Marketing GENIUS: The Strategy Behind Content That Reaches Millions

If you just keep being consistent, you will just plateau. The actual formula for growth is consistency x experimentation. We went from 8,000 on YouTube to 13 million. This is the blueprint going forward for brands.

I have like 40 questions. Meet Grace Andrews, the marketing genius behind the biggest brands in the business. And today, she's revealing her exact playbook. We can go viral. There is a science and a math to it. But I'm in the game of content for business outcomes. If you want to get someone to actually pay attention to you, you have to.

>> And the tactics they used to grow one of the biggest shows in the world.

>> Diary of a CEO.

>> Diary of a CEO.

>> Guys, we're 90 away.

>> We're 990 away.

>> None of us had ever worked in podcasting before. All on the phone trying to find guests because we had no credibility yet. Our whole mindset was it's a numbers game. If we message 1,000 people, we're going to get 10 people who say yes. So, we would message 1,000 people every single week. If we keep doing this and we do not quit, we will win.

>> I'd be introduced as the brand director, the diary of CEO, Grace Andreas. Who am I without that? You ultimately decide to leave the diary of a CEO. What was going through your mind during this time? Can I do this again?

We are on the hunt to make one of your dreams a reality. Now, we have a series called What's Your Dream? Where we help make one person's dream come true, and we don't do these very often, but we wrapped one of our projects recently, and we are looking for our next big dream. Let us know in the comments what your dream is, and what part of your dream our team can support you in. Our team is going to be looking through all the comments, and you just might hear from us. All right, guys, let's get back to the video.

Grace, what patterns do you see in brands that know how to hold attention? A lot of companies at the moment, I think they're understanding that the route is entertaining. And if you want to hold people's attention, like episodic, entertaining content is the route to go down. There are of course different approaches depending on your industry, but I truly believe that the the blueprint that spans all of those brands is the idea that you are a media business that happens to sell product and they all are adopting this same mindset and all seeing results. That has been proven to be true with all of the content we've seen in the last 6 months. My favorite example has been Roomies Roomies Roomies. So this rental software platform like on the cuff of it super boring, right? So what do they do? They flip it on its head and basically become an entertainment media company. They create a new Instagram account called Roomies Roomies Roomies. It's not logo driven. It's not even the name of the brand. And they create this entertainment, comedic, relatable series about people moving in together in New York City and like finding apartments and they play into all the problems and the struggles of their customer. It's hilarious. It's entertaining and it's addictive. Like you want to come back to it, right? Like I'm not even in that sort of category of the people they're going after. But it was really interesting to see the direction they took because a marketing team could sit down in that corporate environment and go, "Okay, we can maybe we can hold a conference or we can send out some flyers or we can put some posters up around the city and some person who understands content has gone or we can drive millions and millions and millions of views in our target demographic city by just feeding off the common problems that people are facing and turn it into entertainment. And what happens is people spend minutes, minutes, minutes, maybe up to hours now because their content's quite long consuming their content. So when someone thinks about a rental platform or they need to move apartments or their friend needs to move apartments, they go, "Oh my god, they've understood that people are allergic to sales messaging. They are allergic to being told to do anything. People are looking for relief when they come onto social media. They're not looking to be sold to. So, they're not putting their logo in your face. They're not telling you to go and buy the product. They're not um explaining the features of how it works. They are purely going after entertainment. And to me, that is the blueprint for for social media going forward for brands. One of my favorite examples recently was British Vogue had Millie Bobby Brown on the cover and >> as like the intern. >> Yeah. Yes. So, exactly. So, the fact that you said that they had her on the cover, what went viral, the entertaining episodic content they created alongside that. So instead of just having the cover, which is sort of historic Vogue, what they've done forever tradition, they created social media first entertaining content that drove so much conversation, excitement, sharability around it, way more than like the cover still image. Because if you can get someone to watch the intern next time they walk in a supermarket and they're choosing a magazine, they're more likely to choose Vogue because Vogue feels relevant to them. And that's what I wish more brands understood about social. It's not about pushing your product. It's about thinking about yourself as a media company. How can you drive attention through media? Capturing them in the moment where they are, jumping on the relevant trends, showing interest in the things they're interested in until you just slowly move closer and closer and closer until the purchase feels inevitable.

So, let's say someone is building a startup and they don't have an audience and they don't have the budget. Entertainment sometimes feels like this long-term play. Should they be investing in this long-term play as a media company or is this something that they do once they're more established? I don't think it matters if you are day one or day a thousand1. It probably actually matters more if you're day 101 to sustain relevancy, but I don't think it matters either way. As long as you're thinking about yourself as a media company that happens to sell a product, you're always going to approach content with the right mindset. There's a brand in the UK called Salt ST, which is an electrolyte brand, and they bootstrapped this business. Before they even had a product or told anyone what the product was, they had 20,000 followers because they've been driving entertaining content. and now they've got this reputation for storytelling and attention grabbing content and people spend time with them and their engagement rate is crazy. So what happens is like the product goes on sale it sells out overnight. It's never like here's the product like go and buy the product here's our logo. What you should be focusing on instead of like telling them where to go is try and meet them as many times as you possibly can. So that's multiple assets across multiple platforms and getting them that way. If people are interested enough and they attract the right people, they will naturally click through because they you've captured their attention. I totally understand that because I feel like I can't even tell you how many clients will hold on to just like I mean the lo but the logo but the logo but the logo, right? And you've talked a lot about brands being creators and creators operating like brands. Can you elaborate a little bit more?

>> Where do I begin? I think the money that is being poured down the drain because brands aren't able to keep up with the like rate and change of what's happening in the creator economy blows my mind. So brands need to look towards creators to understand attention, social content, storytelling, retention, loyalty, all of that wonderful stuff. And then you've got these creators who know all of that stuff but don't know how to turn it into a business. They don't know how to monetize it. They don't know how to commercialize it. So creators know attentions, brands know business. And if they could just sort of teach each other those competing but also complimentary skills, then we'd have some incredible incredible creator driven brands.

So to that point, if there's an entrepreneur that's watching and they want to dip their toes into operating like a creator, right? They want to build in public, what does it actually look like on a day-to-day? Is is it only through building in public? Are there other ways that they could be a creator? I think it's a little controversial when I say this because I've advocated for personal branding for a long time. It's what I think is like the magnet for opportunities. It's diversified my revenue streams. It's allowed me to scale my career far far quicker than anything else. But does every founder need to build a personal brand? No, it's not critical. But it does fast trust. People build trust with people. They don't build trust with logos. So, if you've got a goal within your sphere that looks like um increasing your credibility or raising investment that requires you to get in front of certain people, for sure building a personal brand is going to be amazing for that. But if you have a founder who is resisting it and feels so uncomfortable and actually they just love being behind the scenes, is there another individual in your organization who can take on that role to build the connection? I mean, you think about some of the biggest brands in recent years who have done it from Door Dash to in the UK, we have Curries, which is like your version of Best Buy. Like, it's like a tech shop. They've been able to genuinely scale the revenue of their business by focusing on certain employees in their storytelling. The CEO of Curry's came out and said it's directly attributing the revenue increase in Q4 last year to their presence of employees on Tik Tok. And I don't know who the CEO of Cries is. She, he, I don't know. They don't have a personal brand. I'm not aware of them. I'm aware of their employees and I'm aware of their brand and they've been able to build incredible retention connection and trust through their employees. So, there are other routes to take, but also just creating a really really great brand story that you can tell time and time again. It doesn't have to have people. You just have to understand how like connection and trust works.

>> It's funny because you say the word trust a lot, but when we're dealing with brands, attention feels like the thing we're chasing sometimes. And so should their first thing be trust or is it attention?

