on this one? So I started out doing all of it myself 'cause I wanted to learn the skill. Now, I've got an idea guy for short-form as well.
Um, but instead of him going and writing titles, he's canvassing all the different pipes where interesting stories could break in my niche. Mm. So it could be other creators.
Like, he's, he's on Sandcastles with our list. Like, we're eating our own dog food, like with our list of 15 to 20 top tech creators.
He's on there, and he's looking at all the videos they're posting and what's outperforming. He's also looking at Twitter, he's looking at Reddit, he's looking at blogs, he's looking at YouTube.
He's trying to basically just create a 360 view of all these input pipes for what could be happening, and then he's... he has criteria to filter down what would make for a good video based on the way we do it.
And so he ultimately comes up with a short list of ideas, and then similar to YouTube, we get on a pitch call. Uh, YouTube's once a month. For shorts, we do like a couple of times a week, where he pitches me the ideas.
So he's like, "Here's what I found. Here's what I think could be interesting. These people have done it already. Here's like a new angle." Or, "Here's what I found. Nobody's done it already.
We should jump on this right now," or whatever. And so, and so then again, like I get veto power of, "Eh, I don't think it's big enough. I don't think it's interesting enough.
I don't think it's visual enough," whatever the criteria, or, "Yes. Looks good." And so that ultimately leads to a short list of videos that we should make.
Similar to YouTube, I guess, I go through, script those videos, record them, hand them off to an editor. The editor comes back with the edit. Usually, it's like 98% of the way there, and then we post.
So yeah, I guess i-if we are auditing the comparison for the workflow, it is pretty similar- Mm... minus the thumbnail design, uh, 'cause I've got like the ideas solved and then the editing solved. Mm-hmm.
Um, going to Sandcastles now, let's talk about it a bit. On the website, at time of recording, it says that you have 43,157 users. Where did they come from?
Did you achieve the goal of building this distribution machine and then building the product that that machine would serve? Yeah. We're, we're on the way, for sure.
[chuckles] That's every single one of those has come from my content- Mm... on YouTube. So it's either, it's either... We have, we have a couple different funnels that we're running. Uh, it's either YouTube direct...
Like, I guess to, to back up, the way, the way YouTube becomes extremely valuable is when you make the videos, and then instead of running mid-roll ads as a brand deal, you, I say you buy your own ads. Mm.
So but I don't have to pay any money to myself, obviously, but like I'm, I buy my own ads. So the ads I run- Owned media... are of Sandcastles. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly.
I make a video showing how Sandcastles could be used or not, honestly. We plug it, and then people go and hit the landing page.
From, from what I've seen of Sandcastles so far, what I see it as is it's really, it's a research tool. It's, it's a search engine for like-For the structures within videos.
I loved how you can kind of save like a Mad Libs version of what's the hook here, and then if you save that, it will Mad Libs-ify, uh, what, what that script was. And it's like, oh, you know, X thing, Z thing, Y thing.
It extracts that from what I could see pretty well. Um- Exactly. But in current state, it sounds like you've been getting a lot of user feedback. In current state, what are users asking for most?
What are the most requested features? Yeah. The biggest thing is on the very front end, a lot of the insights of what's working requires you to know who to look at to then study those videos.
And so the people that already know which creators in their space are crushing, they love Sandcastles 'cause they can come in, they can build that list, and they can look at the...
Like, it really is like a marketer's dream from a data perspective. You can look at all the data and immediately the patterns pop out.
And then if you wanna use the script, the script writing flow that we have where you, like you said, you save the hooks and the style, the story, the writing styles as Mad Libs, you can do it.
I think it's super effe-efficient to do. But if you like what you have in a Claude project or a ChatGPT project, and you don't wanna use Sandcastles for scripting, that's fine.
Like, you can just take the insights you've gleaned from what's working on the idea front out and do whatever you want. Mm-hmm.
The people that don't know who to look at for inspiration, that makes it tough to then get inspiration, obviously.
So, like, for example, let's say you go on Sandcastles and you're a sewing machine review channel, and you make videos reviewing sewing machines. Today, we don't have a way for you to search.
I guess you could in the Videos tab, but we don't have a great way for you to search sewing machine and get a list of the creators that we have on there- Mm...that talk about sewing machines.
We will have that very soon, like in the next couple weeks, but- Well, wait. Let me say that, like, to me, uh, uh, two things here. One, skill issue. Like, that's the whole point.
Like, that's what differentiates somebody who's talented at using this versus somebody who can't really use it, is you should know what you're looking for, and you should know what you're trying to achieve, and you should have already been studying the game a little bit.
And two- Yeah. [chuckles]...I think, I think, uh, you know, you don't wanna just look at... If you're a sewing machine reviewer or whatever, you don't wanna look at other sewing machine reviewers.
I-- That's, that's kinda my whole thesis with what we do with Creator Spotlight and why I try to interview people from so many different niches, subject matters, business models, et cetera.
I think there's more generally to be learned from people in niches adjacent to yours or people who are working in the same medium but in a totally different topic. Whatever it is, I, I think, I think it's, you know...
The point should just be to look at what performs well, and then it's gonna perform well if you take it from that niche into your niche.
It's not necessarily gonna perform well if you're just trying to do the same thing that's already been done in that same niche. Yeah.
And I would say that you would be correct, but in the minority in terms of what we've seen in terms of, uh, user pattern. Yeah. Like, you should be able... Like,
we basically built a bazooka and then handed it to people- [chuckles]...and we're like: "Can you figure out how to load the round or not?"
