Personal Branding Masterclass: From Beginner to Expert in 120 Minutes

We have a disgusting problem in the business creator educational space. Everybody looks like one character. What percent of people do you think actually have clarity in their business? Uh, next to none.

Caleb Rston is the founder of Rston, a creative agency that's quietly built some of the most recognized brands in business. He was a key member of the team behind Alex Hermoszi and Gary Ve's growth, driving massive reach through content that converts.

I would argue a lot of people that are doing it probably shouldn't do it. You're gaining fame, but you're not building your business.

What do you think is the key differentiator between a great brand and a forgettable brand? I have what I call the brand journey framework, and it's four simple questions, and when you're doing that, you're [ __ ] selling.

In this episode, Caleb breaks down what most creators get wrong, how to scale content without burning out, and the mindset shifts that separate short-term trends from long-term brands. That is some of the most unique, undefeated advice I've ever heard. This man is an encyclopedia for content principles and frameworks that can help scale your business today.

The best piece of advice that Gary gave me when I moved on is he said, "What do you think is the key differentiator between a great brand and a forgettable brand?"

I think uh typically I like to start with knowing what we're building this brand for. I think a lot of brands that are kind of fizzling or not gaining a lot of traction have no idea where they're wanting to go. They haven't determined what the outcome is that they desire and so they have no idea why they're building this brand and they don't have a good decision-making framework for what they should or should not do because of that.

Let's dive right into that framework. Let's start right there. So, uh I have what I call the brand journey framework and it's four simple questions. I like to reverse engineer every single thing that I want to do from the outcome I desire to today. So the first question that we ask is why are we doing this? What's the outcome that we want? Right? Why are we building this brand? What are we wanting to make happen? And then from there it's what would I have to be known for in order for that outcome to occur? Okay. So what what do people need to know about me in order for this to happen? And then the next question you want to ask yourself is in order to be known for those things, to get the thing that I desire to have happen, what do I have to do? Right? To be known for something, you got to do [ __ ] Okay? And so that takes us closer to today. These are the actions that are necessary. But then the next thing often times for most people is what would I have to learn in order to do the things necessary to be known for this thing to get the outcome I want? Four simple questions. But I think if you really actually are honest with yourself and you figure out why you're doing this, what you would need to be known for in order for it to happen, what you need to do to be known for it, and then you come to today, which is what do I need to learn to do these things? Because often times the things that are necessary to do, you might not know how to right now. Ultimately, this is just an exercise in clarity.

What percent of people do you think actually have clarity in their business? Uh, I mean, next to none. Uh if we're looking at the amount of people that are out there building their brand, building their business, being public, I think the majority of them, they see people who are successful online doing this. And so they say, "I need to do the same thing, but they have no idea why they want." And actually, I would argue a lot of people that are doing it probably shouldn't do it. They probably what they want to have happen, this isn't necessary. And it actually is a a burden, a cost in many areas of your life, financial, privacy, family, relationships, your employees, all of these different things. So, I think if you don't figure out why you're doing it, you don't have a good reason to be doing it.

I want to quickly go off course right there cuz you said something interesting. Do you think everybody should and could have a personal brand? No. Uh, well, okay, let me take a step back. The answer is yes. You all have a personal brand. Every single person listening or watching this, if anybody in the world can say anything about you, you have a personal brand. I just think that not everybody needs to amplify their personal brand publicly via content. So, I think you are building your personal brand whether you want to or not, right? I think a lot of people just aren't doing it intentionally. The big question in my opinion becomes, is this personal brand of yours something that you should deploy the effort, the resources, the capital necessary to amplify publicly? And I would argue for a lot of people, no, it actually is going to send them down a rabbit hole that won't help their business and in a lot of cases actually I think would hurt.

That's an interesting take. Uh I want to go deeper into uh the kind of framework which you talked about. I thought that I had clarity in our business and by business I mean open residency which we have yet to monetize. We're still kind of figuring ourselves out. But going through that journey starting kind of obviously starting with the outcome and then reverse engineering it. We realized that we were doing everything wrong from a day-to-day perspective. M we realized that it was just all about the inputs and the inputs were actually filming episodes and and posting on the internet and by default us focusing on those input in inputs we would get to our outcome under the notion that we've seen in just six episodes released what has happened in those six episodes being released.

I want to talk about in the personal brand building you talk a lot about association. How important is association and building your brand? I think it's the thing I define branding as a pairing of things relevant things ideally uh done consistently. Okay. So good branding is when you take two things that are relevant you pair them together consistently and brand I believe is the byproduct. So branding is the action and brand is the outcome of that action and that's when the audience inherently associates these multiple things together. And so I think that's all brand is. I think the problem a lot of people find is they're not being intentional with the associations that they are creating. The pairings that they're intentionally making for their audience to create the associations, right? Like me coming on this podcast, I am pairing myself with you. I'm choosing that, right? That's an association. I'm saying yes, I'm good with my audience making that. Right? But in the same, I think a lot of people aren't intentional with who they do not associate with. So I think it's the most important thing. Yeah. I think for context for people listening us getting you know Gary Vaynerchuk as an investor in our company with our company being about motivational art and that you know the art of entrepreneurship getting him then got us Tom Billy who had recently got a multi-billion dollar exit who then got us Damon John and it was really leveraging you know the first thing to kind of go go upstream from there. Uh I think the same thing can be said about this podcast. Um we were very strategic in who we brought brought on first. It was D Murphy who's raised $95 million and then I literally went to guest two and guest three telling them this was the first guest and then the third this was the second guest and I think you need to do that.

I think something that's really really important that we should just riff on a bit is how do you get those associations if you're just starting out? What's your thesis on that? Because I have an interesting I want I want to know yours. Like how you're just starting out, you're just creating content. Where do you start? Well, associations aren't just individuals. Yep. So, you can pair yourself with ideals, with traits, with principles, right? Uh different subject matter, and that can be your starting point. So, if you want to be known for marketing, for example, then you should be talking more about marketing. And the way that it works and it's so basic. It's so but I think our industry or my industry that I'm in tries to over complicate it because I think you make more money that way. But like it is very simply you talk about marketing over and over and people will start to associate you as the guy who talks about marketing. It's that simple. I think what you want to think about though especially if you're starting off is there's a lot of people talking about marketing and to stand out is going to be very difficult. And so that is where I do recommend in the beginning people start to niche down a little bit more and they talk about performance marketing on meta via video or something of that nature and they get a little bit more granular because it's a smaller pond and you can stand out a little bit more. And then as you begin to scale then you start to branch out and associate or pair yourself with different topics wider topics within your expertise. And that's where your audience starts to deliver or intentionally automatically pair you with those things. It's so crazy. If you want to be known for branding, I think it's as simple as study Caleb Rston and post consistently on your Instagram story that you're watching different videos of Caleb and other good branders. And by association, people are just going to see that's what you're consuming, that's what you're putting out to the world.

I think something another big thing that needs to be said, too, is just being a person of value. Um, people don't know with iconic how we actually started our licensing and I I want to share this with the audience because I think it's very very relevant is I was with Melon and we had an off-pric brand and we needed to liquidate the assets in an off-pric brand. Uh, her name was Stacy Confori. She was a buyer and offpric company. I became close with her. We got drinks. She said her daughter needed an internship. What did I do as a person of value? Love Stacy. I got her daughter two internships. Then I'm at a Jack Daniels event at NBA All-Star Weekend with Harley. That sounds [ __ ] cool. This girl who worked for the NBA who happened to be best friends with that girl and she's like, "Oh, you're the guy that got her the entre the uh the internships." Then what did she do? I was working for another company I had Iconic as a side hustle and she's like, "Oh, would you want to try the NBA license?" So what did I do? We got the NBA license. We got a little bit of traction and then I went to the licensing expo which I'm here in Vegas. I'm going to tomorrow. And then I went to the Muhammad Ali booth and I told them I had the NBA license. So what happened? Got that and just kept leveraging, leveraging and leveraging up. So for everybody out there, I would just say you and me are both like Gary Vee disciples. I I would say is just the simplest thing is you just have to just give so much value and put so much value out there in the world. Um to get that little bit of leverage to then lever up to get that association. And for those listening or watching that are like yes Mark value everyone says val value is just usefulness anything useful that's like providing value to somebody is something that is useful for them right and making content value means making content that people can use right like uh we were talking earlier about like a piece of content that we're going to be making soon is filming behind the scenes of how we conduct a shoot like how I lead a content shoot and Jake was like, "Oh, that'd be super useful." And in my head, I was like, "Okay, cool. That that means it's valuable content." Yeah. I mean, the video that I watched of you, that that 6-hour video, I mean, the fact that you gave aligned with it a 50-page workbook, like me and Jake actually went through the workbook and now you've provided value and results to my business also prepared me for this, but now I'm going to bring it back and I'm just going to associate with you with value moving forward.

Um, I want to go more into the nose. Um, because we were talking right before this, it was funny. Um, we do this long form, we also do short form. And we do these things called playbooks. And it's like photo slideshows. And we did one with a buddy of mine, uh, his name is Ryan. He has an alcohol company called Losiento. And I very, very rarely drink. Very, very rarely drink. But I was about to post it and we're literally going through this exercise. I'm preparing for this. And I'm like, I don't drink anymore. I don't want to associate with that lifestyle. I track my sleep and my fitness. I'm not going to post it. And that was me intentionally saying, although I love Ryan and Losento, that's not how I want to be interpreted in the world. And I think not enough people are selfish and guard their time and their brand when, you know, they say it could take you years and years to build your reputation and one second you can lose it. You have to say no to things. I would argue that a lot of people spend all their time thinking about what to do in building their brand and they should spend a lot more time about what they shouldn't do. I think saying no like you're saying makes a lot of sense. I also figuring out I think figuring out like you know we talked about what you want to be known for. What are things that you don't want to be known for and what would be the actions necessary to become known for it? And you have your list of things not to do, right? like I have we're in our first year of business and I go back and forth with Trevor all the time on different ideas for offers or things like that, but ultimately I know where I want to be. And half of the ideas that come up that would be great, really profitable, great ways to inject a lot of revenue in year one, but they would be things that I would do for short-term revenue and would make the clients I want to work with eventually laugh me out of the room. And so I think it's it's not just what you want to do and what you need to do, but it needs to be defining what are the things that would ruin the chances of having the outcome that I want, not just increase the odds I get it.

And do you have some sort of like thought process rubric or is it just for you like you went through that four brand journey framework and you're just like, hey, this person's brand identity doesn't match with where we're trying to go. Is it that simple? Um, I think it's I have the luxury of I have worked with people at some of the highest levels and I've been in rooms where I hear conversations that people are having and I get to see how the big dogs, not just like internet personalities, but like people running real big [ __ ] businesses actually perceive some of the internet marketing world, for example. And I've learned like, oh, okay, if I make XYZ choices, I get lumped into that category and they'll view me that way even if I'm not, right? Because humans in the internet do not deal well in nuance. And so I think for me, it's it's more of an observation thing. Um, and then making sure that every choice I make serves future Caleb more than current Caleb.