>> I'll start from the top. So I talk about the marketing funnel being dead. And the reason I talk about that and it's backed up in a lot of research and data and uh scientific papers is because it's not linear anymore. So what we used to have as awareness down into consideration down into conversion, it was a very sort of simple linear bucket that went straight through. Now in 2026, we have this concept of I guess discoverability is everywhere. So let's talk about this podcast for example. Someone may discover this podcast from a clip on Instagram. Someone may discover it when they're scrolling their YouTube algorithm looking for business advice. Someone may discover it when someone in their WhatsApp group chat sends it to them. So it's now not awareness, consideration, conversion. It's touch points of discoverability and it's how many touch points they need to experience of your brand before they convert. So it's messier. Then we think you have to think about the content funnel, right? So the content funnel still does exist and the content funnel looks like attention which leads to discoverability and understanding of the brand. Then you've got connection which is where someone like resonates, they see your content multiple times, they might convert into a follow. And then you've got sort of conversion into the brand at the bottom which is ultimately trust. So you've got like attention, connection, trust. That's sort of what the funnel looks like. So at the top you're not going after trust, right? Because trust takes time to build up. So the first time I see your content, I'm probably going to scroll past it in like two seconds unless it like hits with me. If it does, I'm probably not going to click on your page still because it's the first time I've seen it. If I get served it again and again and then my friend tells me about it and then I see it on another platform and then I see the founder talking about behind the scenes of the brand or an employee, I'm like, okay, there's like lots of moments here of capturing my attention. I'm going to go and have a look at the page. I'm going to go and maybe convert to the long form. And then over time the trust is built >> because trust is what happens when multiple touch points of your brand have reached your desired audience and you've offered them enough value to convert. So to answer your question, should brands be thinking about attention or trust because they feel conflicting? The top of the funnel that you need to think about is capturing attention always. And after capturing attention multiple times through various different touch points across multiple platforms, through your influence maps of discovery, you're going to build that trust. And I think that's why it's like so frustrating cuz, you know, I think the answer is always like, what's the key to social media? The key to it's always consistency, right? Did you ever see those platform sneakers? They're like these ugly I think they're still ugly, but they're like these ugly >> Someone's going to come at you for that. >> Yeah. They're like these like wedge sneakers. They were really in like 2012 or something like that. And I just remember like seeing them and being like, "They're so ugly." And I saw them enough times all over. My friends had them and then at a certain point I bought them, right? And I'm wearing these like wedge sneakers with like the Velcro straps. And it's because I was exposed to them enough times to the point where then it was like I started to like it. I think that that's the hardest part. We chase the views, we chase the virality, right? Like whether it's viral or not, I feel like sure that helps for exposure because it reaches more people, but the point is to keep doing that so that they see you several times, right? Yeah. I mean, virality is just a sugar rush. Like virality is a sugar hit. You get like the buzz, the excitement, and then what happens after a sugar rush is the come down. You're like, where is everyone that's happened? Because you haven't actually bought like your audience in. You've just got in front of a lot of people. Which is why I say to a brand like we can go viral. Like I could give you a list of 10 things we could do tomorrow. We create these videos right now, they're going to go viral because there is like a science and a math to it. Like if you understand how to capture people's attention at like the upwards part of a trend, you will you will go viral. I can't think of many situations where that should be the goal. The goal is to like always be getting in front of the desired target people and building a relationship with them over time. It's growing for that reason, not just growing for the sake of views. If it's purely for pleasure, go for it. Like have fun and enjoy. I'm in the game of like content for business outcomes. And if you don't know why you're creating that piece of content and what what business goal it serves, then I'd kind of just sit there and like, well, why have we why have we even got to the stage of it going live, >> right? >> You know, like that's the question we've got to be asking before it ever goes live is like for what? And how are we measuring success here? And it's really important that you get so clear on what you're measuring when you go in so that when it goes out and say it goes viral, you don't get distracted by that. You don't get distracted by the views because if you're not measuring views, it actually doesn't matter. I use myself as the example. Like I posted I've been posting this series called Pass Mike. First two um performed really well against the benchmarks of what like what I was measuring success as. That was like mainly driving conversation. So like the comments were really high, but the comments were really interesting. They weren't like AI bots or they weren't just emojis. there were people like had clearly watched the video, maybe watched it a couple of times and they were really engaging in conversation in the comments. So that was what I was trying to achieve with that series and the shares. So I posted a third episode the other day and it did okay in terms of views like it was fine but I wasn't paying any attention to that. I was paying attention to the conversation. It was really low and the quality wasn't there and I was therefore like okay I need to pick this apart like what didn't work. Why was I not driving conversation? I I came to the conclusion that actually it was a too simple of a conversation for the type of audience I've now built. It was a very introductory kind of conversation about what platform do I pick? And then I looked in the analytics and I got a popup from Instagram and it said this reel is overperforming in terms of follows. And so to Instagram, it's measured that reel as a success. And someone might see that and be like, okay, it's performed really well. Against the metrics that I laid out, it still didn't perform. You've got to know what you're measuring. And there are a million different things to measure, right? You can measure engagement rate. You can measure conversion from like to share. You can measure all of these DMs, like am I getting inquiries off the back of it, like actual tangible things. And if you don't know what you're measuring, it's really easy to be what I call like a paper bag in the wind and just go with the flow. And that's a dangerous place to be. I have like 40 questions. There's so much to unpack there. Cuz if those people in theory, let's say, you know, were the ideal customer that you're looking for, why wouldn't that be the right metric? Because if you were going to run an experiment at school, um, we're in the we're in the school room. We're in the science room. I I come back to it. It's really simple. Like when we run an experiment in science, if you don't know what you're going in to measure, then you don't know why you're creating the content. So for me, comments and shares were like the number one metric I was measuring. Shares suggests that people are sending it into other people's DMs and they're having a conversation about it, which is a really great place to be. And comments was like they wanted to chat with me about it. So I was driving conversation like Instagram telling me it had been a success based on followers. It's like yes okay cool as a byproduct it's brought in people but that wasn't what I set out to achieve like this reel has not been successful because what happens is if I look at that notification and go oh my god it's been a success followers I sit back and I go great success done in actual fact it hasn't performed against my benchmarks or my metrics. So I get to analyze and ask why because otherwise that just gets pushed to the side and we move on to the next and I might repeat that again next time. I remember when I when we were at DEO and we bring in freelance social media managers and I'd always ask them to do like a report each week on what had worked well and what hadn't. But what they do is they'd screenshot the real and screenshot the insights and just highlight and be like this one got more likes than the last one and then the next one. This one got more comments this week. Okay, this one had more shares. There was no direction with any of it. It was just trying to highlight something that had worked well with it. And what it prevents is growth because you don't unpick any of the failures or any of the learnings to then improve. So what happens the next week? You go, "This one did likes. This one did follows." And it's like everything was good this week. Okay. But what were we measuring? Did it work against the criteria for success? We've all got to know what we're measuring this week. And then we can go back and go, did we achieve that? If not, which is way more interesting to me. If not, why? Because you said earlier about um like the secret to social media success is consistency. Like of course it is like don't give up when everyone else would give up basically. But the actual formula for growth is consistency x experimentation because if you just keep being consistent, you will just plateau because you're not learning, you're not growing, you're not developing. You've got to find the opportunities for leveling up. So when the platform introduces a new feature, if you don't lean into it, you're going to get left behind. If a trend's happening that's super relevant to your industry, but you've got your content all lined up and batched for this month, then you're never going to experiment and find the opportunity to grow. It's like you've got to be looking at what's working, what's not, more importantly, and be adapting your content going forward. Because if you just keep posting, then eventually you're just going to flatline. You only get that hockey stick like compounding growth graph if you are willing to keep trying new things obsessively every single week on the level of consistency that you're like that's achievable for you. But how do you know which metric you should care about? Like we're facing this now. This is why I'm asking because we're so new. Should right now be the season of trying to grow that following and then fostering those conversations or should I be aiming for the conversations and knowing that that will lead to the following down the line? I would say you probably want to have goals or what I call destinations in mind in any one season. So I do quarterly. So per quarter I will go okay what are the three things I'm trying to achieve. So right now for example in my life I want to increase my rate of inbound speaking inquiries and I want more global inquiries. The second one is sign a book deal and the third one for example is I want to grow my YouTube from 10k to 100k. So what I do then is I go okay if I want to achieve that one I need to know what content types are going to achieve that. I need to know what content types are going to achieve that. So for example, if I want to increase my speaking inquiries, I know that I need more uh formats of my speaking. I need to build more credibility. I need to get in front of the right people, i.e. speakers, bookers. So I know that when I post a speaking clip, the way I'm measuring success for this is like how many emails am I getting? And then I always ask I say where did you discover me or like where did you find out about me? The book deal for example, I know that the formats that are going to achieve like a book deal is probably like awareness, reach, audience size. Publisher is really interested in like the rate that you're growing. So yeah, it's great if you've got a million followers, but if you've been stuck at a million for 5 years, it's like not really interesting for them. They want to know that they're finding writers of books who are on the rise. So I need to prove to them like consistent growth month after month. So therefore, I am thinking about followers. So I'm thinking about what content types can I post every single month that are going to generate growth and following. So follower is the metric for that. And then like retention of the follower. So making sure I'm not having like a high drop off of follows. So you can have multiple different formats happening at the same time as long as you know how you're measuring success for each of them against the goals you're trying to achieve and maybe you are in a season of growth but at some point you're going to have to go okay what about loyalty and retention and you probably need to be speaking those both truths at the same time. So some of your content needs to be going after growth and some of it needs to be conversation driving with your current existing followers to drive conversation and keep people engaged in that space. So your balance is going to be so individual to what you're trying to achieve. Maybe it's 2080, maybe it's platform dependent, maybe one platform is a growth platform, maybe one platform is a retention platform. Like that's where strategy comes into it because it's like about mapping out your goals and where they sit. It is a great time to move into talking about how to apply that for someone who wants to improve their social media strategy in 2026. I want to talk about what's what they should do and we're we have a little show and tell that uh we can go over together. Before we get back to the video, this is generally in the spirit of Diary of a CEO where Steven Bartlett would go 60some percent of you are not subscribed. Well, um, on our channel, it's currently looking like 90 something%. So, if you could help us get that number down and subscribe, that would be so helpful. It will help us so much to continue making these episodes for you, bring on great guests, and well, yeah, as we always say, keeping the lights on. All right, guys, let's get back to the video.

