Transcription
Social media just changed forever. And if you don't understand what's happening, you're going to get left behind. I built a following of over 14 million people by studying this stuff over the last 15 years. And what I'm seeing right now is one of the biggest platform shifts that's ever existed. It's a complete rewiring of how attention works and how influence is built.
So, in this video, I'm going to break down the six social media shifts that you need to know and how to position yourself for success in this new era.
Shift number one, antifragile authenticity. Now, you're probably wondering, what the heck is antifragile? Well, it's a term from Nassim Taleb that really stands for actually benefiting when times are volatile. And times couldn't be even more volatile than right now. Sora just launched. Now we have AI slop anywhere. And what's getting not talked about enough amidst all of this is the debate of slop versus soul. You have an opportunity to create content that is actually true to yourself. Because amidst all the noise, I think that handmade real human content is actually going to be more valuable than ever.
You know, there's this Japanese concept called wabi-sabi. And what it stands for is the beauty in imperfection. And one of the biggest issues with AI is that in a way it's too perfect, right? There's no chips on its armor, right? It's all too polished. And there's something to be said for just showing up as you are, right? You've made mistakes. Share those. You know, you're going through different challenges. Share those unique stories because it's that uniqueness that AI will never be able to replicate.
We're going through this massive shift in entrepreneurship right now where every entrepreneur is becoming a creator and every company is becoming a media company. And so, the best way to go and make your business antifragile is to make sure that you're building organic content that is sending through hot leads to your business. You know, more than anything, people follow people than they follow brands. Right? If you go and you scroll your Instagram, your LinkedIn, your X, you're going to see that you follow way more people than you do companies. And so, the opportunity right now is to be antifragile by building your authentic founder-led brand, putting yourself out there, being the face of what you're building, so you can go and gravitate people to what it is that you do and create this loyal cult following.
Shift number two, own your audience. If you don't have a way to convert your audience into real dollars, you're basically just renting eyeballs from Zuck and Musk. The reality is is that the platforms that you're on are generally just middlemen. The real value when you're building a business is your actual email list, right? Those are emails of potential customers that you own. Not Zuck, not Musk, you. And the truth is that most people forget that all these social media platforms have platform risk. Meaning that at any given moment something could change on the platform and all of a sudden you're screwed. I've seen this across so many industries, right? One minute someone has a flourishing Instagram page and then suddenly something changes and all of a sudden it's shut down. This is platform risk at its worst. And the best way to go and defend yourself against this risk is to actually own your audience by creating something like an email list or a newsletter, right? It doesn't matter what platform you use, whether it's Substack, you know, it's ConvertKit, HubSpot, the tech doesn't matter. If you don't have an email list over the next 10 years, you will die. So, you're not going to make real money from AdSense or advertising dollars. No, the real way to go and think about this is to actually own your audience and then convert people from email subscribers to then loyal customers of your product or service.
And so, here we have, you know, really the operating system that I recommend that founders go and implement in their businesses. Okay? And this is all about going and converting people from your actual personal media company all the way through to loyal customers. And as you can see here, it doesn't matter what platform I'm building on, whether it's X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. The key thing here is to drive people via engaging CTAs to my owned audience. Now, I use HubSpot for my entire email list. It allows us to go and have all of our customers inside of there. We can see, you know, which people are buying which things, what email lists they're a part of, and get the right people into the right thing. And so what you want to have is engaging call to actions across all of your different content on different platforms. On Instagram, that could look like different links inside your stories. It could look like an end of carousel CTA that drives people to ManyChat where you get their email. On platforms like X, it could be at the end of a thread in your link in bio. On LinkedIn, it's at the end of a long-form post. On TikTok, your link in bio. And in YouTube, you can go and put links in your description that drive people then to your newsletter signup page where you're then able to go and capture that email.
But the people that take real ownership over their future and create this antifragile future are the ones that realize that, you know, I don't control how many views I get from the algorithms. But what I can control is the amount of my audience that I convert to an email list. Because when you send out an email, right, 100% of your subscribers get that email. Whereas, when you put a piece of content onto social media, you're lucky if only like 10% of your audience actually sees it.