So in short, is awareness worth a trade? This comes down to the whole uh all press is good press kind of belief. No, I do not believe that. I think that there are there's a lot of harm that can come from that way of thinking. I think a lot of people in the internet content space, a lot of the gurus uh tend to lean towards that. They tend to maximize views over everything and they say more impressions more good. Um I do not believe that. And back to my point at the very top here where I said people shouldn't or should consider whether or not they amplify their personal brand. The reason why I say that is because a lot of people get signal. It's actually noise, but they think it's signal from these platforms that what they're making is good and right because it's getting more views, more impressions, more likes, more comments, everything. But maybe it's not with your ideal customer. And so you're going down the rabbit hole. You're going down a potentially like one to threeyear journey of making content to serve an audience that you'll never be able to monetize on. And so you're getting fame, but you're not building your business. You're getting signal, I would call it noise from the platform that more people want this kind of content. But the people consuming, let's say for example, it's you talking about your Starbucks order. The people consuming that, they're going to want more of that content. And so what you can end up doing is going down a direction for your brand that you think is working, but if you're not tracking conversions for your business, well then you're just maximizing for views and not revenue. Yeah. I think it's really interesting that a lot of people Yeah. I don't buy into any of single comments, single views. I mean, for people listening, you came on this podcast, we're on episode seven, eight, and I mean, we're getting a,000 views on our YouTube. It's very small, but you came on due to our relationship and obviously the association. I'm also a nobody. I I'm I'm getting lumped into I appreciate you having me on. I'm getting to like a real example here is I'm being paired with people that have done some really gangster [ __ ] And then there's this guy here talking about brand. I don't even have a big company or anything. So like you you will though. And for me, we'll get into the 8020 later. I understand to know that I'm gonna have to have let's just call them generalists, operators, CEOs as one thing which I'm gonna do 80% but then that 20%. I want specialists and I already know Caleb you are better at brand than all the people that I've had on thus far. So I think for my audience from a value perspective I need to have that blend or I'm going to get boring which which we'll get into. Um I think another thing to kind of touch on is you're talking about the signals. Too many people they neglect the offline signals. So for me I see the online signals which was low views to start which I felt really small starting with zero subs. It was low. We started from the from the bottom and then I had this guy in venture reach out to me on LinkedIn and he said some really nice stuff and we got on the phone and it was an explosive conversation after one episode. Nobody saw it, but I knew, hey, I'm catching the attention of the right people. I should probably keep doing that. So, don't listen to the the random online jabber. And I think going back to that brand, that brand journey framework, I would take it a step further and really understand the psychoraphics, the demographics, like really understand who that persona is that you are trying to to make your customer because you're so right. You could be doing all of these things and you ultimately could be serving a TAM, a total addressable market that you don't even want to serve. So, I think you need to understand and know like, you know, what type of drinks are they drinking? What type of TV shows are they watching? Um what does their everyday work schedule look like? What type of media do they do they consume? I I love that. I would caution people listening or watching that you're advanced. So, I think that's the right move. I do think some people that are earlier on get bogged down by those details and it becomes a prison. It does not empower them to reach their audience better. It actually constrains them too much. And so I would say like in the beginning the the amount of data that you need on your audience is very minimal in my opinion. I think the more that you go after you're just ultimately a lot of people are just procrastinating on doing. I think you're going to learn a lot more by putting out a fuckload of content in the beginning and seeing what people resonate with what inside jokes, right? Like uh a thing that I say a lot in interviews is bogged down. Nobody knows what I mean by that other than like motorcyclists. They know exactly what I mean, right? And so I I see that they come out in the comments mentioning that I'm learning what percentage of like the people listening or watching the content that I'm in are motorcyclists, right? I'm not going to get that through some sort of survey or anything like that. So that's where, you know, and I'm sure we'll talk about this in a second, but like that's where I think the majority of these insights on your audience come more from you posting and seeing how they engage with what you post than any other like research or anything like that. Again, at more of a basic level, you're advanced. You've been doing this for a long time, so it's completely different. I think the best strategy, especially to start, per what you said, to kind of not overanalyze everything, is having the customer persona be you. And then you're just uniquely you. Absolutely. And and like, you know, there's going to be a story that you're going to tell that Jake or somebody on the team's going to clip. It's going to go wild. The audience is going to love it. You're going to be like, "Oh [ __ ] I should tell that story more." You know, that that's that's how I think about it. That's how we're gaining audience insights. It doesn't have to be some like crazy because ultimately I I think a lot of people are tracking all these different things, but if it doesn't change what you're going to do, then why are you tracking it? It's pointless. It it becomes noise and it bogs down or clutters the actual signal that you're wanting to get.

So for someone looking to kind of find that quote unquote gap in the market, um is your simplest advice is to just be yourself. Just come to that. I think it's a little bit of that. I think it's usually the best case scenario is you identify a gap that you want filled for you and then you end up filling it. So I think I actually stumbled into this when I was like 15 years old. I was really into powerlifting. Uh obsessed with it. My father was a bodybuilder and my whole life revolved around it and I watched all of the [ __ ] training videos. But this was before, like right now, fitness is big. But people don't realize like when I was in high school and got into this, fitness was nothing. Like supplement companies wouldn't spend more than like 250 bucks for a [ __ ] video. And I saw a gap in the market. I loved training videos, but there weren't any that I thought were really well done. And so I just saw an opportunity to take that. And I started working with the biggest supplement brands and the biggest bodybuilders in the industry within like a year just because I filled a need that I had. I was the consumer essentially.

What you just said just makes me so happy cuz that's exactly what we're doing. When I was doing when we were all in on the operators only, what did what did I I was more drawn to the conversations with you cuz I'm like I need these specialists. I want a finance expert. I want an accounting expert. I want a branding expert. I want a digital marketing. I want all of that. And for me, what you said is actually exactly what we're doing. Real quick on that, I I think like another way to look at it too is maybe the subject matter that you're interested in talking about, there's a bunch of people talking about it successfully, but maybe there's nobody talking about it like a construction worker would, right? Like the way you present information is also a competitive advantage and can be a hole in the market that you can fill. So maybe everyone in finance is using big boy language that like people like Caleb do not understand. Maybe you talk to people like me that don't understand anything with finances and you have a very lay approach and you speak to it like one of the boys. That's also in my opinion a really great way to stand out is just to speak to very similar information with a different rapper. Yeah. For us um you know we're looking to one thing is aesthetic. We think that we can elevate the whole entire space. the only thing a couple people are doing it like this. And then secondly is I think that the conversations that I could have with that 20% with specialists like you, it's unique because it's from an operator's lens. It's not you talking to another brand guy. It's an operator talking to a brand guy. And if my customer persona that I want to serve as an operator, it's going to serve them very well. So that's kind of where my brain goes to.

Um, what about just we're talking about positioning and finding the gap in the market. How do you not get too bogged down by like copying other people and staying authentic to your to who you are and what you want to be? Like where do you guys get your in like your inspiration from? In the beginning, you do kind of have to copy. So, I'll use myself with photography as an example. When I first got into photography, uh, after years of doing video, I had to copy the Dylan firsts, the Aaron Brimhalls of the world, right? These were two photographers that I was just like [ __ ] obsessed with their style. And in the beginning, I literally was just trying to duplicate exactly what they were doing, right? Like almost to a tea, never nearly as good, but was trying. And then I think you go to a phase where now you you get the basics. if you understand how to get close to, in this case, a look or whatever outcome you desire. And that's when a lot of people, I think, get lazy and they just continue to do that. And they're always going to be the type of people that copy whoever the top dog in a space is because it's the easy route. It's proven that this works. I think where the winners come into play is this is where they start to go into honing in their preferences and they use their preferences to create their own style. In photography, it'd be my own look. In content creation, it'd be my own voice. Right? Right now, especially in the business creator educational space, we have a disgusting problem where everybody looks like one character and they're all copying this one character. And that's because there's a lot of great success that has happened there. But the problem is is then you will always be number two at best. And so what I would encourage people to do is in the beginning look at the top dogs and replicate, but very quickly you want to start looking at success outside of your niche. You're still wanting to have ideas informed by data. I I'm not encouraging people to just like come up with subjective calls in a corner office and be like, "This is going to be great." Like, no, you want proof that this is going to be a great video, for example. But you should get that proof outside of your industry so that you can look different than everyone in your industry. Cuz the reason why we're making content is to stand out. And if we're doing it to stand out, but we replicate and look like everyone, we're defeating our purpose. I think you just said something there that everybody needs to really really take seriously. It's something that I built my career on. I was formerly mentored by a guy named Jay Abraham who's known for working across thousands of different industries and taking ideas and tactics and bringing them. Some of my ideas for licensing came from a roofing case study. No [ __ ] What other uh spaces or industries are you inspired by? The first one that comes to mind always is video games. I think uh like if we talk like YouTube for example, if we're getting granular for a second, YouTube packaging. I love looking at the video game space. I think they do an incredible job. I think tech review channels, car review channels. I was actually just having a conversation around this where um and I please forgive me, I can't remember the industry, but he was saying, you know what's so funny is in MySpace, no one has ever considered doing a tier list video. Like I think it was they were in HR and they were literally just talking about different HR programs or whatever. But by doing a tier list, they're identifying these different programs that they use that they think are the best or whatever, but it's it's borrowing a format that they know works for many different industries. They haven't seen it done in theirs. They do it. It was like a 2 or 3x multiplier for them. That's what I'm talking about in borrowing from other industries. Another one that I really like is um there's like an emerging trend right now of these comfort creators. um they're they're more like, you know, doing these like new style of vlogs that are emerging that you've probably seen. What do you mean by comfort creators? So, we've been in a day and age where a lot of people yell at you telling how wrong what you're doing right now is and how you need to change and be this certain way or whatever. And comfort creators are kind of the answer to that. I think a lot of people got tired of being yelled at or being told what they're doing is wrong, blah blah blah. And so these are individuals that are still giving advice but in a softer tone way. Uh and they're more appealing to the lifestyle of the individual. And I'm not saying that you need to take the messaging from their content. But the way they're packaging it, I think is very unique and very different and is an answer to what I would call a slight oversaturation of like hardass kind of content. Yeah. I think in dormant categories like I mentioned accounting and finance. I feel like they haven't touched on any of those formats. It's completely wide open. Uh for people listening, business too, by the way. Business, too. There's a lot that's not tapped in business cuz everyone's doing what the top two or three characters are doing. It's funny you say that because I had this vision and I remember when I told it to Jake and I remember when I asked D the first episode. I'm a huge UFC and formerly a WWE guy and I wanted to do these walk out with like entrance music and stuff like that and that's like our teaser for the episodes. Nobody has ever done that. Nobody. And people actually know us for that and someone actually wanting to come on based on that one specific asset. So, I do think completely going outside of uh of your industry is huge. You mentioned something I I don't want to go too far into it because we'll get into content a bit later is the prepackaging and the titles and thumb uh thumbnails. You said a word that I think people need to really ingrain um is the word outlier. Um, and I per our conversation before knew nothing about YouTube and the the views would reflect that. Um, as early as a couple months ago and we brought on some consultants and they've helped us and we've learned very fast. I think uh there's this website, they're not a sponsor. One of 10, which I'm sure you know. I love One of 10. One of 10 is a website that when I process YouTube, I see, you know, a 1X is you're getting the same average views that you get on all their videos. Um, and if it's a 2x or a 3x or a 5x, you know, it's five times better. Thus, something is clickable about that video, whether it be the title, the thumbnail, the setup. I'm expecting at least a 4x outlier on this episode here, guys. Um, so for everybody out there listening, I really suggest getting one of 10 and you'll just then you could just rift millions of ideas because you just see what's working and what's not. And the craziest thing, man, is you start seeing the copycat and you start seeing people that are milking keywords on titles or thumbnails. Uh the gold rush people say, I saw that going so hard for a 2, three month period. So I completely agree is focus on outliers in any industry and then bring it into yours. Yes, 100%.