Okay, so I've never shared this before. This is what I do when I do my one-to-one personal content resets. And obviously storytelling is such a huge part of what I do. And I think people get on board with understanding how content meets business goals when it's told through a story. That's what I found with my clients. So if I go in and I'm like, your content needs to like meet your destinations and meet your business goals. They're like, okay, like I don't really know where to start. So I've made this sort of analogy which is about a city and the city is you and your brand and your business. So like to take New York City, right? New York City like people go there for a reason. They come and visit the city because it has amazing food and drink or it has an amazing energy like people arrive for a reason. So I start with Grand Central like being the center of your city map and that has got to be your why. Your why is your anchor. It's where everything starts. It's where everything comes back to. It's how the whole flow works. Let's just do it for myself. My why is like be the intersection for creators and brands. So that's why people visit my city. That's why they show up. They want to learn about that topic. And I go, "Okay, where do I want people to go to when they're in my city?" So in New York City, you would go to Time Square, you would go to Statue of Liberty. So the destinations I want to get people to with my content is increase my inbound speaking inquiries. So I want to like 10x my speaking. So that's destination one. Destination two is book deal. And destination three, I want to grow my YouTube subscriber base to 100K. So if we want to get to the destinations, we need lines that take us from central station to the destination. So your lines are what I call your signals. What are the signals that's going to carry someone from your why through to the destination? So my signals for achieving this goal is that I need to increase my credibility. I need to demonstrate an ability to speak and I need to talk about unique topics. So when people think about booking a guest for an event, they think about me. For a book deal, I need to own certain topics. I need to really, really have authority on certain topics, they also need to see engagement and they need to see incremental growth because if they don't see engagement on my content, they don't see incremental growth. They don't think they're going to sell any books. And for 100K, I need to build awareness for my target audience. Currently, we've got all these people in Grand Central in your why. They've arrived because they're interested in your brand. But we need to know the right kind of people who we need to get onto each line. So now we need to think about the passengers for each line. So the passengers that we need to get on the speaking line are people who book speakers for events, corporates, like the type of people who I need to attract who are going to book me here. For my book deal, it's literary agents. It's like talent agencies. 100k is my target audience, which is people who want to build, ambitious people, people who are driven, and people who care about content. Immediately we've identified like the audience that we're going to take along each line. And then we need to think about the stops along the line that are going to keep people going. And the stops are your content formats. And we are trying to move people from the central area that they've arrived in and keep them on the line of interest. They take you to the destination and these are your content pieces that are going to do that. So it's like okay, what are the formats that are going to take a passenger along the line of credibility to reach the speaking goal? A lot of people think about the content they want to create and then they think, "Okay, how am I going to measure it?" They don't think about how it feeds into the wider network of your brand and how it's going to build towards a goal over time. So, it's all about goal, signal, content, it works backwards from there. So, when I think about that and I know that the signal is going to be credibility, I think, okay, the formats are going to be cut downs of me on podcasts. That's going to really help increase my credibility for speaking. It's going to be um short form videos where I can talk on a specific topic with a really good amount of credibility and it could even be written like it could be writing on LinkedIn but am I holding attention like am I able to hold attention on a certain topic repeatedly so those become my content formats and then what you need to do is you obviously need to create your timetable like how is this train system going to run the timetable becomes uh your content plan right? so the timet says okay you're going to post two posts for the credibility line this week, two for the authority line and two for the attention line. And then you repeat it for a few weeks and at the end of the month you go, okay, have we taken people along this line? I.e., have we increased speaking? Have we had any inquiries about a book deal? Have we grown our audience closer to 100K? If yes, great. We keep doing more of the same thing. If not, we need to look at our timetable and shift it up. I redo this quarterly. So with my own brand, I have like a Q1 version of this which I'm reviewing every single month and I'm understanding like how far passengers are along this line to achieving this goal. And what happens over time is you start with three and then your network expands. You build your business, you hire a team, you have more resource, you have more capability to build new lines. Eventually this becomes like an incredible network map, which is kind of what happened with Steven the DE CEO. Obviously, we had the podcast, he had his businesses, he had merch, he had shows, he had the book, and we were having to serve all of those goals all at once. So, it was a case of how do we serve all those different goals and all those different people with different formats and keep them all happy, moving along, ticking the lines, happy without any breakdowns. And yeah, I'm a visual person, so it really helps me. I am, too. Normally, I'm so used to seeing like spreadsheets. Yeah. You were like, "Can you bring um like, can you bring spreadsheets? Can you?" I was like, "I can do a drawing." This is incredible to hear because I feel like this just actually makes things make a lot more sense for a lot of people who are watching at home. You mentioned two things that I think are really important. We've we've you know we've spoken about audience and you've spoken about attention. How do you find the right audience? I think people just don't spend enough time at the start understanding that there are different audience types. I think people especially entrepreneurs they are so passionate about the product or thing they're creating that they want everyone to care about as much as they do. They'll go but who is it for? Everyone. But uh who is using it? Well, like anyone can use it. And the reality is if you try and speak to everyone, you're not going to speak to anyone because social media is this like vast like massive place that millions and millions of people are spending every day. And the algorithm is working so hard to try and serve those people the content that they think they're going to care about. I mean, for goodness sake, on Instagram now, you can choose your algorithm via keywords. So you can go into the explore page and for example like I'm building a house, I'm planning a wedding and I am building a business. Obviously would not recommend doing all three of those things at once to anyone but here we are. So I've literally gone into my algorithm and I've been like wedding 2026 bride renovation and entrepreneurship. And so I've told Instagram exactly what I want to see. So Instagram is like okay we can get rid of 99% of content on this platform for this girl and we can just serve her the things within her niche. If you are not thinking and reverse engineering as if you are Instagram as a business person then you are speaking to no one because all Instagram is trying to do as quickly as possible is figure out who is this piece of content for so we can salvage them. It's not working against you. It's trying to work for you. But if you make their life hard and don't make it clear who that piece of content is for, whether it's through what you speak about during the reel or or the piece of content or the keywords, the caption, the tags, the location, like it's studying all of the data within that to try and serve it to an audience. If you are not so clear on who that is, you will get shown to no one. So, I'll work with someone and they'll say, "Yeah, I think we're trying to reach like 20 to 40 year olds in the world." Yeah. And I'm like, where are they spending their time? How what is their morning routine? What do they look like? Who are their friends? What group chats are they in? Like, I need to know that level of granular detail to be able to speak to them. Like, be in the WhatsApp communities, be in the Facebook groups. I remember uh I once I was working with a brand and there was a brand for new moms. There were all these incredible Facebook groups where all these new moms cuz they, you know, they're like so lost and they're sleepless nights and they just join these Facebook groups and they told me about them. They were like, "There are these Facebook groups." And I was like, "Are you in them?" And they were like, "Oh, no, no, cuz we're not new moms." And I was like, "You will be getting all of your insight and data from that space. Like that is where you need to be hanging out. At least like create an account and spend time in that space just to hear the problems. Like spend time like sit with the people. We consume so much every single day. We are absolutely flooded from every single direction with noise, with content, with marketing, with advertising. If you want to cut through, to get someone to actually pay attention to you, even convert to you through a follower or a purchase, you have to be speaking their language. You have to be solving their problems. And what will happen is your views, your engagement, everything will go from like zero to 100 because you will be getting in front of the right people. You've got to infiltrate their habits. You've got to insert yourself in their daily routines because when you nail that down, you will explode within that niche of of that category of that individual. How do you know for sure that it is the right audience? Is it the dollars? I think it's a little bit of everything. It's like, okay, who has the purchase power here? Like, who is spending the money? Who can make the decisions? And don't get me wrong, like there will be moments where you pivot. So, you might go in and you think, okay, I think I'm building for this category. And then you have to look and listen and and be on the ground with those people and go, "Okay, I thought it was this. I actually think it's like over here." That may change. And you have to be willing to listen to the data and accept when you get it wrong. Most founders are so romantic about their idea of what it should be that they lose sight of being able to pivot. I think some of the best founders and entrepreneurs I've ever met, like being able to pivot and pivot fast and like not faf around and just be able to make a decision and move on. It's like, can I remove my ego from this situation and do what's best for my audience here? And then like spend time in your analytics. Are the people you think you're speaking to actually the people you're speaking to? So if I think I want to speak to new moms and I look in the back end of my demographics and it's like 45 to 55 year old men, then something's going wrong. So that audience gap is something that you can close by just paying attention to the demographics and going actually do we need to switch our content or do we need to switch our audience here?

