#229 Kane Kallaway - How To Beat The Algorithm in 80 mins

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Everybody wants to go viral nowadays

But, why is building an engaged audience so challenging?

In today’s episode, we're joined by Kane Kallaway, a content creator and former consultant, who shares his journey from the corporate world to becoming a successful content strategist.

Kane shares the lessons learned from his entrepreneurial journey, the importance of developing hard skills, and the challenges of transitioning from a consulting career to content creation.

We also dive into the art of building an engaging audience, creating content that resonates, and the best practices for monetizing your content without losing trust. Kane also shares his strategies for leveraging short-form content on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and how to create a sustainable business model out of it.

If this episode inspires you to refine your content strategy or simply learn from a seasoned content creator, leave a like and share your thoughts in the comments below.


Kane Kallaway Socials:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kanekallaway
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@kallaway

My Socials:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/darrenlee.ks
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/darren-lee1/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/darren_ks

(00:00) Preview and Intro
(00:58) Kane's Transition from Rapper to Content Creator
(04:01) Impact of Consulting on Content Creation
(07:45) Hard Skills You Need to Build Wealth
(11:29) How Kane Made Money through Podcasts & Crypto
(15:26) The Untapped Potential of Content Creation
(18:20) Challenges in Making YouTube Videos
(21:32) How to Build Trust & Authority 
(25:39) The Reality of Podcast Clips & Discovery
(27:18) How To Improve Your Short Form Content 
(32:44) The Importance of Consistency in Content Creation
(38:38) Using Automation Tools for Engagement
(42:05) Is LinkedIn Shorts The Next Big Thing?
(47:24) Challenges in Building an Engaging Audience
(50:34) High Ticket Offers vs. Low Ticket Products
(54:14) How To Build a Community
(57:12) Pricing Strategies & Building Efficient Teams 
(01:02:06) Challenges of Scaling an Agency
(01:05:27) The Role of the CEO in Business Operations
(01:08:00) The Future of Short Form Content
(01:11:43) Importance of Brand Integrity and Building Influence

Transcript

Kane: 0:00

Let's say you've never used a camera before. You see some cinematic crazy shit and you're like, oh, I want to make those. It's too much to bite off, Like what you're better off doing is just trying to silently consume a bunch of stuff, create a bookmark folder and then find a pattern that you like that hopefully isn't visually tied, because if you can't replicate the visual whatever, but more like the storyline pattern or the rhythm or the pacing. And then the key is like what topic do you make stuff on? It's very hard to get someone to go from Instagram to a podcast because their native consumption on the Instagram island is short form or feed posts, and the native consumption on the podcast is either long form YouTube or audio.

Darren: 0:35

Before we start this week's episode, I have one little favor to ask you. Can you please leave a five star rating below, so we can help more people every single week. Thank you All right, man, let's kick off. So where I want to start is I'm curious to know how much did like your stint. Try to become like a rapper. Prepare you for the content game.

Kane: 0:58

Yeah, well, the funny thing is I talk about this a lot Like when I think about putting content together. There's a lot of factors that matter in terms of like. Subconsciously does someone want to consume the piece and so conscious is like the visuals, how someone looks like, how they're coming off, you know with the eyes, but there's a lot of like in the subconscious level that's influencing someone's brain to say should I flip through this to go the next one or should I stay? One someone's brain to say should I flip through this to go to the next one or should I stay? One of the biggest things in the subconscious is rhythm and like. People don't really pick up on it, but the pacing of the words as delivered is either soothing for the brain or chaotic. It's like one or the other and because I and you can almost hear it in my voice now like because I rapped and produced music and like learned how to fill the pocket with words and different syllables and like almost like dance around when I deliver content, whether it's short form, or like I have my own podcast or on YouTube videos when I deliver the content, it is very rhythmic in a way, and my goal is for that rhythm to sound like a soothing instrument to the person.