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I want to you briefly mentioned on your background. I want to talk about origin story. Uh it's something that we're actually working on now and you inspired us uh as the first post on your YouTube channel to tell us who you were to set the precedent for anybody that comes in. We have yet to do that. I don't think I've done a good job. Uh, how important is putting your origin story out there into the world? I think knowing that Peter Parker had this traumatic event with Uncle Ben and got bit by the spider the way he did informs all of the amazing action sequences that we see, all of the highlights. I think knowing Superman's background, knowing Batman's background is super important. And I think as a content creator, as you start to gain more success and more traction, this is your least favorite part of everything is your origin story. Uh, every single person I've ever worked with, every single one gets tired of telling their origin story and literally will say things like, "Hey, I'm going to do that podcast, but just tell them let's not go into the background." And I get it, right? Like, I am just very early into this game and I'm already feeling it a little bit. But the reality is is where you are right now is not relatable. Where you came from, that's what's relatable. your come up, your origin story. That's where people are right now. They're not at your successful business. They're not at your multiple millions of views on YouTube.

Are losses more relatable than wins? I would say yes with some some caveats, but yes, I would say losses are absolutely relatable and I would encourage people to start sharing more of them. I think the the big key here in my opinion is when everyone's doing one thing, do the opposite. Right now, we live in a world where everyone is posturing and bullshitting online with all these, half of them fake stories about success, but they're telling all these stories around success. And you know, I think we all have that one friend, maybe a couple of us have more than one, that is always telling you how everything's always going great and everything's perfect. And we just know they're a ticking time bomb. They're not everything's not going great. Everything's not working out for them. They're lying. And I think we have that same kind of like [ __ ] [ __ ] filter or alarm go off when we're consuming content from somebody and all they're sharing is W's. The L's are what make us relatable and increase our trust and belief that when you do share a W, it's actually true and it stands out more in my opinion. I think like outside of MySpace, I I'll use an example. I think Alex Earl, her explosion came because she was vulnerable with something that most people online at that time were not vulnerable about, right? She shared her journey of walking through some some uh acne issues that she had and she was very public. She didn't try to hide it like a lot of creators, which I understand why they would, but she didn't. And she shared that and that's like the one of, if not the biggest reason why she exploded early on. And I think that if you're in business education in your content, you can do the same thing. You sharing a failure you had in business doesn't make people trust you less. It makes you trust them more because you're a real human and I actually believe you. Now, on the contrary, I'm not saying go around and tell all the failures and that's all you tell cuz then people will only associate you a failure. So, you need W's for sure. I just believe that the W's are more believable when you share the L's. I think there needs to be a balance between the ups and downs of losses and wins. Almost like uh looking at like the chart for S&P where they go up and then down a little bit, up and then down a little bit. Um and I think for everybody listening, um ironically, Nana, my my girlfriend is is doing this now. Is Jake is the same thing. He's been with me for 9 years now. He knows my origin story. He knows the 60cond origin story, the three-minute origin story, the 10-minute origin story. Um you know, Gary says it all the time again, as well. I'm going to bring him up again. Is someone new is listening to you for the first time, you must give them context. I do think being very very sharp in having different um variations of your origin story and knowing where the peaks and troughs are are very very important. Um and I would challenge anybody and everybody out there to start building that story now. just putting it on paper and knowing that that is a huge thing that a you talk about and b it's what you taught me is we are now working on making that the post pinned as the first post in all of my channels. Like right now someone just goes to my channel on Instagram and they just [ __ ] they just see the wins. They just see a bunch of [ __ ] really successful people on my podcast. So you have it pinned on your Instagram is your story. I challenge everybody out there to do the same. I think it's incredibly helpful. I think it it gives a lot of context and some beautiful little serendipitous thing that also occurs is if you share it, you're going to share things that you're interested in or little things that you are passionate around that maybe you're not as public about most of the time. It's the same reason why I like people sharing more than just their core subject matter and their content. You give your audience more at bats to connect with you.

It's so funny you say that. Um, let's let's transition right into that. If someone is starting to create content now, how do they systematically decide on what to talk about? If you're trying to figure out what to talk about in making content, start with what do you make money off of? So, that's what I would start with. So, what is it that you're selling? Service, product, whatever. Very contrary. You hear a lot of people follow your passion. So, continue. I want to hear. Yeah. I I think uh man, I got a lot of opinions about that. But I think the best thing to do is figure out what you sell. Now, if you don't have anything that you sell, then what are you most passionate around? Sure. Absolutely. What are you learning, right? It it kind of depends on what stage in your career you're at. If we're talking about the person who is literally starting out, they're not the subject matter expert, then cool. You're going to make content, in my opinion, on your learnings. You are our gateway to learning this new subject, right? You're the guinea pig that we're learning from. You're doing things correctly and incorrectly and you're sharing both. So ultimately if someone is starting from zero and wants to become a content creator, then you do advise them to follow their passion because they're starting from zero. Yeah. Whatever they're interested in. So like if you are a kid who is 19 and just graduated high school and you're trying to figure out what to make. Okay, cool. Yeah. Whatever you're interested in. If it's drop shipping, I don't know why I picked that example. If it's drop shipping, then make your content around you learning that, right? If it's photography, you're not the expert photographer. You're making content on how you're learning adventure photography, action photography, product photography, all these different things. Now, for the people that are probably more likely listening and watching, you're a subject matter expert. Okay, cool. Let's start talking about that subject matter expertise. And what I would do, and I would tell a lot of people to do this from the be beginning, is it's called the two column approach. And this applies to a lot of different things, but we'll use it in this example. What I want you to do is if you've defined, okay, I'm going to talk about marketing. On the left side of this, the left column, you're going to write out all the things that current content creators in the marketing space are doing or saying that you disagree with, find cringe, disgusting, right? All the different complaints that the audience may have with them. And then on the right side, you're just going to write out the exact opposite of all those things. And that's what you're going to do. If you are getting into real estate content and you hate the cringe real estate agent that's making content dancing and pointing at copy on screen, well then you know you're not going to [ __ ] do that. If you identify that that feels very contrived and fake, cool. You're going to be very like authentic and relaxed and that's going to be your frame, right? If you like me for example, one of my big things is I don't believe that views is what people should be maximizing for only. I think views are important but not the only thing that's contrary to a lot of what is being said in my space right that's one of my things I speak about the opposite of that in my opinion one of my things as well too about I'm glad I believe this is the way that you stand out in what people would quote unquote call a saturated market it's literally doing the exact opposite of everyone in your space yeah I mean any contrarian take has done actually performed better from a views perspective with what we've done thus far.

That makes complete sense. Um, real real quick, too. Like even in how you distribute the content, like I myself as an an example. I'll do another one. All my counterparts are selling a course. The majority of them have an agency that's not very profitable, and they make their profit in their business off of selling their course. I released a brand new 6-h hour, 22-minute course that we put a lot of effort into for free on YouTube. Not behind an email capture wall. not behind the exact opposite of what I believe a lot of people complain about with my counterparts. That's how I think you make a splash quicker. I think to layer on top of the contrarian take is something that we've talked about a lot in the first six, seven episodes is picking a space that has upside. Um looking at the total addressable market, looking at the compound annual growth rate and making sure you're picking

Something that is where the puck is going. I think too many people rely on the passion, and it's something in an industry that is not growing. I think that is a fundamental mistake. Um, I formerly did agree with "follow your passion." Um, I no longer do agree with that. I think follow something you're passionate about that you can make money in, a space that is growing, because you cannot outmuscle a small total addressable market. You cannot outmuscle a product or industry that AI is going to come and wipe it up. So, I think people, going back to what you hammered home on the brand side, is intentionality. Is making sure you really pick something that is growing. And then lastly, what I would say is it has taken me a while, ironically, we're coming up on 10 years with Iconic, is to think under the lens of decades, not years, not five years.

Um, it's crazy to think that with Open Residency, like, dude, we're at month four. I think it's also building your personal brand and your passion and your content around something that you can grow with. Like, talking about what I said earlier, like, damn, like if I had an alcohol brand, I don't drink alcohol anymore. And maybe five years ago, I was drinking alcohol. Not anymore. Like, you have to build something that you know is going to age well with you. Like, the fact that we're focused on education and learning and growing under an operator's lens. I plan on learning and growing and being an operator until the [ __ ] day I die. So, I think for people listening, is just make sure you're picking something that is going to mature well with your life cycle.

Take a step back though, like that's if that lines up with what you want to do. Like, again, the brand journey framework, I ask, what's the outcome we want? Because yes, if you want to build the biggest brand and biggest business, maximize for TAM. But if that's not your goal, and you want a cool, chill life and just to make enough money to fund that, well, then maybe you do build your brand around your passion, not the best market. Right? So, I think, I think that the thing that I hate about internet content is it doesn't take in nuance. Wants. But the reality is, is like, every single person listening or watching this has very different outcomes they want in their life. And so, I do think that there is a place for following your passion, and I do think there is a place for following practicality. And I think both are great. It just depends on where you're wanting to end up.

Yeah, it's amazing to talk. Maybe you, maybe you don't want a huge business. Completely right. Knowing what you want is huge. Like, I'll share with you, I don't want to build a business even close to as big as the people I've worked for. I don't have those ambitions. I want something big, like I want something strong, but I, I view my job as helping others do that. That's not what I'm trying to do for myself. So, I'm optimizing my days, my choices differently than maybe the characters I've worked for.

You talk a lot on the content side about the 80/20 rule. I want to dive super deep into that. Um, on the 80/20 side, you know, we talk, we're talking now about from a topic perspective, that's where that 80% goes to. That other 20%. You mentioned bodybuilding and, you know, riding your motorcycle. What does the relationship need to be on that 80? Does there need to be a relationship there, or is the 20 the outlet for passion? How do you look at that?

I think it, I, I'm so annoying with this [ __ ] because I'm going to say things like, "It depends on the individual." But it does. So, I think for some people, what that looks like is eight posts are around one core subject, and then two posts for every 10 are around a passion or a hobby. Um, for some people, like myself, that's not going to be the case. Every 10 posts, it's not going to be like there's two of them where I'm diving into the performance modifications I've made on my 2021 Road King Special. No, my 20 is the last video we released took place, the whole entire thing, over a motorcycle trip. 99% of the scenes that you see, there's a motorcycle in it. My Harley is in it. And so, I, I think it's, I think we get too caught up and, and right now we're in a real season of like online content where we want like a prescription. We want rules. I, I don't do well with that. I think that you have to figure out what that 80/20 looks like for you. So, like I'm saying, for some people, that's going to be actually physically or, you know, audio-wise talking about your passion, right? For others of you, maybe you have a business and you love MMA. Well, what does it look like to talk about business principles while you're rolling, right? That could be a way to do it. You don't have to make any content where you talk about your jiu-jitsu routine. You could just be doing it while you're talking about your core subject. So, I think it, it depends on the individual.

Um, and really, I don't believe that is the best for optimizing your subscribers, views, likes. I don't, I think it's the tool to optimize for longevity. So, I think that people that niche down and only talk about one thing forever, they grow faster. I just have found, not as a rule, just an observation, that they quit early 'cause they're bored. They lose their [ __ ] mind. Yeah. Like, I'm having conversations with a lot of these creators right now that a lot of people listening and watching are consuming often, and they are getting [ __ ] tired of what they're talking about, and they've built this whole brand around it. Their whole business is around it, and they're like, "I'm going to lose my [ __ ] mind." Their team is complaining because they're not showing up to film sessions. They're canceling last minute 'cause they're starting to hate it. And so, I just, like a really good, you know, uh, personal trainer or nutritionist, they're not going to build the most optimized diet in the world, they're going to build the diet that you're going to stick with. They're going to build the training routine that you're going to actually do every day, not two weeks and then quit.