So, if someone is ready to move forward and they're ready to execute and they want to really hone in on mastering, you know, social media and marketing in general so that they can garner attention for their brand, right? I want to go back to the attention. The way that I'm understanding this is that, for example, the first time I heard you on a podcast, immediately I trusted you from that video. However, you got my attention before I saw that video. You got my attention through Diver CEO. >> How many minutes of that video did you watch? >> Hour plus podcast. >> So, you spent an hour with me, right? >> Mhm. So, when we think about what I call memorable minutes versus forgettable seconds, okay, forgettable seconds are empty views, it's a real that gets a million views and people can't recall a single thing that was said in it because it was like funny or whatever they watch for 3 seconds, they scroll past, they go on with their day. Imagine how many 3 second, 10 second, 20 second clips someone's got to watch before they spend an hour with you. >> So, that might mean they have to come across your content for 6 months, a year, I don't know, before they build that trust. you've just spent an hour with me. So that is like what we call memorable minutes and we're just thinking imagine like a a jar as a brand or as a content creator. I'm trying to get you to spend as many memorable minutes as you can with me. The fact that I managed to get you spend an hour with me means we've gone from like zero of attention to trust within that hour. But through short form that's going to take weeks, months, years. So it doesn't mean to say that you can't go from awareness to trust or attention to trust within one asset or one video. It's just you're never going to achieve that through short form. It can absolutely happen in long form and that's why I'm completely obsessed with like long form as a media form.

Grace, when I hear you talk, you know, you are so knowledgeable about all of all things marketing, all things brands. You understand it because you have dedicated a incredible amount of your 20s, I mean all of your 20s to this. But it didn't start off this way. And so I want to go back. Where did we start? I started getting um rejected from all of my uh university choices. But I ended up going to a fine university. It just wasn't my first choice. And I meet my life partner there. I make my best friends. I study history and I finished that. Um so I think I applied for like 50 grad schemes, got rejected from all of them. Uh didn't have a clue what I was doing. Landed myself in an internship in experiential marketing because it was literally the only thing that accepted me. Uh and then I kind of turned around and I was like I think I want to be on TV and I think I want to tell stories uh as a news presenter as a journalist and I go study journalism. I'd got four uh work opportunities lined up through with the the BBC with global like some of the big companies in the UK. I was like this is it. I'm running the world shuts down. All the opportunities close their doors. They don't invite anyone new in because we're in a state of panic and crisis. And so that's when I turned to social media and I just started posting content and it was so cringe. Like it was painfully cringe and it was like hey the world's locked down and all the opportunities have closed but like can I would love to go for a virtual coffee with someone in this world. I was inundated with responses. I had execs from like the biggest studios in the UK being like let's jump on a call. Like they were bored in lockdown. They didn't know what to do. I had so many people and that was the moment where I didn't realize what I was doing but I started building a personal brand and it was the first time I realized that a personal brand was going to be a magnet for opportunities. Eventually led to me building my like uh social media management business and I I started building my brand online. I just shared the journey like I shared the messiness, I shared the learnings, I offered as much value as I could at the time as I was learning. And so what happened when Steve uh who at the time Steven Bartlett who was only really known I would say if you I always say if you lived in Manchester which is a city in the north in the UK because that's where he'd built his business. He was like really well known in that area of the world or you worked in social media because he built this incredible social media marketing agency and loads of people looked up to him. So when he posted on um LinkedIn looking for a social media manager because he just left his agency and he wanted a personal social media manager. I didn't have to do much selling because I'd been selling myself through my outbound social media strategy all that time. And it's funny because I then went in to build his brand and the direct co brand and I was high number three of what ended up being 120 by the time I left. And we were just not willing not to win. So we would work harder. We would do more experiments. We would try new things. We would think about it differently. We had naivity on our side which was a blessing. None of us had ever worked in podcasting before, but we all understood the first principles of like attention and storytelling.

>> And so you join, you're hire number three. What was the subscriber count of the channel at the time when you joined?

>> On YouTube? It was 8,000. And when the day you left, 13 million. So like we went from 8,000 on YouTube to 100,000 in the first year. And then the next year we did 100K to a million and then the next year we did 1 million to 5 million. So the rate of compounding was evidence to us. Like it wasn't just this theory or this thing of like compounding consistency. We were seeing it happen in real time. What were those early days like? Intense. We sacrificed pretty much everything for it. Like we'd had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. Worked all day every day. But it was the

best. Like it was so messy. And every day was like, "Guys, we've got to get an episode live on Monday. Who are we going to get to film this Friday?" All on the phone trying to find guests because we had no credibility yet. Like why would anyone come on our show? And the rules were like we're not willing to put anything out that doesn't feel like our current standard. And we don't skip. Like we just don't skip. Like it goes live at 8 a.m. no matter what. Like all cost. He was like if we don't skip and we keep getting better each week, we will become the biggest in the world. Like there's no sign off. There was no layers of uh decision-making. Like Steve sat me down on day one. He was like, "So you going to start posting?" And I was like, "Huh?" I was like, "On your channels?" He was like, "Well, if you don't post, you don't learn." And I remember Steve saying to me, "Your first 90 days is going to be the steepest learning curve of your life and then you're going to go and do it." So I just spent as much time learning, absorbing, listening, activating, experimenting as I possibly could. And it was that mindset honestly that like I carried through for the next 5 years. Like I would have social media managers start and I was like, "So what are you going to post today?" And again, they'd have that like panic moment. And then my role became building and scaling the team to also have that mindset.

I have like a lightning round of questions cuz I'm like I've always like wondered these things. So, first and foremost, who were you editing because I know that you guys got an editor after you were editing the videos at the beginning. Who was editing that?

>> No. So, the initial team was um I joined he had a manager. So, Dom who technically I guess was my manager but we didn't really have managers. Um and Jack who was hire number one who is co-founder of the Diary CEO. He is editor producer. So, me and him worked alongside each other to yeah do pretty much everything. So, Jack was the one who actually did the video editing. So like he would do a first pass.

Oh no, I would sit. No, I would sit. So we had a studio. We had to sit in the studio in death silence. Like if you made even like a peep, it would ruin the whole like the whole show. So we'd sit there like these episodes like 2 hours long like all sweating cuz the air con had to be turned off.

>> In his kitchen, right?