And it's like the people that figure out how to load the round, boom, they're like firing it all, all day. [chuckles] But most people are like, "Well, what do I do with this bazooka?" Like, they, they don't know.
You have to literally put their hand on it, like load it for them. Yeah. So that's what we're trying to do right now, is if you imagine the workflow for short-form being like 20 dominoes.
We started out, s-let's say scripting is dominoes like five, seven, and-- five, six, and seven. So we laid those first. Then we laid like two, four, and then a bunch, a bunch after scripting.
[chuckles] But now we're going back and we're like, "Okay, we missed number one, so we gotta lay one. We gotta lay three." Very soon we'll have the full domino chain where you can just tip it.
And where we're going is we will automate the entire flow. So in theory, you will put in your profile or you'll put in whatever topic you make.
We'll automatically build a list of creators that are the best in the world at that or adjacent, to your point. One click, mine for the best ideas and Lego bricks that are working in your niche.
One click, save those as templates. One click, write those as scripts. And we will just hand you winning videos in five seconds for your niche where the scripts are already dialed that you can just record and go.
So, so now the only point of friction is just in this, in this ideal end state, the only point of friction is me in front of the camera having to make the thing, but the planning and the scripting and the research is productized.
Yeah. And then we'll just, we'll put in a HeyGen avatar, uh, API in so you can like train yourself on an avatar, and that'll feel lifelike, and you won't even have to record it.
So eventually it's, it's just frictionless creation at the end. Yeah. Yeah. Distribution in a box. Okay. That's, that's what we're going for.
The, the editing really is the last frontier 'cause that, that cannot be AI-ified away.
Um, eventually, maybe through, in three to five years, there'll be a Premiere Pro type- Mm-hmm...product or plugin where you can literally just have it auto-edited. But that is, that is the last frontier.
So- Well, and then once, but then once that comes, it just increases the value of, of, you know, handmade editing, right? Exactly. So there will...
I think, I think the, the visual packaging with the handmade editing will always be the kind of moat. Mm. Uh, 'cause I think it's easier to
look at 10,000 videos and identify the script patterns that are best performing at the moment and replicate those via AI than it will be to do that on the editing side.
So yeah, the, the whole goal was like, could we build a machine that if a business owner that doesn't know how to make content comes in, press a couple buttons, content comes out.
I guess they, in this case, they have to record it, so they'll still have to like do some work from there, and then it will just drive leads.
Last thing I wanna ask about is this tension between working on the distribution and your initial thing.
You said this m- a couple times today as we've been speaking, and you said this to me when we first met, that you never wanted to be an influencer. You didn't wanna be famous.
But now you have this large audience, and you are locked into the content production rhythm. Uh, and there's some tension here, right?
You also-- You told me that you, you're working on being kind of a one-name guy, right? Calloway. And this is, this is...
You're modeling this public-facing version of you, and it doesn't seem like you're gonna be stopping. Stay focused on Sandcastles. Maybe another product comes later.
Uh, but I guess what I'm curious about is how you're managing that tension, and if the goal is like five to 10 years from now, you actually don't need the distribution anymore, you're just good, or are you just [chuckles] kind of locked into, I actually am an influencer, I am famous in this corner of, of, of the internet?What is it?
Yeah. It's tough. I, I don't really, I don't really think in those terms. Like I, I don't, I don't really think about too many moves ahead. Yeah. You know? Like
all I can do is just execute as well as I can on the strategy that I believe in, and right now that strategy is I need to own the distribution, and then I need perfect alignment between the distribution and the products I sell.
And then the-- I guess the third thing is I need the products to actually fulfill the promise to the user. Mm.
And right now that promise is people are not good at short-form today, and they need their short form to work as easy and quick as possible. So it's like all I can really do is focus.
As long as that strategically is a mission that I'm willing to embark on, which at this time it is, all I can do is focus on those three things with laser precision. I think people live in arcs, right? Yeah.
You live in seasons. Mm-hmm. And so, like, I'm not gonna be playing this influencer... I, I don't even consider myself an influencer. Like, do I influence people? Yes, but like- An entrepreneur makes content. Yeah.
Exactly. I'll always be an entrepreneur. Like that's, that is a forever game and, like, the, the privilege of entrepreneurship is just being able to get to play the game forever. That's the whole point.
And so I'll always be playing the entrepreneurship game. But at some point, own distribution may go away. Like, there might be so much AI content that's so good that human-made stuff becomes Etsy.
It becomes like the- [scoffs] The shittify, as they say. You know, the like... Yeah, yeah.
And so there'll always be, like the way we still pay two hundred dollars to go see concerts, there will always be the, like, cream of the crop human artisans that are making videos as their medium. But the,
the supply-demand dynamics where a random person that's not that talented can post a video and get a million free views and drive that anywhere they want, that may not exist forever. And so as...
And I would be willing to bet that won't exist forever. So as that phases out, everything I'm doing may or may not be more or less important. Who knows? So I think there'll be future arcs.
But at the end of the day, an entrepreneur's job is to, like, find the gap and shoot the gap, right? Like, and just, and just fill the gap with something. Shoot the gap meaning, like, go through it, not- Yeah.
[laughs]... not destroy it. But like, a-a-and, and just find something interesting to work on. So I'm sure there'll be, there'll be more things. There we go. Well, Keller, thank you for coming on. This was fun. Nice.
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Of course. And listener, we'll see you next week.
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