Yeah. I mean, it was so interesting hearing a podcast with Mr. Beast and the fact like he's not happy. Like, that just blew my [ __ ] mind. It's like, how are you not optimizing for happiness before anything and everything else you're doing? I thought that was absolutely mind-blowing. It seems as though on the 80 side, especially to start, you want to stay very, very narrow and go deep. And then you're saying on the 20% side is you don't want hard contrast. You want it to be subtle and slowly integrated and potentially, you know, mix the two together, but you're not doing this is my business operator content and then this is my motorcycle content. You're just integrating it in.

Correct. And then tomorrow, if I woke up and I was like, "Trevor, I want to make a video all about my three motorcycles and why I have three completely different Harleys and how they serve different functions in my life," and it has nothing to do with brand or content. We would do it. I know it's not my expectations are correctly aligned, right? I know it's not going to do well. The audience that we've acquired so far is not here for my Harley content. I know that. But for me, I want to do this as long as I can or as long as I need to to reach the goals that I have. And I know for me, I like a little bit of variety. And so I know if I don't inject that variety, I will not stick with this.

I think people would be very, very surprised too, in when you do do that, you know, it's 80/20, but that 20 that you interject, you might be very, very surprised and see that people are very, very interested in it and the ratio could kind of flip. Case in point, our our episode with Nate from Marone, the most engaged part of the conversation was lifestyle design, which is something that myself and Jake are deeply passionate about. Like, we're crazy with like tracking everything. And I don't know, maybe my passion and authenticity came across more during that conversation, that part of the conversation, but like now we're going to slowly in, you know, implement that more into the 80%. So, um, yeah, you got to take the swings and not be uh torn by the shitty views. Although I know the low views, it [ __ ] hurts, bro. The low views hurt.

You have something that you guys are tracking as another measurement of success. Right now, our first and most important thing is to get to a minimum level of threshold on a sub and views perspective to for me to feel comfortable to monetize, which we'll get into later in the conversation. And, you know, to not speak too early. I mean, we have a guest coming on that has the market cap is $6.9 billion. This goes back to how important association is. The fact that he said yes with the amount of views that we have is [ __ ] mind-blowing. So, for me, we are going to start, we weren't like not arbiting, but optimizing a bit more for views to get to a minimum level of thresholds. Um, and then the other thing that we're really focusing on is the different types of content formats, um, and building out our team, which we'll get into as well. Um, but for now, it's really just staying narrow and getting a baseline of an audience. Um, and now dipping into that 20%, you being the first one. Love. Yeah. Honored. I would encourage every single person listening or watching that is embarking on the content creation journey in your minimum first 12 months, you need to have another metric that you are tracking to indicate success other than views, subscribers, and likes. Otherwise, you're [ __ ]. I would say the last thing, which I mentioned earlier, which is the most important thing I probably should have said, is the inputs, which is the amount of episodes and the amount of posts. Yeah. Um, that was the first thing that we said is just episodes. I love that. For everybody listening, we need to do 26 episodes in 2025 or my neck. Are they coming from my neck? I love that. 26. 26. Every two weeks, we got to do it. Um, the reason why I say that is you're not going to get lots of views in the beginning, pretty much no matter who you are. There are exceptions for sure. Um, I'm going to sound like a real [ __ ] right now. Um, our content has gone way better than I would have expected for our first three videos, but I nerfed my expectations. I was telling Jake earlier, I tend to do that. Um, when Trevor and I were talking about the performance expectations around the first video, I was like, "I hope within the first two months to get to a thousand views." We were low, too. I think I, I probably should have given context there. I think we are in a little bit of a different spot from a leveraging a guest perspective where I wanted a minimum level of audience to then go to the next part of the business. Totally. What I'm saying though is we, I told Trevor, we're going to look at who reaches out. You said it earlier. Yeah. The offline. Exactly. That's huge. Like, to me, the early indicator of success was we put this video out. What level of individuals are texting me or DMing me that I know and they're like, "reemerging into my life," or it's a new person coming in, or who's viewing your LinkedIn profile, right? This whole entire game that we have going on, this is the game that me and Jake play. It's so funny right now. It's really good to do though because you need something else in the chasm between zero and call it 5,000 subscribers, even. Like, that takes a very, very, very, very long time for most people. And if you don't have some other reinforcement to get you over that line, you'll end up like 99% of people and you won't continue. You'll stop.

I think the last thing that that needs to be said as well too, there is I think you have to go into it with a hell or high water. This is the time commitment I'm going to make to see this thing through. And for us, it was a year. Um, and we've already, I don't know, we're like four or five months in. We're like, "Fuck, this is it." Like, looking at the life and the flywheel, like media must be a pillar in my whole entire existence moving forward. Um, I think for everybody going out there, it's consistency on the inputs for a specific period of time. I think that's a all-in-one piece of advice that you would give to anybody.

Correct. Say it again. Just put a goal of number of posts and or pieces of content over X period of time. Yes. Uh, those are controllable. Your outputs are not. And so if your inputs do not get your desired output, then you just need to change your inputs. It gives you control rather than what a lot of people do with social is playing the lottery. They're just, you know, just pulling it and hoping. But it's like if you have outlined what your output, what your outcome goal is and the inputs you've determined are necessary to get that. If you don't get that, it's very clear what you need to change. Love that.

Um, so I want to dive into some mediums and some platforms. Um, what do you think the common trap is that people do when they're picking the content medium and platform they go on? They kind of like what we talked about at top. They look at the top dog in their space. Whatever platform they're occupying and prioritizing, they do the same thing. The problem is is for some people that's the right move, but they're not taking into account their strengths and preferences. If the person you're trying to model makes YouTube long-form content and minimum of 30-minute long videos, and you can't even imagine talking on camera for 60 seconds, that is a bad strategy. Now, working up towards that is not a bad strategy, but trying to attack that out the gate is a really terrible one. I'm a little bit more dated. So, the example I use is Ronnie Coleman, but you could insert that for Seabum, right? If I'm getting into bodybuilding or powerlifting and day one I'm like, "I'm gonna do the Seabum routine," I'm tearing every [ __ ] limb imaginable, it's not going to work, right? Same thing with content creation. So, the best piece of advice that Gary gave me when I moved on to go build for others is he said, "Do not build what I have built here. Reverse engineer the needs of the client, of the person you're building around their strengths, preferences, and deficits. If they're really good at writing, build a system to maximize that first, not video right away." And so, I think a big trap that a lot of people make is they look at video, short-form, for example, it's been really big for the last couple of years, and they think that's what they need to do. But if it does not play to their unique strengths and skills, they probably won't stick with it for very long, and they won't get traction on it. So, whatever you are best at, that's where I would encourage you to start.

Yeah. And I, I want to give context too, is the video part, I think is the top of the food chain. There's there's audio, there's video, there's words. What else am I missing? So, I define them as video, audio, graphic, written. Yeah. And I would say from a graphics perspective, that's basically written plus stills. Yep. I mean, in 2017, I had, this might be when we first started talking a long time ago with Gary, is I had a guy following me around for 18 months, 24 hours a day. I was on camera the, the whole, he literally Turks and Kost everywhere. So, I was on, I had no life. It was, I don't recommend that to people. Um, and then we did a podcast, 23 episodes. And then when we made the decision to do this podcast, uh, I'm not going to lie, in every single one of these episodes, it's like the cold plunge. It's like, it never gets like the seconds before I come on and sit, I get nervous. I always do. We did a test run with my girlfriend, Caleb. When I tell you it was the [ __ ] most embarrassing thing I've ever seen of how [ __ ] bad I was. We should actually put it out. It's so [ __ ] bad. I then had to do another one with her business partner that was incrementally better. And then I went into the first episode of Open Residency, which I think I performed fairly well. And I went in and I was like, "Fuck, I don't even know how this is going to [ __ ] go." So, I completely agree with you is start with what you're comfortable with. But with that being said, it's not even [ __ ] close. All roads, delete the video. And the reason for that is just the ability to break it down into the other formats, which, which I want to talk to you about that. Um, are you in any client that you work with, are you always recommending to go upstream eventually to video up? Just because you get better ROI to date?

Yes. I imagine at some point there will be a client that that doesn't make sense for, and we'll just optimize around written, graphic, maybe audio, maybe they'll do a podcast. Um, to date, we have not had a faceless client though. Do you think someone can win at scale with where everything is going if they don't ladder up to video?

Yes. Absolutely. Because I would ask you, what is winning? Right? Like, if we define what winning is within reality. If winning is being Mr. Beast level, no. But I think there are many authors that are very, very well-known, arguably more well-known than a lot of video creators online. And that's a very traditional medium, books, right? So, I, I think yes, I think you can have success being only in one of the four ways of making content. I think you increase the odds of success by branching out to more. Right? If you, in flip, if you only do video, you're not going to reach people that only learn by reading. Right? And so, like, yes, I do think expanding is the best move. Video is the highest leverage activity because you can extract everything else. Everything that the other three can be pulled from video. So, it's like, what are we doing here? Of course, that's the best use of your time. But again, if you're not comfortable with it and you like vomit at the idea of even considering being on camera, then that's when I tell people, write, do a podcast, audio only for a while, and then we can start to delve into video. For context here for people listening is video. You can use the transcript and then you could obviously utilize that transcript. Use stuff like ChatGBT and then that could go down into something like a newsletter or social media captions. Yeah, I think if you're doing video and photo, which is what we're doing right now, it just gives you unlimited amount of opportunities from an actual format perspective in what you can do.

Um, how important is it to tailor the content specific to each individual channel?

Uh, the same level of importance as it is for you to tailor the way you talk when you meet up with your mom, uh, business partner, uh, you know, romantic partner, and siblings. No cursing. No cursing with Iris. Is that, is that how it rolls? That's, that's my mom. There's no cursing. No cursing. I have to hide that, hide the tattoos, too. Got a new one. They got a new one. She can't see it. My my mom has grown to accept the fact that I have more of a Brooklyn mouth. Um, but I can see her wince whenever the f-word gets dropped. So, yes, I, I think it's super important. I think, uh, you want to always be yourself, just like the analogies we just gave. It's not like you're not being Mark with your mom, but you're presenting in a different way, right? In that example, you're using probably more restraint, right? Um, I think that all of these platforms, you're showing up as your brand, but you know that people, the psychology of the user is different on Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok and YouTube. We go to these platforms maybe to consume from maybe the same creator, but we go for different reasons, right? Like, even if we were to take like the top dog, right, Mr. Beast, I go to YouTube and TikTok for different content from him, even, right? And I would argue that his content is, is closer together and in line with each other than maybe a lot of business creators. But ultimately, you do need to show up contextual to the platform because more and more people are not going to social media. They're going to individual platforms for individual intent and needs. And if you're not making something that is reverse engineering those specific intents and needs, then you're not going to stand out anymore.

Let's go deeper into purpose and strategy on a per platform perspective. I don't think there's anybody better than you to talk about that. Let's just fire off each one. How do you see Instagram?

Uh, I see it right now as actually a platform that more and more people should be paying attention to. I think a lot of people started writing it off because TikTok was blowing up. Everyone was moving over to TikTok. They had a better algorithm. Everyone started feeling like they were getting less engagement on Instagram as a whole. That was kind of like an industry-agnostic complaint that you would hear. And that's changing. Um, I think more and more people are finding that their content is showing up to the right audience on Instagram more than ever before. I think all of us in this room, and I could be super wrong here, but uh, I would argue if you were to look at your, you know, feed, your Reels page feed, eight months ago, I would say most people looked at it and were like, "Gh, this isn't showing me anything that I want to see. I'm going to go over to TikTok." I'm noticing more and more [ __ ] is showing up on my Instagram feed that I [ __ ] like from people I don't follow. It's getting better.