>> In his kitchen. Like I'm sat behind the desk making notes about the trailer. Then I'd go away with Jack. We'd be like, "Okay, I think it's going to be this bit, this bit, this bit." We'd then work together to figure out what it would look like, what the hook was, would Steve would get involved because we all were sitting around a table like this. We were working to the wire pretty much every episode because there's like no one in the team. And his Wi-Fi was not strong enough in his house. It would get to like 4:00 a.m. the day of the episode. And he would have to cycle to his brother's porch. His brother had high-speed Wi-Fi to get the episode live. And then he would text me at 6:00 and pass the button on. And then I would get all the assets ready, link it back to the for. And we did that every week for like two years before we started scaling a team. And then I would pass the responsibility on. And we and we developed systems that meant people didn't have to stay up all night. And we were growing and scaling the team. We were getting better caliber of guests. We were doing better edits. We obviously hired incredible trailer editors. And it just set the precedent for what we were going to do. We repeatedly became and named the top podcast in the world or your only Zack behind Joe Rogan or the biggest views. When those things happen, someone would send a message and be like, "Okay, cool. So what's this going live tomorrow?" It was never for those things. It was for the idea that we were just creating the blueprint for what this industry would be. And every day it was our responsibility to get better and better and better to keep raising the bar for the industry. And I think when you're not chasing like the accolades and you're chasing something that's a bit more meaningful and deeper and intrinsic, you can just keep going for a lot longer, you know, because otherwise what happens is you reach those like mountain tops and then you realize that it wasn't ever a mountain top and you just like the next mountains appeared in front of you and you just get too tired. You're like, I just can't keep chasing the next thing. But it was never about chasing. It was like growing an industry and it was our responsibility to like keep growing that and that's I think what fueled us as well as like the learning like I never stopped learning every single day in that business from the day one till the end of when I left every day was a learning day there were so many incredible minds in there the guests that we bought on the conversations I was exposed to like I just saw it as the best learning opportunity of probably the fastest learning experience I'll ever go through in my life.

I want to talk about that and how you guys were testing. But I'm I'm actually very curious. I have to ask this. You talked about how it was hard to get guests at the beginning for anyone that is because I mean we're there, right? But um I am curious like in those early days getting guests. What were you saying to get them on there? Was was it everyone on the team was trying to pull someone in? Was it mainly Steve that was like he was in charge of that?

Steve never wanted to ask a guest to come on to the show, but I don't think without his existing audience, we would have ever been able to get any guests. I think it's almost impossible to start a podcast or a long form show without existing audience because getting people to trust you enough to spend 10, 20, 30 an hour with you without having that existing audience base, I think, is so hard. So whenever I see sort of people going, I just want to start a podcast, but they have like a thousand followers on Instagram. I'm like, that's going to be a hard climb. Why don't you work with someone who's got an existing audience because it's just going to make your life so much easier. But I mean, at the start, our whole mindset was it's a numbers game. If we message a,000 people, we're going to get 10 people who say yes. So we would message a,000 people every single week. And when we hit the limit on Steve's DMs, we would find their emails. We'd create a new account. We would do anything. It was all about what we could control. Maybe they have a book coming out and it makes sense that they're on a press run and they will come and do your podcast cuz they're doing a load of other podcasts. We tried to be where we could strategic about the guest because we knew that one guest would unlock another guest would unlock another guest. So we had like gates of unlock to reach certain guests and we were just trying to find like the people around that person. If we were like, "Hey, we want Obama who they eventually did last year. We're going to start here and demonstrate that we can have a political conversation with like Boris Johnson. How do we get Boris Johnson? Okay, well, we need to have this person over here. And then eventually the person in the middle would be like, "Oh, I've seen that show. I've seen a lot of my friends go and I trust it. Oh, come on."

It's the same marketing strategy that Triangle Bikinis used to get Kendall Jenner to wear their bikinis. I don't know if you've heard the story.

>> No.

>> So, this Australian bikini brand, they went completely viral uh in the late 2016. And they wanted Kendall Jenner to wear their bikini. Like, they knew that if Kendall Jenner wore it, they were going to go viral. They were going to take off. They needed her to wear it. They tried to get hold of Kendall. She obviously gets a million inquiries a day. So they were like, "How do we actually get to her?" So what they did is they found her circle of friends and they sent like 10 bikinis to all of her friends. All the friends start wearing the bikinis because they've been gifted it. They're not super famous. They're like, "This is so cool. These are nice bikinis." Kendall Jenner's team reached out to Triangle and are like, "Hey, um, Kendall really wants some bikinis. All her friends are wearing them. Like can you like sort her some out?" So they like infiltrated the friendship group. They built trust and they got proximity to her. So we always had the same sort of mindset. It was like how do you reach that person? Okay, well let's go to like this first layer and then get closer and then get closer and then we'll finally like reach the target and then once we put that target unlocks that target unlocks that target.

What's an example of data that directly changed something big within the show?

I think when YouTube introduced the retention graphs that was a big game changer for us. I think we play around a lot with understanding like where retention spikes would happen. It's all changed now, but at the time we had guests that would fit into four different categories. And we'd have understanding that within that category, retention spikes would happen at certain moments. So in the edit of the episode, for example, like on future episodes within that industry, we would lead with the retention spikes and try and make as many retention spikes that we could create within an episode. And that was a big game changer for us because we found that we were always starting episodes would tell us about your story. And actually, people just want to get to the action. They want to get to the advice. So we would uh Jack would create the edit so that that came first.

I mean a huge thing was when we introduced like pre-production testing. So what we used to do at the very start was we put the episode live and we test two thumbnails and whichever one got more clickthrough rate was the thumbnail that it became. And we were like why do we wait until the out to test that? Because if we knew what people clicked on then we could make the title it. Then we could frontload the episode with that topic. Like we could do so much the episode if we knew that information before. So when we would record the episode, someone would be in the room, very manual at the start, writing down the lines that they thought were like the key lines based on understanding of what people click on. We put that all into a spreadsheet and turn them all into thumbnails. And all of those thumbnails would go into pre-production testing. So we'd understand what people were clicking on more than others. And sometimes you'd put like a title out and it would get like 20% more clickthrough rate. And our whole mindset was like, wouldn't it be such a shame if that podcast episode, which is the same podcast episode that they're going to get no matter what they click on, got 20% less clicks because we didn't know what the right title was. So, our whole mindset became kill the guesswork. We do meta ad testing. At some point, we were testing 100 thumbnails per episode. It was something that scaled. There's a whole team dedicated to it now. I mean, they've created softwares that automatically run the whole thing. So, it's it's a completely different space to what it was, but it was the same mindset. It was like, wouldn't it be a shame if this episode never saw the light of day because we didn't get the title right and we knew the episodes were valuable, but we wanted to work on increasing who saw it and the visibility towards it. I mean, that's where the trailers all came from as well. Like, we never saw ourselves as a podcast same as you guys. We we saw us as a show. And so, therefore, we weren't playing the podcast game. We were playing the TV, the media, the movie game, and that was all like, how do you get bums on seats in a cinema? We just always thought about it differently, I guess. And the packaging was really important.

From the very beginning, you somehow had the quantity and still maintained an an element of of quality that you felt were like was the bare minimum that you guys needed to have. Is that fair to say?

It's funny you say that because if you act if you look back to the start compared to what gets produced today, it's like a primary school versus like PhD. Like yeah, I guess at the time in the moment it was good enough and we had standards of what it had to be and we weren't willing to put anything out that didn't meet that. So we had I remember we sometimes would be up against the wire. We'd have an interview and it just wasn't good enough and the guest just didn't perform in the way we needed to. And obviously that level has increased over time to the point where there's an entire production team pre-production. They do pre-production calls. They speak with them about what works, what doesn't work, how they're going to have to deliver the conversation. Uh they do some like speaker training with them. It's like a whole another level of production now.

>> Speaker training as well.

>> Yeah. Like and making sure that they've there's evidence of them being able to deliver on podcast in the way that we needed to because half of the work is from the guest, right? So as it scaled the quality has continuously improved and I think that comes from like the hiring mentality they have like they are not willing to hire anyone who's not the best and they are absolutely unshakable about that. So like I remember trying to hire a role below me ahead of social and I must have done 50 in-person interviews and to get to an in-person interview you've had to have gone through about four stages to get there and still no one was right because we were just not willing to bring in anyone who wasn't the very best at what they did and understood the culture of what we were building. It was an understanding that if you brought in anyone who wasn't at that caliber it was actually disrespectful for like the people who were there. So, I wasn't willing to bring in anyone who wasn't going to raise the bar of everything we were doing.

>> My gosh. For anyone that's watching, they may see this and be like, "Well, I'm not there yet." But at the end of the day, you guys did start where everyone else starts, right? So, to that point, there is a a version of like, okay, like there are steps that will increase your odds of success. And you guys talk a lot about the 1% better. You know, our company literally lives by that because of you guys. What's also crazy is that I mean people like me are studying it, right? We study what you guys figured out in those early days and it's really what you locked in when you were sitting all together at that same table that I think set the tone of where the industry went, which is really, really, really impressive.

So, you were around a lot of very successful individuals. What did you learn from being around all of those people?