Kane: 2:02

I think when you think about content, it's basically like a lot of variables. Either the baseline is they don't disturb the person enough to have them churn, or they do. It's not as though it like builds me an advantage, it just doesn't, it's not a disadvantage. So if you hear someone, like if you were someone, talking a ton, almost like they're speaking like a run-on sentence, no pauses, no periods, no commas, like in the way they talk, it's very chaotic to the brain and so someone will turn faster. Similarly, if they're talking way too slow and the pauses are way too elongated, someone will get bored and churn.

Kane: 2:35

And so I think there's a few things that come from making music and rapping. The biggest one is the pacing and the rhythm. The other one is just like. I think I kind of think in metaphors. My brain is is just completely wired to think in comparisons, and so that's really helpful. On a podcast I found so like, either when I'm a guest, like I am now, or on my own show, when people are just talking like I'm real time, just like processing and like coming up with interesting comparisons of like oh, let's take this explanation as a little complex and hard to understand and break it down using this other, completely non-related thing and my brain just works in that way from the wrapping man, that is literally insane.

Darren: 3:16

I was thinking about that entire time when I was consuming your content, before I even listened to your story, cause I'd just seen like a lot of your videos and I had noticed that the way you speak was so clearly, was so clear, but it wasn't in a way of just clarity, right, it was like the sounds, the tiny small changes, uh, and you're speaking incredibly well, which is insane, right, just to be able to to think through your own thoughts, cause usually for me it's about clarity of thoughts leads to clarity of like speech, um, but I didn't even consider like tonality, I didn't consider pacing. I've not, I've never considered these things until I saw your content, which is why it actually drew me so close to it. So, before we even get into those, in contrast, how much do you think your days in consulting?

Kane: 4:01

has benefited your content game well the best thing about consulting is that I know what I'm running from, and I know how annoying it is to work in consulting. So there's there's a there's a fire breathing dragon that I'm never going back to, so it's helpful in that sense. I do think, though, consultants are exceptional. The good consultants are exceptionally good at taking complex messy things and structuring them through simplicity right. So, like you go into a project, you have no idea what's going on. All the data's all over the place, Nobody's giving you a straight answer. You go to all these interviews and then you take all that jumbled mess and you distill it down into a few slides to tell a story.

Kane: 4:38

That's basically what consulting is, over and over, and I think most of life is that too and like content especially internet business especially you're really just trying to get crystal, crystal clear on whether it's copywriting or content or any form of expression. You're trying to get crystal clear on a message and continue to grind it down. So I do think consulting is super helpful for that, Just like a way of a way of approaching problems. Um, but there is a lot of nonsense in consulting. I know you said you worked at Accenture. There's a lot of, a lot of, a lot of not best practices.

Darren: 5:09

We'll say yeah, a hundred percent man, it's a, it's a fucking, it's just like it's something to do if you don't know what you want to do, right, and that's what happened to me, like, like I was in startups when I was like 19, 20 and I loved it. It was really tough. And then I was, I bought the light, I bought the ticket, I bought the light. I'll put my hand up and say that. And then when I went there, I literally I couldn't believe what I was doing to some degree and I barely suffered through two years.

Darren: 5:38

Now I know you were in like the innovation lab which in a century, in Ireland in particular, there was nothing going on, right, there was nothing going on there. But it's I heard you mentioned to you before about how like you didn't really build real skills. And I remember when I went into the online space, I remember even following people like Dakota Robertson, hugely influential in my journey, and he was always talking about, like you have to build skills, build skills. And I was like, well, what are my skills? I did. I didn't really have a hard skill like sales, writing, persuasion, like anything. Man, I really didn't have anything.

Darren: 6:09

Which makes me kind of think what is it. You're building in those careers. Right, because my kind of fear when this is that if you lose your job which bear in mind, tens of thousands of people have done in the past year you're actually left to some degree with nothing. Right, because you're going to go looking for another job. It's not like you can move into the online world and almost broker your skills. You can't right. That was kind of the struggle that I have had and that I'm speaking to people a lot of time and I think some people don't realize this right. They don't realize that sometimes it doesn't prepare you for what could happen down the road.