So, I think it's by getting better, you mean the algorithm is getting better, correct? Yes. That's serving content, I think, a lot better than it has to date. Um, I think you're getting a lot more traction. I view Instagram as the closest in the, if we're going to identify this as different circles or spheres of depth with your audience. I think Instagram is the one that you can have the most proximity to. Right? Right? Like with Instagram Stories, you can share a lot more personal elements temporarily with people so they get to know you better and know you as the rounded human more on that platform than any other. So that's where I find you can be a lot more like you.

Yeah. I don't find, is there any other platform that you think strategically you can be raw outside of Instagram Stories?

I, I don't think so. Do you? How are we defining raw? Let's just say not as staged because it's a come and go. It's a 24 hours. Like, for me, I guess I would say, uh, which I just pushed through to it, but Facebook Story, I would say Instagram Story and Facebook Story are the only ones that I could just kind of just say, "Fuck it."

I agree. Yeah. I, I think that Instagram is one of those weird spots right now where you have a lot of different ways that people are consuming content under one umbrella. You've got your normal feed, you've got your Reels page, you've got the Instagram Stories. And so, I, I do think that it allows you to do that more than other platforms. For example, if you wanted to share the same kind of behind-the-scenes content, that's, I would articulate it as behind-the-scenes content because I would argue that on LinkedIn, for example, how you define raw is how most people should show up. You'll actually stand out instead of being one of those catchy BT bros. Um, but yeah, I, I think like you absolutely can do that. I think when, if we go over to LinkedIn, you have less chances to do that. I would argue every post is a little bit more valuable or sacred. I hate saying that because I think people take that way too far, but yeah, I don't think you're going to want to post on your LinkedIn, "Happy birthday to my dog," necessarily, like you'd be willing to on Instagram. On LinkedIn, I do think that right now we're still in a time where a lot of people show up as their like buttoned-up professional self. And I think people are tired of it. You have the OG LinkedIn homies that are like, "Oh no, LinkedIn's changing. I don't like it." And I get it. I have empathy for that. But like, they need to adapt with the times. This is now a platform that everyone is going to be on. But for the individual creating content on it, I would actually argue show up more as your raw, as you defined itself. More of like you the human, and you will stand out. And back to what we said earlier, a little tactic of like taking a transcript from a video and running it through ChatGBT. Do that, but then [ __ ] edit it like a human. Like, everybody has the same format, same kind of style of hook in their l. Like, LinkedIn's getting really disgusting right now. If you show up, there's a couple of creators right now that are showing up very much as just like the raw h, and they're doing very well because in a world of robots, if you're the human, you stand out. And by raw, you mean from a, a text perspective or photo, video, anything? Yeah. Yeah. Like being who you are versus being who you think you need to be. It's good context.

I would say another big thing that I found for everybody listening on the Instagram side, we have found amplified reach, probably a 20% growth on our impression rate on Iconic through posting natively on Threads. For people listening, that's a great one. Um, the same thing I did with Facebook. I just push through my Instagram posts and I used to push through my Threads posts. Now I natively put it in and I'm making a concentrated effort to post more on there. Social media manager is. And with all other things consistent, we're getting significantly more views. Yeah. So, that's a nice, a nice little wrinkle. Um, I can give another tactic on Instagram. I hate giving tactics. So, this will probably be the last one. But May 2025, guys, thank you. That's the huge key 'cause tactics, and the reason why I don't like teaching tactics is because they change all the time and then I make an audience that's completely dependent on hearing my tactics all the time. I'd rather teach principles. But a tactic that is working really [ __ ] well right now is taking your top performing all-time Reels on Instagram and running them via Trial Reels. Trial Reels is the most insane thing that still shockingly a lot of people that we talked to have not even heard of.

I have never done it. Keep going.

Okay, cool. So, when you go to upload a Reel, you can toggle Trial Reel, and it will serve it to people that do not follow you. Nobody who follows you will see it. And then you can choose to put it public. This is great for a couple of things. One, you can test hooks. If you and Jake are debating a hook and Jake's like, "No, [ __ ] This is the hook here," he can show you that he's right because you can post yours and his to people that won't see. You can throw some tactics in here with the principles. That's, that's a good one right there. And if you do that, you can one calibrate your hooks. You can start to know what's going to work and what's not because you're going to have data over time. But secondly, what a couple of interesting characters are doing and, and, you know, a lot of our clients are doing very successfully right now is taking their top 10 to 20 Reels of all time and just reposting them because they're being served to somebody who has not seen your content before. It's essentially, it feels like free paid. It's very strange. And so, I would argue that is a very good use of, you know, your social media manager or whoever is running your Instagram. Like, have them [ __ ] do that. For sure. I don't know anybody that's doing the Trial Reels and or if they're doing it being systematic with the hooks. There's a lot, just to be clear. Like, I am not the first person. I, I didn't invent this. I got this from, I think Adley Kingsman. Like, yeah, I, I got this from somebody else. This goes back to why I love this podcast because it's going from an operator's lens and a lot of people in the companies that I'm interviewing, do you know who the person is that's deciding this? A social media manager at a big company that's not in the weeds. I would definitely, the social media manager, I would 100% bet that none of the guests thus far are doing Instagram Trial Reels. [ __ ] I'm not doing it either. I'm guilty, too. You know why? 'Cause they have a social media manager, not an Instagram manager. What, what you framed this section as is like, let's go in on all the tactics on all these platforms. I'm not the expert on all these platforms. I would argue there is, I'm sure there's somebody on Earth that is, but I have yet to meet them. It's impossible. There's too many and they're evolving all the time. So, the best case scenario is you actually have people own individual platforms. Back to what we were talking about of creating individual for the platforms. If you're going to put in that effort, you should also have individual people managing them. If you have somebody that's managing all the platforms, they're missing out on these tactics and they're seeing these tactics after the wave of gurus talk about it. If you have somebody that's only managing Instagram, right? If Trevor is only in Instagram, he's all of a sudden going to notice, "Wait, what the [ __ ] is this new thing? I, I go to this page to upload this Reel every [ __ ] day, multiple times a day, and I see something different. What is this?" That is where like, I mean, that's where we had the most growth on TikTok for Gary, for example, when he was like, "I want to prioritize TikTok. Caleb, let's go ahead and like, do the damn thing." You run it like me, not only creating the clips but managing the platform and seeing how they performed or didn't perform, that feedback loop was incredible. If we had one person managing all of that across the, do you think I would have gotten those insights? Hell no.

What's interesting too is I think that the human and persona which would be passionate about those platforms is such a different human. Like I think someone that's a 55-year-old human potentially could be super passionate about LinkedIn. Do I think they're on TikTok? Maybe. Maybe not. So I definitely think that there's too much contrast. They definitely are. Yeah. Oh yeah, dude. Everyone's on TikTok. Maybe a bad example, but No, I, I know what you're saying. I would say Facebook is fading. I would say Facebook is fading as far as the younger demo. No, younger demo. Uh, anecdotally, yes. What percent of people are super passionate and on TikTok and Facebook? I think that that is like a tiny percent of people that are on both of those. If you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, for example, his top performing platform out of all of them right now is Facebook. Wow. So, running through each of the platforms, should I be taking Facebook more seriously?

Definitely. The someone I used to work for would call it like selling out of your own pocket. It's, it's, it's behaving online assuming that everyone else behaves the way that we do. And I, I'm the biggest culprit of this. I always have to fight this because I, I tend to think I'm an early mover on a lot of things. And so then I make the assumption that a lot of other people are, too. But it's not the case. Facebook's huge. There's more people on Facebook than any [ __ ] country or continent in the world. Like, it's massive. Facebook, I got two messages from, uh, two people I went to middle school with yesterday. I think about that as high school, middle school, and family. Same. But I, I do get decent reach on there. Um, I'll tell you this, a lot of my aunts and uncles, they all spend way too much time on Facebook. Way too much. Like, it's a big one. So, with that being said, um, I want to keep going into each platform, but you just completely negged an exercise and thesis that I thought was a good and smart one. And then we did an audit of where does Mark spend his time pre getting a social media manager for specifically for Open Residency, which starts this week. Thank you, God. And we're like, "Hey, we think, you know, Mark is spending 90% of his time on Instagram, 7% on LinkedIn, and some kind of other schmeckles." And then later to find out that like everybody that I want is on Twitter. So, I think taking a real look at just where those people are. How do you understand and know who is on it? Is that just something that you need to fundamentally test, or are you prepicking the platforms which you are focusing on? Because I was wrong, straight up. I think it's kind of like McDonald's moving in next to Burger King or Burger King moving in next to McDonald's. I think look at who is already making content on these platforms and is there enough demand for it? If, if you see that an overwhelming amount amount of these conversations are taking place on X or on Twitter, I'll never be able to figure that one out. And that's just feel, right? That's just feel like going on, following the top people in the space and just seeing the dialogue. That's how I did it.

Yeah, I think you could call it feel. I think you could also probably track it if you want to get more scientific about it. Yeah. It's looking at like, is more of the conversation occurring? Is there more traction around this subject matter? With this niche on Twitch or on Kick or on YouTube or on Snapchat, right? Like any of those. And so, I typically am not in the business of convincing, meaning I don't want to create a new market on a platform. So, if people are on a platform, not consuming anything around brand and content, it's not my job to go pioneer that. I'll let somebody else do that heavy lifting for me. Fast follower, but differentiated. Twitter, I do believe, is huge from a business perspective because from an access, I mean, there is people that are colossal businessmen that have 6,000 followers that they post and you could put on post notifications and in five minutes they could have one heart and you could go in and you could literally speak to them. So, I think Twitter is, is the two that I just was so wrong on. One was Twitter. Um, and then the holy grail of all, I truly do believe, is YouTube. Um, I just think going back to the pyramid, which the audio, the graphics, the video, all things lead to YouTube. I think all things lead to long form. The longer people watch, the more invested they are on you, the more sticky they are. Um, but with that being said, like anything in life, I think you would agree it's the [ __ ] hardest. It's so much work.

Do you agree with that?

Uh, yes. Yes, I do. I think that a lot of people overcomplicate it. And I think I, being the biggest culprit of this, so what I'm about to say, I'm not saying that I'm doing well. I think we as humans, especially, I shouldn't say we as humans, that's probably too broad. We as individuals who have ambitions and work hard, look for the hard way to do things. We create the, we do the opposite of what we do in nature, which is find the path of least resistance. Like, I would argue that that six-hour, 22-minute course on my YouTube channel, we went about it the hardest [ __ ] way possible. And I could have made that way easier. I mean, Trevor talks about it all the time. Like, we, we made it very difficult for ourselves. And I think it, again, and I, I'll just sound like a, a record on repeat, it comes back to what you're wanting to build and what you're wanting to have happen.

You would agree though that that channel allows you to get the deepest connection with the end user?

I do. And I, I think like, to go further on what I'm saying here, um, a lot of people will look at the top dogs and think, "I need to have a 45-minute direct-to-camera scripted video," and that is massive. That is a huge lift. And is that going to, if you do it correctly, increase the odds that your YouTube channel gets traction early on? Yes, of course. But again, back to wanting to stick with this a long time, I would argue there are much simpler ways to get the same ideas across. They won't be packaged as well, and it won't perform as well, but it'll get you in the mode of doing it, right? So, like you talked about how the prep for a one-on-one podcast is absurd versus if you were to sit down with six individuals and you have, I mean, you could probably get away with having 10 to 15 prompts and that's it and let the discussion take it from there. We may or may not be doing that. Something like a panel. Oh my god. Give me a p. I'll go on a podcast. I'll just. You don't do anything for that. Just show up. Yeah. So, like the course, we could have done a version where I just had a slideshow and I screen shared and did like a [ __ ] recording on my webcam. That's what the majority of those courses on YouTube that are free are. And they're great and you learn a lot. We just wanted to make it really difficult. So, I think like, yes, it is the hardest one, but you can make it less difficult, I guess. And, and that's really a note for the overachievers listening. Uh, I'm that way. I, I, I mean, we're constantly having to be like, "Okay, let's make this more realistic so that we can like film it, edit it, ship it in a realistic timeline," because yeah, I would make things infinitely difficult.