The common thing I saw with sort of the more successful people that we had at the table, they were willing to just start like build the plane while it's flying, figure out the mistakes as it was happening and glue it all together and make it work. It's like why I started YouTube way before I was like ready. Like I don't even know what being ready is. But like I was like, I'm just going to pick up the camera. I ordered a camera the next day. I started filming and the next week I posted because if I didn't start, I would be now in this position 6 months later with no learnings under my belt, still trying to figure it out. probably still going to post a really average episode to start with. Like if you don't start, you don't learn. And the other part is like the pivot. How many entrepreneurs start a business and it fails? How quickly can you pick yourself up from that rejection or that failure and start again and not sit in it? So now I get to work with like all sorts of founders and people. And I think those like identifying traits are sort of what I look for when I want to work with people. I'm like, do you have a bias towards optimism, a bias towards action? Like those two things. And they're different things cuz like action is make it happen no matter the odds. like if I asked you'd like to do something, are you going to figure out every way to make the impossible happen tomorrow? And everyone at the team had that as well. We'd have a guest in the UK whose all the flights were canceled and we had to shoot that episode that day in LA. There was no part of our brain that said they wouldn't be in that seat by 3 p.m. It was just how I mean, we had like billionaires turn up and they turned up by themselves in a pair of jeans. They'd driven themselves there or they got the tube or something and they were like just really like human normal people. And I think having proximity to people with that level of wealth and that level of success and seeing such normality within them is what made it all feel sort of attainable and relatable.

Your fingerprints were all over this, right? And I know that there is this phenomenon that you know once you've built something or you've owned something and you've had ownership in something, it makes it harder to let go of. So I can only imagine, you know, the next chapter is is that you ultimately decide to leave the diary of a CEO. So what was going through your mind during this time and what led you to that decision?

It's funny because it was almost a year ago, probably like to the week that I had the conversation about leaving. And it was something that I sat with for a while and I played out lots of different scenarios and I spoke to lots of people who were close to me. I'd spoken to people who'd left. I asked what the world was like on the other side. Um, and I basically had come to this point where I the choice was taken away from me because I'd been building and scaling my personal brand at the same time as working there. It was a marketing channel we took advantage of in terms of commercial partnerships, in terms of uh organic growth, in terms of hiring. So, it was very intertwined and building my brand had started to lead sort of some opportunities that I didn't want to say no to. And I built a team of 20 who were working across multiple different shows. the system was running and it was kind of starting to run without me because I would be traveling for my own brand, traveling for work, meeting new teams and we were taking the blueprint of what we'd created, the drive of CEO and applying it to all these new shows. I sort of felt like my ceiling had been reached here and as I said earlier like I love startup phase. I love getting my hands dirty, being in the messy middle and I really wanted to get back to that. And I was really happy with the people I had in place that I knew they were going to care about what I built as much as I did. And I mean, I sobbed my eyes out on my last day. Like I just I'm not a crier, but like I cried and cried and cried and cried. Like I felt like I was grieving something that was no longer going to be my truth. And these people in that business are still some of my closest friends. was like in my last letter I sent to my team, I was like, um, the flag is now yours. Like, keep waving it. Like, keep like carry it on for me.

What scared you the most about walking away?

So many things. I think identity was a huge one. Like I would do these podcasts. I would go and speak on stage and I'd be introduced as the brand director, the driver of CEO, Grace Andrews. And I was like, who am I when it's just Grace Andrews and what does that mean? and also like the the fear of going forward of I don't know who I am without the diary of so that was one of the biggest fears and I guess the second one was without the comfort blanket of this huge success of what we've created can I do this again or was it just right time right place right people it took a minute I think to build up the confidence again to go no I I know what I'm talking about I remember putting up those first episodes of the vlog and I think I said something along those lines of I'm going to find out if people are here for me or they're here for like proximity to Steve and then I remember the feedback I had and people were like I'm I've never followed you because of the dire I followed you because of your content and your story and I really had to sort of build up that confidence bank again. I think I have this thing in my notes app which is like my confidence bank. It's basically like a bank of when I get positive feedback and it's not always positive feedback. Sometimes I get a DM from someone and they've never engaged with any of my content publicly, but they'll send me a message and they'll say, "I just wanted to let you know that like your advice has been the reason that we've been able to scale our marketing." And so what I do is in the moments where I'm having a bit of a wobble or during these last six months being like, "Who am I, what am I, where am I going?" It's like truth and evidence that I can come back to. We're all going to have days where we wake up and we're like, "What am I doing? Do I even know what I'm talking about?" Like, it's just cold hard truth that can't be denied. like that's that's real and collecting that evidence is something that really helps my brain balance out the noise sometimes.

I think the thing that I really related to when you started you from the beginning were like I'm actually not quite sure 100% what it is that like I'm going to form or what I'm going to build specifically. I just know that it's something and you know everyone was like this is all a marketing ploy. She knows exactly what she's doing. And I was like, "No, no, no. I actually have no idea." Like, people talk about building in public. Like, I was figuring it out in public. And I was like, "I want to show this part because I listen to so many podcasts. I'm addicted to podcasts. I love founder stories. It's like my favorite indulgence." And they always skip. They're like, "How did you figure out what it was that you actually wanted to do?" And I was like, "No one documents this." Like, entrepreneurship is so glamorized and glorified. And the reality is is it's really freaking hard sometimes and that comes at a toll. I think this polished fake unattainable world puts entrepreneurship on this pedestal that feels so unachievable for people. And the reality is is like, it's hard out here. We're all figuring it out as we go along. It's messy. And I didn't see anyone having panic attacks and telling me they were also building a successful business. I didn't see anyone saying this week has just been really hard and there's been no highs and it's I've been in like working from my bed office and I haven't got dressed all week and this is the reality of building and scaling a business and I didn't see that. So I want to show that and I want to show that I can build something great and that is my reality as well. And don't get me wrong like I have amazing highs too like I'll go from that and the next day I'll be invited to like a PR influencer breakfast. I'm living this like Hannah Montana life, but then you realize that like everyone and you sit down at the breakfast and you go, "How are you doing?" And my friend turned to me last week and she was like, "Honestly, this has been one of the worst weeks um of building this business." But like here we are all smiles. Do you know what I mean? So I need to show some of that because I think it's probably more important than showing the shiny success. Enough people do that.

Speaking of shiny success, you recently hit a very big milestone, 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is huge. And not only that and on top of it, you launch community service, but I think the beautiful thing is seeing how the messy middle has paid off and especially coming to the point where you really have identified what you want to do. Going back to what you were talking about, making that decision to leave the world that you knew, we had this principle about find your allies. And I think in a lot of ways, I'm sure it was really scary because it almost felt like you were leaving those allies behind. But that being said, those allies are still very much here. So much so that we have a message from them >> for you.

>> Grace Andrews, this is for you.

>> Naughty.

>> Hi mate. Just thought I'd leave you a quick message to remind you just how proud I am of you and how happy I am for you. And you both know how much you've helped me. We both know that whenever I just send a text or WhatsApp or voice note or call, you're always there to give me more lessons and more advice. And that's the thing that I'll always be thankful for the most is just how much of a wonderful human being you are. And that I'm privileged that I get to say, >> "Log, sky's the limits. I'm incredibly excited to see where you go and what you do." and I had zero zero in surprises that you would go on to do amazing things.

>> A quick note to share how proud I personally am of you and how much of an inspiration you are to me on everything that you've done since leaving. You've just gone out there and absolutely proven to everyone that it's possible. That in itself is a huge inspiration. You should be so proud of what you've done.

>> It's always been my the greatest privilege for me to watch you grow into the woman you are today. And I'm so so glad the whole world gets to see how incredible you are and how inspiring you are. And I'm missing you lots and I wish you could be with us, but I am cheering you from afar.

>> 10,000 followers on YouTube is huge. I can't wait for you to hit 100,000. No doubt that will be sometime very soon. I love you lots and I'm so proud of you.

>> I am so proud of watching you become the person you have. from being at the DA CEO together and growing the platform pages and podcast to getting to go up on stage with you and you were there for my first talk on stage and you showed me that it was possible to do things like that and now I get to do that which is wild but it all started because you showed us that was possible.

>> How lucky am I? like that shows like why it was so so hard to make the decisions for you because the people are there are like the most wonderful people in the entire world. So this is just a proof of of the legacy that you've created there and the legacy you're going to continue to create. Maybe you may have left that project but those people are still with you. I personally want to thank you so much because you've been a mentor of mine without even knowing me for a very long time. And you know, when we first started the show, one of my dreams was to interview you.