Kane: 6:42

Yeah, I think in in a career like consulting specifically, the best outcome is that you never leave and then you really like the skill. Like the skill is you're learning how to play the political game so that you can best position yourself to have like a comfortable life while you work as you ascend. But yeah, the it's. I think consulting as a career is the biggest gap between Something you think will produce skills, whatever. That means that like the at the at the widest assumption, when you go into it and like actually producing skills. And I know that's true because if you talk to people that are Anywhere between like three and seven years into a consulting career and they try to leave, it's very, very tough. They almost always have to take a either go to the internal consulting function at a big tech company and like basically get bailed out, right, they're doing the same type of thing, but they luckily they found a role there aren't that many of those roles or they take two steps back and go basically back into an entry level role or like equivalent in a vertical like whether it's marketing or product or operations something where they can learn a tangible skill.

Kane: 7:45

So, yeah, I think the the fallacy or like when I went into it. I just no one, no one's there to really teach you when you're younger, so you kind of just like fall into a path based on curiosity and then you have to learn these lessons the hard way. But, like, the truth is, if you really want to build real enterprise value which, if you're listening to this, you probably want wealth, and so if you need enterprise value and own equity in something to have wealth, if you want to build real wealth, you have to have hard skills, because the only way to build enterprise value is through hard skills. So the only way to build hard skills is to either go to a school or YouTube for that technical skill I would recommend YouTube, because YouTube has everything or build a product like actually build something. That requires you to learn the skill to build it.

Kane: 8:30

I'm always a fan of the latter right, like, just go through the process of building something and if you wanted to build it, bad enough, you will learn the skill, or you'll find someone that knows it that will teach you. So I wish I started that sooner. Like I, I spent two years in consulting and then four-ish years four or five years basically running an internal startup at the consulting firm, which was not the same as a real startup, and so when I came out of that after seven years, I really didn't have hard skills, which was pretty frustrating.

Darren: 8:58

Yeah, it's so interesting, man, because even when you're that close to a startup but you don't even own it, you're not exactly like learning trial by fire. And the biggest exposure that I've had was, well, my podcast was four years ago, but I was like messing around on Shopify in 2015, 2016,. I was making sales on stuff and I was able to see, like get a product. I was doing. What was I doing? Basically like vintage clothing that was coming out of Italy, selling it through like the UK, and it was really hot 2015, 2016 for music festivals, and that was like for me, the eye opening right Like how to make $1 online, just opens your brain.

Darren: 9:34

So it's kind of like everything else seems like a little kind of trivial. So I just think it's quite an interesting because, like you don't notice it happening. If you're just stuck in genuinely the matrix man, like I know a lot of people that are stuck in that mindset and they're dependent on other people. But as to your point, like enterprise value, real skills come externally now there's nothing wrong. But if you just want that type of lifestyle, but I think for a lot of young, ambitious guys, they get caught in that for vortex and it's almost trying to detangle that shooter 20s before you almost can't in your 30s, right, there's just things come up. I'm 28. A lot of things just come up in your later years. So I'm interested for you because I know you're big into brand building and looking at even like clothing brands and your big follower people like George Heaton and stuff. When was the first instance for you that you made like your first daughter online?

Kane: 10:26

Yeah, so I gotta I mean. So basically my whole, my whole backstory was, as I was working in the consulting firm, my whole goal was I don't want to do this and I'm going to launch stuff on the side, funnel all the, all the money that comes from the consulting job into these side ventures and then eventually one will hit and I can leave and run it. That was kind of like my goal, instead of cause I had founded a company coming out of college and we did that. First, we ended up selling the assets. It wasn't like a huge outcome, but I had the startup bug. So, like I knew I wanted to build companies, but I also was, I guess, smart or dumb enough to know, like jumping into the entrepreneurial space was zero clue, zero idea, zero ambition for a certain, a certain project is pretty dumb If you, if you have no cashflow, because you'll just burn out all your free cashflow while you try to figure out what to do. So a better, I guess, like a hedge path is take a job where ideally you're learning some skill although I wasn't and then spend every other waking moment other than the job trying to find what that thing is going to be, either doing research on the industry or like building prototypes. So that's what I had been doing the whole time.