So, with that being said, with all things consistent, which platform do you think offers the biggest opportunity right now for creators?

It depends on what they're wanting to accomplish for sure. Um, but I think by and large, YouTube is going to be the best. It is, it does have the, um, highest barrier to entry for sure, but I agree with everything that you said. The more time that people spend with you, the more likely they are to trust you. And the more trust you have, the easier the transaction becomes. I believe that trust is the currency that precedes the transaction. And so, the more trust you can build, the easier you will have to get people to convert on your offers, whatever that is. So, I, I think YouTube is the best from that standpoint. Then the next question is, do the majority of your customers live on YouTube or are they living on YouTube, or sorry, LinkedIn in the comment section engaging with other people, right? And so, then that's where you have to test. Um, and I'm sure we'll get to it eventually, but that's why in the course with team, I talk about not hiring people full-time, but hiring contractors and agencies to validate a platform and validate that it's worth investing your time and money into before you do it full-time.

To, to put a pin on the YouTube for people out there listening. It is the furthest platform from "if you build it, they will come." That is a platform that people must decide and click to engage with your content. It's not like an algorithm feeding it to you. You really have to do a lot of things right to get people even into your ecosystem, which I have found personally has been very, very hard.

This all backs into the biggest question, and we've had a lot of back and forth on it, is what is more important in scaling content, quality or quantity?

Um, I think this question lacks a defining of what things are. So, I think people think they know what quality is, right? Like, you know, we've had this conversation, so I don't think you operate this way, but I'm sure at one point you thought you knew what quality was, right, Jake? I definitely, I definitely did. Right? Jake thought, Trevor thought, I thought. And what I've learned over the years is we, as the creators, have no [ __ ] clue what quality is, but yet we will very quickly define something as high quality. And often times, and I'm sure Jake will resonate with this because, you know, I've been behind the scenes creating content for others far more than being in it, the things that we put all this effort into and think are so [ __ ] awesome are often times the ones that underperform. And the ones that we like, kind of like put together really quickly, and it was like, "Didn't really like the fact that I used like Helvetica New Light as the headline for this." That's what [ __ ] murdered. And I don't think there's any woo-woo magic to that. I think it's just you do quantity, you do volume in order to acquire the data on what your audience is signaling to you as quality. So, for example, if you're just starting off, you're going to post, let's say you're doing one Instagram Reel a day, you're going to post 14 over a two-week period. The majority of those are going to average 113 views, right? But then one of them might get 419. Okay, cool. That one, your audience has signaled to you is higher quality. They want more of that. That worked better. So, then what you're going to do is start to take the learnings from your quantity, and that's going to inform the level of effort you put towards content that your audience has signaled as quality. So, notice I didn't say the quantity then allows you to start making quality content because I still believe we don't know, right? I think the Mr. Beasts of the world do, like the people that are like absolutely obsessed and been doing it for [ __ ] ever, but the majority of people don't know. And so, you want to put out as much as you can in the beginning. Not the [ __ ] throw the noodles at the wall and see which one sticks. It, it's less of that. I think that implies that you're doing it without intention. You want to do it with intention, and then you use what I call the accordion method. So, in the beginning, you're expanding the accordion to get that data. But then once you have that data on what your audience signals is quality, you're going to put more effort into those things. So, let's say, for example, in in this case, uh, lifestyle design, right? That was something that your audience signaled to you that they're liking and [ __ ] with a little bit more than some of the other things. So, you notice that and you're like, "We're going to inject that more." Right? What that might look like is all of a sudden you've told the team, "Hey, I want to spend twice as much time editing this clip, and I want to cut three clips that we normally cut." So, let's say you have an arbitrary number of, we make 14 clips from every episode. You're like, "You know what? [ __ ] that. We're going to go down to 10." And the effort you put into four of those clips, sorry for spitting there, putting into the four, you put into one around lifestyle design. Okay. So, you're increasing the effort that you put into it because you've been signaled by the audience. They like it. So, you're going to put more into it, hoping that it increases the performance of it. To take that a layer further, too, to recommend.

To all the people out there, I completely agree. You double down on effort. It's a little bit risky to do one piece of content there and then find all the findings. I think what you said is doing the trial reels in conjunction with that piece is very, very valuable because seeing if something performs, it could be the topic, it could be the type of medium, it could be the hook, potentially. So you want to control as many of those things as possible to see, is it actually about the topic? I would argue you want to pick one variable and duplicate that.

This is taking it from a great question, great like prompt. That's taking it from the starting point. If you're already putting content out there, it's a completely different way to approach it, in my opinion. Instead, what you're going to do is you're going to every month look at the top 10% performing content, find out what is happening in all of those pieces, right? Not just like, "Oh, you know, Mark, you're wearing a red shirt in your most viewed video." The way that a lot of content creators work is they go, "Oh, cool, Mark, always wear a red shirt." It's like, that wasn't it, right? Maybe it was the hook. So then what you're going to do is you're going to look at your top 10% content across the board and see, well, was I wearing a red shirt in every one of these videos? If not, then no, that wasn't what it was. That wasn't the secret sauce that caused the video. Turns out it's the fact that you started every single one of like last month's videos with a contrarian statement or whatever. Cool. Now we do that moving forward. That is now a principle that we put into our content, not like a tactic or trick. I love that. We're going to take that one. I think there's just so many things. It could be the day that you post, the time that you post. There's so much stuff outside of the actual content as well that you can look at. Definitely taking that one.

Would you say what is a better outcome? Getting 10 pieces of content that get 100,000 views or one piece of content that gets a million views? Which platform? Let's start with YouTube. Okay, YouTube. I place way more value in the single piece of content getting the same collective views rather than, you know, five videos leading up to the same. So, I can't remember the math you did, but let's say we're trying to get a million views. I value on YouTube one video getting a million versus four getting 250,000. Why? Same collective views, but the way that it typically, again, not a rule, but an observation I've had is when you have that million-view video, that's a lot of new audience. Those 250,000, the majority are the same audience. Now, there's nothing wrong with reaching the same audience. You can't neglect your core audience, but depending on what your goals are, you do want to attract new people and bring new people into your ecosystem. And so that's where the million-view video, I think, does a far better job of that because typically the outlier or the reason why it's an outlier is because it attracted a cold audience. So the quantity is done on other platforms. All things, it's quality on YouTube. Increased effort, but yes.

Yeah, I am very careful about saying quality because again, then we get into this subjectiveness. And so I always think of it as I increase the amount of effort per individual piece on YouTube relative to an Instagram, for example. For short-form, I view the highest value of short-form as people recognizing your brand, seeing your face, and then it making everything else you do easier. If people recognize your face, they're more likely to click on your YouTube video. If people recognize your face, they're more likely to click on your ad and convert, right? Because it's a form of trust. When you recognize somebody, you trust them. Maybe you recognize them for bad reasons, so you don't. But by and large, you trust them more. And again, like I said, trust is what precedes the transaction. And in some cases, the transaction is monetary. In others, it's them clicking and opting in to spend 6 hours and 22 minutes with some scary bearded guy.

Through all of this, it seems as though it's quantity, quality, then quantity, and quality. It all comes down to consistency. What do you think is the single biggest obstacle in people being consistent? Them hating it and creating an environment, process, and potentially having people around them that make it more of a burden than something they enjoy. I think that if you're listening or watching this and you have a film day coming up on your calendar and that gives you a pit in your stomach or a little bit of anxiety, your heart rate goes up, that's a sign that you need to change either your process or the people. Content should be something that we want to look forward to, that's enjoyable, not something we dread. Otherwise, we won't stick with it. So, a lot of my philosophy and a lot of my intention whenever working with a client, whether in-house or out-of-house, is how do we make the film environment amazing? I have a full, like, massive playbook just on the filming environment, on how we conduct a film session, right? Like little things like you get done saying something and we're about to go into the next section, I'm going to walk up and give you a fist bump and say, "That was [ __ ] awesome, Mark. I loved that." When you're talking and I'm behind the camera, I'm nodding my head so that you know that what you're saying is actually interesting. 'Cause right now, you're just staring into this black hole and you have no idea if it's [ __ ] interesting, right? Like when you show up, I want your favorite snack and your favorite beverage there. Little things that all ladder up to this being a positive. Back to branding and brand. I want to brand film sessions appropriately. I want it to be something that you look forward to, not want to avoid.

I want to keep pushing hardness, consistency, and scaling content. Should scaling be done across one platform or all platforms at once? Love that question. I'll give you the best-case scenario and then we'll work back to reality. Best-case scenario is you have all the money in the world and access to all the best talent in the world. And so you are posting on all the platforms and then you, the talent, so you, Mark, you have a team that's focusing on all these different things, but then your attention is on one platform at a time. I'm a Lord of the Rings nerd. I use the Eye of Sauron analogy. You want to be focusing on one platform at a time. Now, the reality is is 99.9% of even the most successful gangsters listening to this are not in that scenario right now. The majority of content teams are not in that. And so what I would recommend you do is you identify your top three platforms that you are going to prioritize. And then let's say for us, it's YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Those are our top three. And then podcast would be number four. Uh, that we'll tackle towards the end of the year. YouTube is where we're at right now. We're putting all of our time and attention on that. We post here and there on LinkedIn. We post here and there on Instagram, but we're not optimizing for those platforms at all right now. All of the attention is going towards YouTube.

So those posts are just a byproduct of whatever you're posting already on YouTube? Correct. Correct. Um, you know, sometimes we go a little crazy with it and we make a promo for Instagram specifically for a YouTube video, but ultimately it's to promote the YouTube video. It's not making content to just live on Instagram. Right now, my content on Instagram a lot of times is driving people somewhere else. I think the best-case scenario is I'm just supplying their need there and they never have to leave. Um, but yeah, I like the iOS approach. So, what you want to do is you want to build up YouTube. We're doing that. We probably have another two or three videos to go until we are in a place where that feels dialed. And we'll put that on what I like to call maintenance mode. And then we'll go over to LinkedIn. And we're going to figure out what does it look like to make content for Caleb Ralston on LinkedIn. And that'll probably take us another three to six months of optimizing, honing in. Cool. Maintenance mode, Instagram. And then instead of going to number four, go right back to YouTube. Ensure that everything's good there. 'Cause by that point, we're going to need more innovation, right? 'Cause you can't just keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results. And so then I like to cycle between those. And typically, even on some of the biggest teams, you're only cycling between, as far as prioritizing, a top three or top four platforms. And the other four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten platforms you're posting to are secondary. They are getting the distribution of the content you're making, contextual for those four platforms. Does that make sense? Like if I'm making, if I have a team dedicated to making Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and podcast-first content, then we're redeploying all of that content to the TikToks, to the X's, right, to the Threads of the world. And you're not going to be doing like native optimization specific to that channel. You're just pushing it through.

Correct. I, the biggest thing that I got out of that is the flywheel of having to go back because you need to innovate, which I think people sort of misunderstand how fast stuff changes and you need to go back. Another big thing that I would say in relation to that is, which, which we have done on the YouTube side, is if you're going to have a maniacal focus on three platforms and you're just going to keep going on the Ferris wheel, keep going back, I highly recommend to bring in a specialist for each one of those. Take the course, go in the community, bring the consultant on, learn as fast as you can 'cause it's just going to amplify everything. And you'd be really, really surprised, quite frankly, everyone listening, how little you know about these platforms until you work with someone that has their job is to be an expert on that platform. Me, I learn things in these scenarios. Like this is what I do all day, every day, and I hire these specialists to learn from.