>> Crazy. And you are just truly such an inspiration. I mean that with every bone in my body because I know that I'm one of those people that would not be chasing my own dream if it weren't because you're in the world. So, thank you so much.

>> It's just been the most phenomenal experience. So, it's a privilege and thank you so much for having me.

>> Thank you.

>> All right, guys. You know the drill. We are going to be diving into the anatomy of Grace's dream. We're going to be going over the principles that came up in Grace's journey. And because there are so many, we are going to be putting up a list of all of them. And we're just going to be touching on the few that we find to be the most important. And if there are any that you want us to touch on again in a future video, let us know. All right, let's dive in.

All right, our first principle is the proximity principle. So this principle is basically that your environment shapes your outcomes. Meaning being physically present around certain people or places or ideas actually increases your odds of success. And when you look at Grace's story, she didn't stumble into working with Steve. She literally chose it deliberately. She even talks about how she applied to that role knowing that being around him would accelerate her career. And there are plenty of studies that prove that who you have in your proximity matters a lot. There's a professor at Harvard Business School named David McClelland who did foundational research on motivation and achievement. And one of the most powerful things that he discovered was that your success is heavily influenced by a reference group. And basically this is a small number of people that you spend the most amount of time with. And so by deliberately choosing that reference group, the people that we learn from, the people that we compare ourselves to, we significantly shape our own motivations and achievements. And this means that certain people set really high standards for us. meaning being around them actually makes us better. And there are people on the other hand that do the exact opposite and make us worse. And I think the thing about the proximity principle is that sometimes it feels like it's not in our control or that it is something that is like really hard to change because where you live or the co-workers that you have around you, a lot of these elements don't really feel like they're in our control. But when you really think about it, when you really think about all the principles that we have control over, I would honestly say that proximity is the thing that we have the most control over. Maybe the job that you have right now or the place that you live right now is not something that you can change at the moment, but look at your friend group. Look at the place that you go get coffee. Look at the activities that you do on the weekend. And so right now, if you are in a place in your career where you want to level up, I want you to ask yourself this. Who are the top three people in your field that if you were in their orbit would change the trajectory of your life? And ask yourself, what is one thing that you could do this week to get closer to them? A lot of times you're just one person away from making the dream happen.

All right, moving on to the success loop. The success loop is take action, fail, pivot, and you do that over and over again until that failure turns into success. Now, the most successful people, they will go in that cycle over and over and over again till they actually succeed in whatever it is that they're trying to test. Now, most people will go through a success loop cycle in maybe a week, a month, sometimes months. When you look at Grace's story, they were going through the success loop on a constant basis. They were figuring out what was going to work, what was actually going to get them to a place where they were growing. They were sometimes doing a success loop a day, maybe multiple of them. They took it so seriously that they literally have a head of failure in experimentation, which her job, Grace Miller, by the way, she helped us out in setting up that whole surprise at the end. So truly, thank you so much, Grace. But they literally have a head of failure and experimentation which shows you how seriously they take the success loop. And so Grace was implementing this in her social media strategy when she first started from day one all the way until she became the brand director at Flight Story.

This leads us into the volume principle. The volume principle is kind of what it sounds like. It's that success becomes predictable when you increase the number of high quality attempts that you make. Grace talks about how their whole mindset was a numbers game. that if they were to message 1,000 people, they were going to get 10 people to say yes. There's a saying that volume negates luck. And I really love that because when really when you look at chasing any dream or any journey, understanding that the more you do something, the luckier you're going to get. And so if you really want to increase your odds of success, volume is your best way to get there. Currently in our journey with this channel, currently we're reaching out to I would say just a few select guests every week. I did the math and at the rate that we were going in, it would take us 6.5 years to reach out to the same amount of people that they had reached out to in one week, which is not good. And this explains why they grew at the rate that they did. On our end, we're depending on luck that the three people that we reach out to this week, that one of them is going to say yes. The thing is, successful people, they understand the volume principle, I think, better than anyone else. The person who sends 10,000 messages will beat the person who crafts the perfect 10 messages every single time. Alex Hermosi talks about increasing his output so much that it would become unreasonable that he wouldn't succeed. So ask yourself, in what area of my dream could I increase the volume of my output so much so that it would make it unreasonable for me not to succeed.

All right, moving on to our next principle which is data as a north star. This principle is basically kind of what it sounds like. It's using measurable feedback to guide decisions, refine your strategy, and to remove any guesswork. As Grace says, I'm starting to realize that we underestimate the power of data. I think that we don't search for data most times because we don't think we have the time. At the beginning of our business, I honestly feel like data felt like this like luxurious thing that big companies had the money to pay for. But I think that that is honestly what prevents a lot of people from getting to becoming those big companies. And if anything, if we were to apply it sooner, we would grow a lot faster because data is truly the best north star. And so with the data, you want to ask yourself, what are the numbers telling me? Where are people actually responding? What patterns are emerging? And you see that they were doing that with 100 thumbnails. I mean, who literally does that? Nobody. And it just shows you how committed they were to really removing the guesswork and finding out the data that was going to point them in the right direction. And I am sure there are plenty of areas in your own dream right now and maybe in your own business if you just take the extra time to go search for the data or to go find the data, you'll make a better decision. It might prevent you making a mistake and actually accelerate your growth.

Which brings us to our next principle. Evaluate the right metrics. Now, evaluating the right metrics means that you're measuring progress based on what actually moves you forward and toward your dream and not on a surface level based performance. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants followers, but none of it means anything if it doesn't fulfill what you're actually chasing. And that's exactly what Grace spoke about. If your goal is to go viral so you can sell a product, let's say, and your customer base is female and let's say that you hop on a trend and then you gain a 100,000 followers, but they are all men. Literally, those followers mean nothing. This is why she speaks about a knowing what your destination is and b tracking the right metric that will get you there. On the surface, it might look like chasing the 1 million views is going to bring you business, but the truth is most times it's the 100 comments with like diehard fans that actually move the needle in your dream.

All right, moving on. Excellence as a value. This principle first came up when we studied Steve Jobs and it's basically this principle that you do more than the standard. You care about the details that no one else will see. Now, Steve Jobs talks about how his father would create these cabinets and maybe you wouldn't see on the back of a cabinet the work or the craftsmanship of it, right? And so you could in theory just put some plywood there, but he talked about how his father was like, "But you will know that it's there. You will know that you did not do 100%." And so Steve would require his team to create perfection even in the parts of the Mac computer that nobody would see. I can't help but when I talk to Grace to see that same exact obsession exist within her. This brings up this notion of the the 1% which Steven Bartlett and the diary of a CEO team speak about a lot and Grace does too. There's this video where she's showing this PR box that her and the marketing team were designing and they took them like 6 months to design. the level of detail that went into this PR box. Like, I promise you, I know PR boxes are like super extra nowadays, but you could tell that they really took it seriously. And there's plenty of interviews where they talk about the the air freshener and they even measure the CO2 levels in the room for the interview. And I think a lot of the times when we think about excellence, we think about it as like this big overarching like I am the best. But in reality, it's actually just focusing on like the tiny details and improving where you can, even if it's 1%.

Our next principle is compounding consistency. Now, compounding consistency is this principle that small repeated actions build exponential outcomes over time. When you look at Grace and and their journey with diary CEO, it wasn't easy for them at first. Grace mentions this hockey stick growth in the interview. Once they started posting once a week, that was when they got that hockey stick growth, right, where it's like kind of plateaued and then it suddenly goes up. When you actually look at that, that is due to this principle of compounding consistency. I actually found this post from Grace where she spoke about Mr. Beast and it was his subscriber count from age 12 all the way to 25. And so when he was like 12 years old, he was at one subscriber and then when he was at 25, it got to 184 million. And God knows what he's at right now. I'm sure it's a lot more than that, but that is the compounding consistency in action. And she literally talks about it in that post. And so at the beginning when you look at it, they were like at 8,000 and then 100,000. And that's a, by the way, a very big jump. I think most people in that first year, like they're not growing that quickly. Granted, they were really focusing on the volume, right? And that is a huge reason as to why they were even able to get to that point. When you show up consistently, at the beginning it might be a little bit flatlined, but then eventually it will multiply and it will compound.