Kane: 11:29

So, uh, what was the first dollar I made? The first thing I did was like launch up a podcast where I interviewed founders, so I made. I made money like some money on that through like AdSense or like affiliates, but it was like small, small dollars. The first real money I made was in crypto. Um, doing various things, I launched a crypto project that was designed to be like a lifestyle brand on web three rails was the idea. So I wasn't one of the like schemers, you know, but so it was actually tough to. It was tough to win as not a schemer because there was so much noise and like nonsense going on that it was. It was tough to cut through that because there was so much noise and like nonsense going on that it was tough to cut through that. So we didn't do that well on that. But I think that experience was definitely eyeopening. To like yo, the rules are way different than what and, like I had my corporate job during the day and we were like trading crypto at night, so it was really interesting.

Kane: 12:20

But I think my first like real internet money has come through this like content path. I think something that might be helpful too is explaining like, okay, if you buy into the narrative that we're talking about, about you need hard skills, like most people can hear what we've said and be like, okay, I agree, I need hard skills, I don't have them, but where should I start? That's kind of where I was. I picked content and I can explain like my framing around, like why I think it gives leverage.

Kane: 12:46

But at the time, the most valuable hard skills that I think you could learn three years ago were either software engineering or full content stack. Now, software engineering, I think, is going to become less. It's still going to be important, but I think it's gonna become less rare. Because of AI, in the next year or two, everyone will be able to build anything with one prompt. You'll still need software engineers and I think it'll 10 X software engineers, but like to close the gap is less rare versus the content leverage. So I chose content, which I'm pretty, pretty happy about, but we can talk through that if you want A hundred percent.

Darren: 13:20

Yeah, because I was exact same. Right, I was looking for something that was like high leverage but didn't involve me just sitting in like a dark room building like another e-commerce store right, it was like something that I could almost meet people with, grow and also get better. And then for me it was like long form, which was like the ultimate, like grind. Right, it was like no result, no result, no result, no result until like episode 50, to be honest. So for me, I was learning actually I was learning sales, what I was doing, because I was able to sell myself, get people on my show, write good messages, do good outbound and, to be honest, that's helped me so much in the future. So walk me through your philosophy in terms of like how you actually got started, but also like what you were learning with intent through that process.

Kane: 14:06

So, yeah, I mentioned that. I don't know if this was before we started recording, but I had a podcast where I interviewed entrepreneurs. It was called the Founder, and so my goal was, like I don't know anything about anything, but I want to build a media skillset. So this was like my first foray down and I was like I'm super in entrepreneurship, super into startups. I really am not getting any conversations with these people at my job. Like, let me launch this podcast as a way for me to just get in touch. It's probably similar story to you, right? You just wanted to like have the conversations with people that were like related to what you're interested in, so I started doing that. Um, I did that every week for 50 episodes or so, and it was. It was definitely growing, but like linear. There was no, no explosive, no stepwise, but it was like slow, linear growth.

Kane: 14:51

Uh, but at some point, like after those interviews, I realized I was like there's no difference between these people that I'm talking to and me, like there's zero difference, other than they just picked something and did it for a decade, like there is. There were a few that I talked to that were like holy shit, they're really impressive, but the majority of them were no different than you or me, like they really weren't. And so, as I was talking to them, I was like, okay, I could take this path of like being the guy that talks to founders, but I was like I'd rather be the founder I don't. I don't really want to be the guy that talks to founders forever. I don't really want to be the guy that talks to founders forever.