I completely agree. Like, I'm not the best in the world at YouTube. Not at all. It'd be absurd for me to say that. What I am really good at is building an environment for all of these individual experts, these specialists, to all thrive together for one very strong, cohesive brand. But yeah, I like, I do exactly what you're saying, and I talk about this a lot. Like, I think, I mean, we said it earlier, but any agency or individual who is a generalist at this, you're getting what you're paying for. They are a generalist. They're not going to be the best in the world at any one of these. And so a lot of people listening, watching, that's what you have to do to start. But like you said, very quickly, you want to ladder that up to specialists. Another thing that I found amazing is you guys would be very, very surprised. If you take it seriously and you're an intelligent human, on how fast, I mean, we had a 90-day engagement on the YouTube side. I think I went from a zero to, I don't know, a seven and a half, eight. You can learn a lot and skip a lot of levels. And then you're starting to use things that you learned from other parts of other businesses and then put on your own unique spin, and you can do really, really well for yourself. So definitely recommend to bring in the hired guns.

Let's talk about resource allocation in conjunction with all this content and storytelling and team structure. This is going to be amazing because this is actually what we're doing right now. So we can really kind of go back and forth. As I mentioned earlier, I think like the true job of any operator is resource allocation. So to scale, you obviously need a team. When do you think it's the right time for a creator to start thinking about building a team? When they start recognizing a massive bottleneck in the process, and whatever that bottleneck is, that's what I would encourage you to hire. So if you're like, "We have all these ideas and we've filmed a ton of different shits, but we're like 20 videos behind on the editing." Cool. Then you need to hire an editor. I think that too many people, again, I'm very contextual to the individual. Like the way that we run Ralston, my consulting firm, it's not like these playbooks that we run everybody through, it's very tailored to the individual. A lot of individuals out there have like the standard org chart for a media team, and I think that is the worst way to go about it. You're just filling seats. What you should be doing is hiring based off of problems that make themselves known to you. So, like I said, if we're constrained in the editing, cool. Let's hire an editor. If you know, if you're making content, you're like, "I'm down to film whenever, and we have no editing issue, but I have no [ __ ] clue what to film," then you need to hire an ideas person. Now, these aren't always necessarily a full-time role. Like, you know, if you're doing one or two videos a month on YouTube, maybe that's not a full-time ideas person. Maybe what that actually is is somebody that's a contractor, right? Uh, but yes, that's how I like to go about hiring it. So yeah, I typically like to just hire based on needs and problems, nothing else.

I would say something. I love that everything is from a framework and principles perspective. But I do think, you know, when you look at any and all the positions a company can have at scale if they're creating content, you know, at the tip of the iceberg is the talent, the person that's on camera. I think outside of talent, there needs to be a maniacal focus on two things. The first is the editor, which we could talk all day about. It's obviously, I need to edit the videos and put them out. But I think the thing that does not get talked about the most, which per your frameworks is the biggest bottleneck, I am the bottleneck for it. It's [ __ ] up everything is a social media manager. And let me, let me explain and talk to you about that. Currently, we don't have a social media manager. I have a whole go-to-market strategy from Ryan Bartlett, the episode that just launched from True Classic. I'm trying to prepare for our episode today. And what happens at 7:34? I got to [ __ ] post on LinkedIn. I got to [ __ ] post on Twitter all by 8 o'clock. And then what happens? The [ __ ] dopamine hits randomly. Shackleford posts and it goes [ __ ] crazy. And now I'm getting all this stuff. And I am not as good here, aka the product, the [ __ ] most important thing, because I'm on the dopamine fix on social. People need to talk about that more. Guys, you need to, guys and girls, someone else needs to [ __ ] post for you. It's ruining people's efficiency. You cannot scale unless you have, we're not going to call it social media manager, it's a poster. Someone needs to post for you.

Do you agree with that? Depending on what your goals are, yes. So, I think that there is this weird thing that is happening right now where there's a growing discrepancy between what people, the talent know about social and what the team knows about social. And I think the best-case scenario is you have, you know, your knife in the ground a little bit, ear to the ground kind of a thing. You know what's going on. So for us, for example, we're slowly rolling things over to Trevor taking over, but like, I will always own at least one platform, always forever. Just because I want to be in it. I think if you're just wanting to build this on autopilot and you don't want to have the insight on it, cool. Have the team run everything for you. But I'll take it a step further. The best success I've ever had with anybody I've ever worked for is when I'm not the only person driving the ship. If the talent also understands what's going on and can react to things and knows what's relevant, it's a totally different ballgame. Like if I was completely tapped out of this, obviously that would suck for our clients. That wouldn't work. But it would suck for Trevor, too. The amount of times that I'm sending him ideas is constant on Instagram 'cause that's the one that I run, right? He runs our YouTube. I, you know, am watching and consuming [ __ ] but I'm not thinking about it in the same way that he is. So, yes, I think it's very important. And I think that like, you know, what I would argue is on the one that you post on, it just requires more discipline. You just got to put the phone away or whatever, right? Or what I do is you schedule time. I literally will put a 30-minute, when we put the course live, I blocked, I didn't know how it was going to go, I blocked three hours to be available for communications. So yeah, I mean, you'll notice I have very few rules. Most of it is like a framework for you to establish your rules.

You're actually debunking basically how the best companies in the world set up their accountability chart. It's not responsibility, it's accountability, and people have to own certain departments. It seems as though what you're saying is everything needs to be to see success per what you just said. Everything needs to be interconnected. That's where you're going to get the best results because the content needs to be native to how the platforms are performing. Yeah. And what I articulated in the hiring process that we were talking about is what the majority of people listening and watching will have to do. The best version of this is what I did. I hired the person that I want to run everything for me on the content side. I hired the top dog, and then we're going to hire people below him. Right? That's what I have been in previous organizations. I came in, and like in my last role, I came in, and in the first six months, I was doing the majority of almost everything. I was filming. I was ideating. I was editing. I was posting. I was reviewing for any vendors that were making content for us. I was doing all of that. And then I knew what the system and process needed to be. I built trust and established that with our talent and then started to hire people based on the constraints that I had, right? I needed somebody to be able to film with them so that I could do [ __ ] during a film session. So then we hired that. I love that we're doing exactly what you're telling us to do. That's exactly what we're doing right now. He's owning the whole entire ship, Jake. And now we're deploying underneath him specialists from a per-platform perspective. Also, I mean, you guys have been working together for what, you said, nine years? Jake knows you. Eight, nine. Jake knows you and knows [ __ ] that it would take a very long time in a formal onboarding process to get like that. That's the cool thing with Trevor. Trevor has a lot of context on me, too. Long-term games, long-term people, guys. The 101. We need that.

What are your thoughts on agencies versus contractors versus in-house? Yes, I like them all. They all serve different purposes. So, uh, we talked about earlier, if you're considering taking on a new platform, for example, this is one use case. I would argue your best move is not hire a full-time employee with salary, benefits, and make them leave whatever they're currently doing to do this, to only find out two months later that that's not a good move for you. I would say do a three-month minimum trial, right? Hire an agency, hire a contractor to validate that this platform is going to provide qualified leads for you. It's one that you enjoy doing and you're going to stick with, and then make the full-time hire. So I like to use agencies and contractors typically for two or three functions. One, to validate a test. Two, to gain learnings and insights. You spoke about that very heavily. I agree with that completely. That's 100% the right move. Or for a temporary expansion. So like if you have a launch coming up, you're like, "We want to be posting, you know, on 30 different fan burner accounts, you know, 20 clips a day." Okay, cool. You're going to need to bring on an agency to increase that scale temporarily, but that might not be something that you're going to do forever. So don't hire people full-time for that. Hire an agency to do that. And they're obviously working within your framework, within your leadership. Yes. Uh, that's a big kicker is make sure to set proper expectations of how you roll and what your review and approval process is.

Let's talk about the expectations. You go pretty deep into this on one of your pieces of content talking about role, responsibilities, requirements, and results. What is the overall purpose of that framework? Uh, I just think it makes up a really good job description. Makes it very clear for candidates on what they need to have in their history to qualify, what we're expecting of them. And then in conjunction with that, I like to, once the candidate is hired, once they've accepted it, before their start date, I like to send them a 30-60-90, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, what the expectations are that I've articulated. And then I ask them, what am I missing here? What is an improper expectation based on data I don't have? Or more often than not, and these are the best candidates, where are my expectations too low? The best candidates that I've ever hired, they always, like, literally, I've hired people that don't do this, but the best ones I've hired, they took that 30-60-90 and they edited it and they added more to it. They were like, "That number in 12 months? No, let's [ __ ] hit that in [ __ ] six." And it's a collaborative process. So, I find it's really important because it ensures that you don't have individuals like, I like, I mean, if you look at any of my job descriptions, they're [ __ ] detailed as [ __ ] 'cause I want them to know what this is going to actually be like. The amount of times that candidates I coming up when I would get a job at places, I'd come in expecting it to be one way and within two weeks find out, "Oh, they had a very different picture of what my role was." But that was never articulated to me. So, what does that create for me as the employee? Anxiety, stress, uncertainty. That's the last thing that you want your employee in their first 30, 60, 90 days to experience. They're not going to get any traction, right? The ones with the most confidence, I find, are the ones that have the most clarity. And the ones with the most clarity and confidence are the ones that make the biggest swings, the biggest impact immediately.

From a macro perspective, how do you look at that 30-60-90? Because I would imagine at day 90, you're ultimately leveling up to results. What have you done for me? How do you look at those three different projects? I have results in every single one of them, but results might be inputs, results might be outputs. So, typically in the first 30 days, I view that as like context acquisition. You're trying to learn as much as possible. But I do make sure that they have some actions they're doing. I think a lot of places, they just view your first month as like, you should just be meeting the team and getting to know. It's like, no, I want that in conjunction with like, let's move the needle. Like, let's do the damn thing. One of my former bosses articulated it in a really clear way. You want your interview process and you want your opening 90 days to reflect what the role will be like forever. And so if there's a, I'm saying give all this clarity upfront. But if you have a role that actually is going to require somebody to deal with lack of context, lack of clarity, and still act, that's how the process should be.

What would you say is the biggest red flag when people are hiring? I'm going to give you mine first. It is undefeated and always not working out. Too much movement and moving from place to place. If you see anybody that's been at places for one, two, two and a half years and they've done that four, five, six times, that's just never worked out for me, regardless of the skills, experience, or anything. I think loyalty and the ability to have compounding relationships, intel, systems, per, like what you just said with Jake, long-term games, long-term people. I think people that don't have that mindset are just not going to win. That's what I've found over the years. My red flag is going to be for the interviewer. And it's my biggest mistakes I've ever made in hiring is ignoring the red flag that I feel because I'm in a rush to hire a role. I ignore something that I see as a potential problem and I justify it. And anyone who's ever worked on any of my teams, they'll laugh if they hear this. A clear sign, as like a side note, that I wasn't super confident with a hire is if I really oversell them to the team. I'm trying to sell myself on them. This happened with a client this year, actually. Here's a great little L to share. There was a client this year and we rushed through hiring their team lead for their content team, and we brought on somebody who's an amazing individual. They do great work. They're [ __ ] awesome. They weren't the right fit. But because this individual, this client was in a rush and wanted to move, in my opinion, too quick and didn't listen to some of the warning signs, we hired somebody too quick. And a month and a half, two months later, they've replaced that person. Now, I helped them find that person, and that second individual was somebody that we found through a longer process. Took a little bit longer. I had no reservations with the second person. I've done this with project managers. I've done this with video editors, with creative directors. Like, I've done it multiple times. And it's the same thing in like romantic relationships, you know? There's that like plaguing that thing that you know it's like, "That's going to be a [ __ ] issue," but you just ignore it because you need the role right now. You don't want to be alone, so you start dating the dude or the girl, right? Like, and it's the biggest mistake I've made. There's many other little things, but at a macro, like big level, that's the one.