When it comes to the actual content inside of a newsletter, there are a lot of different ways to go about it. Now, there are really two core ways I like to think about the content. You have the more curator approach or the systems approach. So, the curator approach is made famous by folks like James Clear in his 321 email or Tim Ferriss in his Five Bullet Friday. Essentially, what you're doing here is rounding up some key little tips, tricks that people can go and learn about and then sending them on to different links. Okay. The other side is the more deep systems approach. And this is what I do inside of the Founder OS newsletter that I send out every single Saturday. It's the only newsletter you need to scale your personal brand. And how I do it is that I start off with a story of what I've currently experienced that week and then give away a valuable free system that can help folks go and scale their own personal brand. These are more deep dives, giving away free systems, templates, GPT prompts. Monetizing attention isn't about going viral. It's about building conversion infrastructure that allows you to actually go and monetize the eyeballs that you have. So move past this obsession over virality and focus on the infrastructure. If you want this entire funnel, want to go and implement it in your business today, you should go check it out via the link in the description.
Shift number three, the content GPS system. If you don't master distribution across platforms, you're going to be left in the dust. That's why winners will have a content GPS system. So the content waterfall system is how I go and take one piece of content and turn it into 20 other strategic pieces of content. And so the key thing is you want to make sure you get the maximum amount of bang for your buck by actually making sure that that one YouTube video becomes things like multiple LinkedIn posts, carousels for LinkedIn. It becomes Instagram posts, things like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok videos.
So what I'm going to go break down is one of the original videos on my channel. This was all about my story and how I got started. And so, as you can see here, I was able to go and take some of the core aspects of this video and go and synthesize it in a number of different X posts. Each one of these getting around 200,000 views. In this case, one of them got over 1.9 million. So, it's crazy because the cut-down version of that long-form video actually got more views than the video itself. Now, over here on LinkedIn, same deal. You can see that I'm breaking down my story for that platform as well. And the post got over a million views as well. And as we go to Instagram, I took it and put it into different carousels that I thought would be valuable. And these also went and blew up. And so what ends up happening is when you go and you distribute this, right, you're just doing smart repurposing of your content, allowing the distributed content often times to get more views combined than the actual original video itself, thereby again maximizing your output while minimizing the amount of energy you have to put into creation.
Now in addition to that you can see here on Instagram what we typically do is we'll go and take the general concept and turn it into an eight-slide carousel and the last slide there will drive people to go and DM me where they get into a ManyChat funnel and become part of our email list. And so all of this infrastructure, right, allows me to go and stay on top of things, right, and not just build some media company that's based on views, but is really based on systems and conversion, which allows me to build a valuable media property that feeds my business, it feeds my lifestyle, and makes this sustainable long term.
Shift number four, your taste is what cuts through the noise. Now, when it comes to taste, right, it's really that feeling, that emotion, that general sense that you evoke amongst the viewer of your content. And while a lot of people just ship a bunch of garbage, right? You have the opportunity to go and really elevate the quality of everything you put out there, right? Make art, not content. Don't just ship stuff that is kind of 50% the way there. Go and actually go the distance, go the extra mile to make stuff that people develop some sort of emotional resonance with. Okay? And so, you know, when I go and think about where I'm trying to go with Founder OS, right, for me, it's almost creating this super aspirational founder brand. What Apple did for creatives in the '70s, what Nike's done for athletes in the '80s is what we're trying to do for founders in the 2020s.
One way that you can go and think about creating your own taste brand is to come and create your brand principles. And so, one of my brand principles is obsessive craftsmanship. And showing the amount of detail that goes into developing a team of A players, creating org charts that create a seamless operation within your company and how to actually go and delegate to people so you can go and elevate yourself within your company. You know, it's having that aesthetic artist touch. I think that too much of content is just getting lost in this soup of sameness. Everyone's doing the same thing as everyone else and you have an opportunity to actually go and make things different because there are two things to think about, right? Are you trying to go and create signal or noise? You know, noise is that kind of content that just goes viral but that no one's talking about a week from now. Taste is all about signal, right? And signal is when you create something that stands the test of time.
And so when you're actually looking to go and implement better taste inside of your own brand, the key thing here is that the best creators are the best curators. And you got to make sure that you're actually curating your content by being insanely intentional. You know, stop scrolling and start using that time to actually save content that you see that you really enjoy into different collections on Instagram or into different X bookmarks, LinkedIn saves, Pinterest boards, into my mind. It doesn't matter the tool you use. The key is that you stop consuming and you start curating. This is often times the first step to then getting the inspiration you need to create your brand. You know, I think that every brand should start as a Pinterest board. Here's the Pinterest board that really defines the energy that we have here at Founder OS. You can see that it's filled of adventure, freedom, deep systems and frameworks, all the while having inspiring, sharp, quick copy that's bold, that really evokes emotion, and that encourages you to just go do the damn thing. It's this Pinterest board that really inspired the beauty across the entire Founder OS brand. And I think that if you don't have a mood board for your brand, well, this is your cue. Probably time to go get after it.