Kane: 15:26

So I stopped that podcast, mostly because I wanted to like focus the effort somewhere else. But that gave me like a little touch into like what the media skillset would be, so similar to what you're saying. How do you do cold outreach? What does it actually take to like get a podcast uploaded? How do you make sure that the quality is good, understanding the gear you know, like basic stuff that's like helpful in media. And so I would say that was like my step one. And then, when it came time to I, so I actually I left Deloitte. I guess it was only nine months ago actually, but I started making content 18 months ago. So when I started I still had a job there and I was. I was like definitely checked out. I would, I would like work for the first half of the day and then make a video for the second half, and I just did that every day.

Darren: 16:04

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but our stories are like identical as in almost identical. Like I could do something in like a century for like, honestly, like 40 minutes, and then I would spend the next four hours working on my podcast. Do you want to launch a podcast for your business, but you don't know where to start? Remove the stress, pressure and all the overwhelm that comes with it by working with Podcast University. If you're an ambitious individual who wants to build your influence online, grow your own podcast and also stand out from the crowd, Podcast University is for you. We help you with the strategy, equipment, the content, your guests everything you need to create a top tier podcast. If you want to learn more, check out podcast university and start your podcast journey today.

Kane: 16:50

Yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly how. So when I started, I was kind of my thinking was like so when I started AI, I wasn't even there was no chat GPT. So like AI was being worked on in the background but no one really knew about it. So I would say that that wasn't like a factor in terms of my strategy or anything. But I had launched all these things into the abyss with no customers for the last like four or five years and I didn't even have an. I didn't have enough of an audience to even get feedback if they were, if they were worth continuing, so it's not even though, like I didn't, I wanted to earn revenue from those products. It was just like I wasn't even getting in the feedback loop of if I was on the right track with anything. So I was kind of like, all right, before I build another product, cause I could just go. My mentality was like I'm going to go forever, like I'll just keep building these products until something hits. But I was. I was playing the game poorly because I just wasn't even getting the feedback. So I was kind of like, let me, let me stop building and just zoom out. It's all you need to win is like a good product and distribution, that's all you need to win. So I was like, let me just focus on the other one. So I'll just focus on distribution. So what would that? What would that mean? And I was kind of like I think the highest signal thing to do is have video of some kind. And I looked at the options, which were long form, podcast, medium form, which I can. Medium form is like YouTube 10 to 20 minute videos like long form YouTube or short. So those are like the three video options. I had already done the podcast and knew it was like brutal to grow and it's it's really really hard to cold start a podcast. Like you you've done it effectively. But unless you're willing to wait five to 10 years, it's like very hard to do YouTube.

Kane: 18:20

I made my first video. If you go back on YouTube like my very first video was like my plan. It was like a 10 minute kind of like here's how I'm going to build a holding company. So I wanted to try to see like what goes into it. Dude, making YouTube videos is so hard If you have no, if you don't have the video skillset, there's just like the editing time is forever to make it look good.

Kane: 18:38

And so then there were shorts and I made a short. I was like, oh, that was took three hours, like in one day I went from idea to ship and like that felt good to click close that loop. So I was kind of like, all right, shorts is the easiest way for me to get feedback quickly, cause the YouTube video took like two weeks for me to make and I really didn't enjoy it. And so, yeah, I picked shorts and then after the first, like 10 shorts were trash like horrible. Like if you go back to my channel, scroll all the way down, like you'll see it's like very embarrassing to look at, honestly. But I was, I don't know something inside me, just said like there's something here.

Kane: 19:16

And this was before. A lot of people were blowing up overnight, you know. So people like you had like the D'Amelio's and like all of those huge like TikTokers had gotten big. But there was no like B2B short form content that had ripped. Yet it was like right at the beginning of that. So I was like, all right, let me just keep going.