Moving on to our next principle, which is the art of attention. In another video, we talked about how there are eight ways to gain attention. It's to do something unexpected, provide extreme value, have a strong POV, be consistently present, accomplishment, so you have to accomplish something really big, collaborate with those who have attention, tap into culture, and develop indisputable talent, which is by far the hardest one. And I want to focus on one of them right now, which is to be consistently present. This particular way of getting attention is the thing that people like Alex Hermosi and Gary Vee and yes even Diary with CEO utilizes because they are so consistently present online that at a certain point you can't help but be like wait who is this I keep seeing them with Diary of CEO like I found them because I saw their shorts pop up so many times that eventually when the like long form was actually fed to me I recognized Stephen and I was like wait a minute it's that's the guy from the shorts that I keep seeing who is this let me watch this episode and that's literally how I came across that you're a CEO. Ultimately, that is how people start to gain familiarity and then what could eventually lead to the trust and that connection. So, just put yourself out there. If there are any of you, by the way, who like are hearing this and are a bit annoyed at talking about this obsession with attention, the thing I'll tell you is this is that we can't escape it. We are in an attention economy. And so no matter what dream we have, you will increase your odds of success. If you understand this skill, mastering attention means understanding how to deliberately design it. It means understanding the psychology of human beings and obsessing over the pattern interrupts that make people stop and look. And I feel like Grace really understands this. And even just, you know, hearing how at the top of the content funnel that she was describing, attention is the first thing. The game of attention is not let me tell you what I want to tell you. It is let me figure out how I can get you to stop and most importantly care.

All right, moving on to our next principle which is to build a personal brand. In her case, obviously this is a very big thing because her personal brand led her to having a job with Steven Bartlett at Dire CEO and then it also led her to her next phase of her career which is then leaving the Diary of a CEO. Right. She does say that like having a personal brand isn't absolutely necessary, but I do agree with her that trust is a very big benefit of building one. I did want to do some research on personal brand. So, there was actually this one 2019 study that found that personal branding actually leads to greater career satisfaction. It found that people who actively shape and communicate their personal brand, they feel more empowered and then ultimately are seen as more employable. And then there was this other study that found that over 93% of surveyed managers said that personal branding had a significant or a very significant influence on achieving professional success. And so I think that on on both ends it's it's an opportunity magnet and it also is a built-in audience that you are developing over time that will be there to support whatever it is that you decide to put out there.

Now our next principle is to know when to quit/pivot. In a previous video, we spoke about pivoting and the different types of pivoting that can exist in your life. And there is one in particular that I think applies to Grace's journey, and that is the role pivot. And ultimately in your life, if you are at a current role or position, there are a few ways to know that you should leave or not. And there are two in particular that I want to speak about in this video that are pertinent to Graces, which is either that you've hit a ceiling or you want more ownership. And I think in Grace's story, it's a little bit of both. And it's not to say that she wouldn't grow more if she had stayed because obviously Dire CEO Flight Story, I mean that is a company that is facing tremendous growth and they're going

to continue to grow. But it seems like she, in some capacity, felt that she had learned what she needed to learn from that experience, and it was clear that she was ready for ownership.

I think that what we think about pivoting or quitting is that we expect that things have to be really bad in order for you to leave, and that's not necessarily the case, right? I think that in her case, things were going really well, and ultimately, that must have made it all the more difficult to make the decision that she made.

I think this is where we would want to follow in Grace's footsteps. I think the part of the reason that it felt like an obvious choice is because she had created undeniable proof, which is another principle of ours. Now, undeniable proof, in our other dissections, if you will, has really come up when it comes to like business deals or strategic partnerships. Like, we saw this applied in, let's say, Rihanna's story, right, where she had undeniable proof of success in other partnerships where she put out other releases of other products, right? And so, when she approached LVMH to ultimately make Fenty, she had that undeniable proof.

And in Grace's case, what's interesting is that her undeniable proof was really for herself. This undeniable proof came up twice. It came when she applied to work with Steven Bartlett because she had, um, I don't, I don't think we went into it too much in the interview, but she had this page called The Social Climber. Um, and she had clients. And so, Steven knew that she had, she wasn't just calling herself a social media manager. She actually had social media experience. She had the undeniable proof to get that position.

But then later on, that undeniable proof was for her. So, at the time that she decided to quit, she was making it in her speaking engagements and online and in her brand deals. And she had created enough undeniable proof knowing that she could do this on her own. And I think that that was actually something that I learned from this, which is undeniable proof isn't necessarily just for other people. Probably the most important person that it's for is yourself. And so, if quitting or taking a chance is very difficult for you, if you absolutely need that certainty and that safety, where in your spare time can you create that undeniable proof for yourself so that you can go take that leap? And if even if you aren't thinking about leaving your current position right now, you're just chasing the dream, finding areas where you can create undeniable proof for yourself, even if it's in your consistency or in the volume that you're outputting, these are areas of undeniable proof that actually matter.

Which brings me to our next principle, which is to start before you're ready. Now, this basically is what it sounds like, to start before you're ready. It's to move forward even though you don't have all of the facts and you don't have all of the information, but it's understanding that momentum is what's going to create the refinement and the skill and the direction that you ultimately need. And it's also this concept that starting before you're ready means that you know that you are allowed to suck at the beginning. You may not be ready because maybe you don't know all the details about it. And it also may mean because you don't know how to do it. And both are fine.

And one of my favorite things about what Grace is doing right now is that she is documenting the messiness of this chapter, the uncertainty. When she left The Diary of a CEO, she didn't have a perfectly mapped out master plan. She didn't know exactly what her channel was going to become. She didn't even know really what project it was that she was chasing. And not only is she documenting it, but she's embracing it. And I think that is really important because when we think about chasing a dream, we assume that we have clarity. We assume that we need to understand what the dream is. We need the blueprint. We need the five-year plan. We need the exact outcome that we are looking for. Sometimes the dream is just the decision to build, and that's enough to start.

And you want to hear something wild? This video wouldn't have even been possible without this principle. I remember being on the phone with our producer, Guy, talking about Grace. I've been following Grace for years. Like, truly, I am like a very big fan of Grace Andrews. And eventually, that conversation, like, led to the, you know, our producer saying, "Okay, like, why don't we reach out?" And I had this email drafted, and we were going to send it. I literally backed out. I was like, "No, no, no. We're not ready. We're not ready. We're too small." I don't know what happened in our miscommunication, but our producer, Guy, and Guy, thank you so much. He sent it anyways. And then I get a text from him saying, "Grace Andrews responded. She'd love to meet." And I'm like, "Wait a minute. You sent the email." The crazy thing is, if it had been up to me, that email would have never been sent. Which makes me wonder, how many dreams did I get in the way of simply because I waited to be ready?

Which brings me to our last principle of mindset. Now, this mindset principle, I'm always going to say this, I cringe when I say it because it's such a cliche principle, but when we think about this principle, we usually think about having a winner's mindset. It's like an optimistic mindset, like a confident mindset, right? This is something that Grace clearly has. But even the most successful people like her, they still doubt themselves. In the interview, Grace talked about the moment that she was on the verge of leaving Diary of a CEO, and she asked herself a very honest question: "Can I do it again?" And perhaps it stemmed from the fact that she was wondering if what she accomplished was from the magic of that specific group of people in that exact time, and ultimately, a very universal feeling of, could she do it on her own? She clearly had the doubt, but her mindset shows us that she chose the dream over the doubt.

And that's personally what I'm struggling with right now. At the time of filming this, our last video is currently sitting at 133,000 views. And first and foremost, I just have to thank you guys because that definitely was a, um, a dream come true. I think the thing that I wasn't expecting is, along with the pure joy and excitement, was coupled with this other emotion of a lot of fear. And it was the fear of, could we do it again? I was like, Grace literally said that question. Like, I felt like a pit in my stomach because it was like the same question that I have honestly been asking myself for the past, like, month. I think the question is like, was it a fluke? I don't know. Could we actually do that again? And then what happens if we don't do it again?

But I think the thing I'm realizing is failure and rejection don't really say much about you. How you respond to the failure and rejection says everything about you. And I hope that if you're watching and you're in the depths of your dream and wondering, "Can I do this again?" Or "Can I even just do it to begin with?" Choose the damn dream over the doubt.

And so, will we do it again? Well, by the time you see this video, we will know the answer to that. But with the same mindset that Grace had, whether we do or we don't, we will learn. We will pivot. We will be consistent. And more importantly, we will continue chasing the anatomy of a dream. All right guys, we will see you in the next one.