Shift number five, brand identity. You're not just building a brand, you're building who you are in the mind of others. Let me get into a bit of the identity behind my own personal brand. So, first off, the core feeling that we're looking to evoke in people is this feeling of freedom, right? I'm all about going and achieving time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom. And it's the systems that I often times share that have helped me get there over the last 15 years. And so, for me, it's this kind of Zen CEO vibe, right? Being able to travel the world, live a life by design, go and help founders that I genuinely love to help.
On the aspirational side, over the next decade, we have massive ambitions with this founder freedom movement. You know, we're looking to go and buy a retreat center in the Dolomites, this epic place nested in Lagardena, which is all going to go and host amazing founders from all over the world, allow them to snowboard together in the winter and do some downhill mountain biking and epic hiking through crazy refugios all through the mountain range in the summer. You know, I want to go and bring this YouTube channel and eventually get our own Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown meets entrepreneurship vibe onto Netflix and bring this from subscribers to streaming. And then over the next 7 years, I'm looking to publish seven best-selling books. And my hope here is to really push the envelope and really achieve my mission of really unlocking my full creative potential and along the way inspiring you to do the same.
You know, the difference between me and most people out there is that, you know, I actually use these systems daily. You know, I'm actually in the trenches building. And I've helped 10,000 other plus founders go and build their businesses. And so, what I like to do is just, you know, be this role model for people on my channel going and building different systems. And as I discover new breakthroughs, I go and share them with you here for free. For me, one of the big things that I think encapsulates our brand is being insanely simple and insanely generous. Whether it's via different decks we create, systems we have, or the things that you can even go and find in the description of this video. And so, you want to go and take a look at, you know, what is your brand stand for? What is the hill that you're willing to die on? The thing that, you know, you think that you were put on this earth to do? And why not just go and bet on that? And so, I'd encourage you to go do that thing. Go build that thing that scares you, right? And it's quite possibly that that's the exact thing that's going to help go and inspire a movement around what you're building.
Shift number six is get offline to grow online. The most underestimated leverage of all is actually just stepping away. Peace offline is presence online. There are a couple core systems that I have in my life that ensure that I get some offline time that really just goes and fuels my online presence. Now, one of those is called the soul trip. Every six weeks, I take a spontaneous trip with a group of friends, going somewhere epic, and crossing something off of my bucket list. It's these trips that give me the inspiration, the creativity that I need to go and fuel this amazing creative brand that we have here at Founder OS and around my personal brand. Nature is the greatest mentor.
Another system that I have is something that I learned from Julia Cameron and it's called an artist date. You know, taking those couple moments in a week to go and just do something a little bit different to kind of feed the inner child in you. It could be going to a pottery class, doing a painting class, maybe it's, you know, going and doing a bit of a nature walk without your phone. Rick Rubin in his book, The Creative Act, goes and relates a lot of core aspects of creativity to nature, you know, whether it's the different flow you feel when you're in a creative flow to that of like a river and the water flowing down it, you know, or it's often times, you know, the stillness that you have when you've released something that you really feel proud about and you can just sit there feel proud. Very much how like a tree feels rooted, right?
The reality is is that when you get outside, you get offline, you get into nature, you're able to allow yourself to get inspired by things that are not online, right? The issue is if you're always online, what ends up happening is you follow five creators, you're looking at 10 Instagram accounts, there's another million people looking at those things. And so the stuff that's inspiring you to create is the same stuff that's inspiring a million other people's to create it. And it just contributes to this sea of sameness online. Meanwhile, there's those people that escape to Joshua Tree, go for a hike in Sequoia, go and escape to Yosemite, go on a road trip for five days with friends and get inspired by different things.
You know, if you're looking to go and build your own founder brand, become more antifragile for the next 10 years, you should go and check out Founder OS via the link in the description. Thanks for watching this video. You can go and check out this video and don't forget to hit like and subscribe. My job.