Kane: 19:32

And then, I think, my 20th video, I had one get like 30,000 views or 50,000 views or something, and that was all it took. I just needed one in my mind to be like I'm just going to, I'm just going to never stop doing this because a the dopamine release from it working and having the idea that morning shipping something that night and having 30,000 views one day later, that dopamine cycle was pretty sick, like no lie. But also I just started projecting like okay, if I build distribution and I have hundreds of thousands or eventually millions of people who listen to what I say, I can pretty much build and sell them anything, as long as I have high trust. So that that's what got me started down the route. And now it's I we can go through like it's been definitely a turbulent.

Kane: 20:17

I was like straight up for the first six months and then trying to figure out okay, how do you backfit a business model onto this? Cause the views are very much. It's very I call them empty views, like short form video. You'll get a lot of views, but they're empty views, like there's not a lot of high intent action coming from those views. And so the real game is like you want to go wide and deep. And so if short form is your wide, what is the off ramp to get somebody deep? And like who is the wide to get them to an offer? I didn't really approach it that way. I was kind of just like I'm gonna make whatever I'm interested in making, no niche, no category, and that was good for views and growth followers, but it was bad for like angling, a monetization.

Darren: 20:56

So yeah, there's so much in there, man, and I look, this is exactly where I want to take this, because that trust and I want to get your thoughts on this is the trust in short form. Empty views is a great way to put it, because I say that it's very difficult to articulate the views. You know, if I'm looking on Instagram, like are they real? Or especially on YouTube, instagram is a little bit different, but on YouTube I feel like are these even real views sometimes? And what I kind of was struggling with was thinking is short form for a podcast going to be helpful for the podcast with the conversion mechanism, like do people come over and become loyal fans? That's one thing, that's another conversation.

Darren: 21:32

But the other side was just trust in general and the depth right, our big philosophy is all around influence and authority. Like how do we build influence and authority? And I feel like writing is actually really high, or a wife for that. Like you use twitter, I use linkedin vehicles are relevant, right for me. I feel like writing is actually really high ROI for that. Like you use Twitter, I use LinkedIn, vehicles are relevant, right For me. I feel like that writing really pulls people towards you and I just didn't feel that having as much of an impact on short form. I'd like to get your thoughts on that in terms of building that loyal cult following on short form.

Kane: 22:00

Yeah, and I have an email newsletter that I write weekly so, and I write long form writing on that. So I I also have perspective there too. Of like, right now I have the short form, I have the long form email, I have a podcast on YouTube. I'm like trying to get into the middle forms, the medium form YouTube, so I'm like all over the stack. My, my take is so I have this, this, this like framework around portability, like audience portability, so basically, like what the internet really is is.

Kane: 22:26

You have a bunch of these islands, so, like Instagram is an island, tiktok is an island, youtube is an island, email's an island, and you're building like populations on each island that like follow you for whatever you post there. And the dream as a creator, like someone, an entrepreneur building a business online, is that you can create I call them ramps. You can create ramps from one Island to another and you can transport followers easily from Instagram to email or from email to your course, right, and so the thing to analyze is like there's certain ramps are really shallow, so any vehicle or, like any person with almost no nudge could get over from one to another. Other ramps are very steep. Like a $300 course purchase is an extremely steep ramp. So if you make a short on Instagram and your call to action is like I want you to buy this $300 course, the ramp is so steep you may only get one or two people that could climb up it to actually do it. Versus if the ask was like hey, here's like a free download template to help you like make content ideas, that's a very much more shallow ramp and, like these are not novel concepts, like the whole like lead funnel thing has been around for a while, but the framework of thinking of it as like separate islands and trying to connect them is really helpful. And so I say this because we have a podcast.