This is going to probably blow your mind when I tell you this. I just blacked out for like 45 seconds, didn't listen to anything you said because I was just going through all of my employees of all the years. That is some of the most unique, best, undefeated advice I've ever heard. I'm thinking of all the people that didn't work out and I had to sell my team on why we need this person. That is my mind is actually blown with that one. That's I never could identify three people right now that I did this with, and it's like I didn't realize it until the last one, and I realized I was like, 'cause what it was is I was so embarrassed when I had to go to the team and be like, "Hey, we have moved on from this person. We had to let them go." And what would happen is I would go and share that, and they'd be like, "Yep, makes sense." I was like, "Fuck." That's a vicious flywheel to lose credibility with your team from a judgment perspective. Uh-huh. My mind is blown with that one.

So, once the team is up and running and you're scaling content distribution, let's talk the big thing, the right time to monetize. When do you think is the right time to monetize? I think the best version is you go as long as you can without asking the audience for anything. So the most success I've had with clients is the clients that don't need the content to transact right now. They don't need to drive revenue from it right away. They view it as a long-term play. And so they start by depositing a ton of goodwill into the marketplace and then slowly start to inform the market of their offers. And typically that happens when your audience is demanding that you give that. And the even better version is you don't do it in your organic, you do it in your paid. So in your organic, you know, like there's the whole saying of don't serve two masters. In your organic, serve the master of giving. That's it. And then in your paid, that's when you inform people of the opportunity to work with you, to buy your product, whatever. And when you're doing that, you're [ __ ] selling. No splitting the difference. No going halfway, dipping your toe in. You're going all in on one or the other.

Are you communicating in your organic that you have an offer? So the way, yes. The way I like to do it, though, like let's say, for example, if you have a community and that's your monetization play, instead of saying, "And I have a community," you reference individuals in your community and the success they're getting. So notice in this interview, I've never once tried to pitch my offers for my consulting firm, but I've mentioned clients. I've mentioned things that we're doing. I casually throw that in here and there, right? I can tell the story of how we 20xed qualified viewership for a company in the UK, right? I share stories about the things and I casually reference it. I don't try and make it some hard sell. You'll never catch me being like, "And if you want to be a client," like even at the end of the course, I say like, "We gave this all away for free. If you found it overwhelming and like, holy [ __ ], how do I act on this? That's where my team is here, but you have all the resources. I just gave you the playbook on what to do." So, there's all these different monetization paths and at some point, obviously, you're going to monetize.

Is there specific paths that you think are best to start, like almost like just starting small and then incrementally build from there? I think the best version is, again, there's so many different variables of where you're financially at right now, but best case is not doing brand partnerships, but having a product. If brands tell you that that slot in your interview show on YouTube is worth X, it's worth more than that. Why would you not sell something you own during that slot, right? Sponsor your own content. That's the best version in my opinion. 99.9% of people that create content will never be able to do that, or, I should say, they'll never be able to do that. So they won't. So, the next one is brand partnerships. Well, brand partnerships, like they can be really wonderful or really disgusting. And I watched a lot of my friends who were these influencers shill out a fuckload of different products, a new one every month that none of them related to the next one. And very quickly their engagement started to fall. The principle here is if you're going to do a brand partnership, make sure it makes [ __ ] sense. Here's a really personal example. I had an awesome friend of mine reach out, and he helps creators, the biggest ones, get really big brand partnerships. And he reached out and asked me, little old me, if I want to start taking on brand partnerships for the content we're making. And he suggested this clothing brand. And I was like, "Okay, there's some items on here that I like and it's cool, but does this really serve our audience?" No. Like, what would be a really good one, right? Like oneof10.com, aframe.io, Adobe, like any of those would make sense. But anything that isn't serving my audience, I feel like I'm wasting, to use a graphic and violent analogy, I'm wasting one of the bullets I have in my chamber, and I'd rather use that bullet for something that is going to serve them so that when they do purchase the item, they associate me with the value they get, not the devaluing they get.

All right, man. So we're going to round out to the last part. This is the lightning round. I'm just going to fire away a bunch of questions for you. I'm tall, so lightning strikes me faster than others. Answer as much or as little as you want. Let's start with who's better to work with, Gary Vee or Alex Hermosi? Oh, dude, what a brutal question. Um, I will answer it this way. There are wonderful, awesome things that you will get if you're somebody like me who's working behind the scenes for these incredible characters. You're going to extract different learnings and different positives from either. So, whoever you work for, what I would argue the best thing to do is to try and figure out what is their competitive advantage, what are they best at, and figure out how you can extract that from them.

You answered that well. What is the worst advice you hear online now? There's a lot of bad advice. Um, I think I'll just stay consistent with where we've gone in this episode. That you should maximize for views. I think you should maximize, if you're a business and you have money to be made, you should maximize for conversions, not views.

Having worked with Gary, Hermosi, what is the best way you can get their attention? Individuals like that are not offended by being told what they're doing wrong if they are provided a solution and it's said with empathy. So if you are trying to get a hold of somebody who is at a really high level, if you believe you could do one function in their business better than they are currently doing it, articulating it in an empathetic way of understanding why they are not doing it as well as they could be and how you would be the solution to that, and maybe even take that a step further and actually do that and give them an example of doing it, i.e., editing a video in a certain way or something like that. 100%. I would say another thing too on that one is getting prevetted introductions. I think I think that's been a huge thing with this podcast. Is I have yet to ask an existing guest to introduce me to someone else to be on, but everyone has been a personal relationship and or someone that someone has introduced me to in my current network. And I think that just puts you in a better playing field to even make the ask, whatever it is.

Love that. Uh, what is one title or concept that has smashed for you on YouTube? Uh, a lot of people are still doing this to this date. There's been some packaging that we created. "Brutally honest advice for [blank]." Anything in that realm has [ __ ] murdered and almost every creator in the business education space has replicated it with success.

What are your favorite brands and why? Harley-Davidson. They are the greatest brand in American history, in world history. No other brand comes even [ __ ] close. They're the greatest forever. I don't care about the stock prices going down, and they will turn around. They are the greatest of [ __ ] all time. Their motorcycles are, I don't care if they're using old engineering. They are the best [ __ ] motorcycles in the world. And all of you wearing the vintage Harley shirts, even if you don't ride, I love it. I don't hate on that. That's that one. We could go on about Harley if you want.

Best piece of advice for one platform on social 2025. Give him a gem. You've gave a bunch of gems in this whole episode, but why not throw them another one? On YouTube, take the amount of time that you're deploying towards the idea and the pre-production and times it by 10 at the expense of your production and post-production. No amount of editing will save a bad idea. Guys, title and thumbnails are very, very important. I agree with you.

What are specific tools or resources that you can't live without? One of 10.com. We've talked about a lot. I'm just going to give some free plugs. One, one of 10. Yes. Frame.io. That's what we use for review for all video content. Dscript. I learned because I couldn't log into it over the weekend is actually a huge one for me. I'm sure there's a better workflow that somebody's going to DM me about, but I take all the transcripts of my Zoom calls, whether they're with clients or like a podcast like this. I transcribe them and throw them into ChatGPT, building a collection of data and everything like that. But I also use it to help me with determining what things to follow up on on the next call, action steps, all of that [ __ ]. So Dscript is actually a huge one for me.

We're huge Dscript guys. Really? Okay. Yeah, I love it. Um, and I think another one would be, um, probably Instagram. I love Instagram. Yeah. And I'm talking communication with people, but also just doom scrolling. I can't get away from that one. Me too. I'll admit it.

If you had to build a new personal brand from scratch with $1,000 today, what's your first move? Probably do what I did, which is make a video on who you are and why you're worth listening to. Love that.

Uh, what do you think is the correct path for a creator to break through from hobby to career? I mean, I'll give you a basic answer. Take what you're doing as a hobby and start charging for it. I think that's the moment it can start to become a career. I think the big one is just start. I think there's too many over-complication. That's not a word, but overcomplicating these things. And I think the biggest thing is like, if you love making videos and you want to turn that from a hobby to a career, make a video for somebody else and then start charging for it. Simple but profound.

What is the most underrated characteristic of Gary Vee? His business acumen. And it's underrated because he intentionally sandbags it. He intentionally doesn't put out his smartest business [ __ ] by a [ __ ] million miles. That man is way more in the weeds, way more high-level on like private equity, on like real business [ __ ] that you don't see publicly in any of the content. And I remember when I was on the team, there'd be so many things, meetings that I filmed that were like [ __ ] wild. And he'd be like, "No, I don't want to put that out. I want to be underrated. I want to be known as the happiness guy." I might make that ask for him is to talk about that on a podcast. We'll see what we can do. It drove me nuts. But I think that there is an interesting thing to it, which is kind of like, I think it was Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or one of them that had a full-time person follow them around and say like, "You're just a man." Every success they had, it was like, "You're just a man." And I think he has his own version of that.

Favorite book or podcast and why? My favorite podcast is The Joe Rogan Experience because I started listening to it when I was in high school. I think episode number nine, one of my best friends, Aaron Hail, introduced it to me. I remember driving through the rainy streets of Seattle, Washington, listening to it in his Honda Civic, and I've been listening to Joe ever since. And the reason why I like it is because unlike maybe what is portrayed in the media around him, he is probably the most curious character and makes few assumptions on beliefs and approaches this podcast from a curious frame. And so I like learning through him. Love that.

Favorite content creator you want to give flowers to and why? It's Adrien Purr, right? That's his name. Adrien Purr. There's a lot of different people that I admire. I really like his content. Are you familiar with who I'm talking about? OMG Adrian. Oh, I am. Yes, I am familiar with OMG Adrian. I love that. Yeah, that dude's amazing. And I think he he does like such cool [ __ ] quirky, vibey, simple stories, aesthetically pleasing. Exactly. He combines education with aesthetically pleasing, interesting narrative films. Like all of his shorts I view as like just short films. And the most recent video we did on our YouTube channel, all of the inspiration was from him on the way that we shot that. I think he does an amazing job of people talk about retention editing. He does like retention production.

My last question is going to be different from all the other ones. How big can Ralston be? What an interesting question. The true answer is as willing or as big as I'm willing to take it. And so it can only be as big as I want it to be if I continue to build out the process and people that make me want to continue. I don't have a number. That's not, you know, I don't have like a $20 million, $50 million, $100 million dollar goal. I think for me, success will be, especially in this latter half, you know, I'm young, but career-wise, I'm fairly old. I started really young. You know, I'm in my early 30s, but I'm at the point in my career that most people are at in their mid-40s. And I think for me, success will be, do I amplify the right brands? Do I bring attention to people that cause more good in the world than make it a worse place to be? And I think if I do that, then Ralston is as big as it needs to be. Amazing way to end that, man.

Where can they find you? Everywhere in social. Plug everything. Um, we got a website. It's calebrolston.com. We're on, I'd say a lot of the platforms, but if you want to chat, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn are probably the best bet. If everybody listening for me, you want to talk about flowers and give them to you. Your YouTube videos have been so educational, helpful for me and my team. So, I appreciate you. You guys should all check them out. Definitely check them out on YouTube. And uh, yeah, man. I'm excited to see you grow. Appreciate you coming. Thank you. It was an honor to be able to be in this group of amazing guests you've had. Bang.

What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode. [Music]