Kane: 23:41

I've been into podcasts a long time. I like look at the shorts and stuff. I think it's very hard to get someone to go from Instagram to a podcast because their native consumption on the Instagram Island is short form or feed posts, and the native consumption on the podcast is either long form YouTube or audio. Those are apples and oranges. And so to get to get somebody who's in the moment consuming shorts and enjoying that experience to break that flow even if you have the best clip of all time to then take the ramp over and listen to like a 60 minute audio experience or even like bookmark it for later. That never happens, like people say it does, and I think people people try to lie to themselves about like, oh well, if I make a podcast, I can also cut it into shorts, so I'm getting a two for one.

Kane: 24:27

But the reality is like nobody is watching those and coming to your long form, the only way to use short form to get someone to your long form is to make a native short form piece that isn't a recut or like if it is a recut, the first half of it is like specifically shot for shorts. And then you maybe like use some of the you know recut podcast footage if it's like really high quality and that. But that's only to build an audience on the Instagram Island. And so I think the people who are doing it best like, let's say, diary of a CEO I listened to Steven Bartlett's a lot.

Kane: 24:59

He does use clips and maybe occasionally one out of every thousand watches a clip and is like, oh, I should listen to the podcast, but I think what he's just doing is building huge authority on Instagram so that he can take someone off a different ramp, and that ramp could be him selling a book or like him selling something else. That's not as friction heavy as the podcast. So that's how I think about it. But I will say like I've seen podcast clips, like the 17th clip I see from a podcast on shorts that I've never listened to. If the funnel is clear and like I can go to the description and like learn the name, maybe I'll look it up and like try it. But oftentimes that's not. That's not the power use case.

Darren: 25:39

I love that a lot because the way I kind of would view it is that you're not putting out clips on Instagram to get people to go across at all. You're putting out the clips to build your influence and authority and then it's keeping top of mind so that then in a week's time they're like oh, darren recorded another podcast. Let's go check that out then, because they'll consume at the point of when they consume. Right, I write my newsletters Saturday morning. I might listen to a, a podcast on a walk, but I'm not going to convert when I'm in the middle of my work on Instagram to go over and listen to the podcast. So that makes sense. So it's like top of mind, putting in the reps, uh, just keeping like awareness, and then at some point then people know that, okay, there's this repeatable content coming out on every Wednesday. Therefore, when I want, I want to consume, I'm basically going to go and engage, right. But of course there's outliers. I think there's outliers to everything and that's what people focus on. Like Chris Williamson you know the guy from the UK, he's based in America now Like, obviously his content is blowing up continuously. But, to your point, like people are not watching the clip to go over the way.

Darren: 26:43

I kind of think of think about this too. Right is that? I really like your point about creating native content, because that's what a lot of people in long form don't do, including myself but when we do it like I've been recording a couple of raw videos and I know you've had experience with this too and they've worked really well. Right, because there are a lot of the frameworks that I would use in my podcast anyway or use in in writing probably the best frameworks and would cut them up. And the reason why I'm saying this is because the videos we would use from a podcast are just standalone. It's not like, hey, go listen to my podcast or go check out my newsletter or whatever, it's just like here's my framework on how I approach long form.

Kane: 27:18

Yeah, and that just leads them to following you on Instagram, which then you can ramp them off maybe some other way. Yeah, like you said, maybe they'll listen a week from now or what's a lower friction ask than like give me 60 minutes of your time right now. It could be just like a free download, or it could be you could sell a $20 product and maybe that is lower friction than like 60 minutes of their time in the moment, you know. So there's other. I think if more people looked at it that way, you can still use the podcast content.

Kane: 27:48

Well, the other thing is, like, most podcast shorts are just noise right.

Kane: 27:50

So like people, the truth is, most podcasts, like, 90% of it is not that interesting and of the 10%, it's really hard to cut that into a clip because the phrasing and pacing of the delivery wasn't good enough so that if you were to mimic a short, it would be so choppy that it wouldn't be good.

Kane: 28:06

So most people then, what they do is they're like oh well, I want to get five, you know, like they work with their agency and they're like I want to get five clips out of every episode and the four of those clips are just garbage and like then they'll post it and it would just be junk. And then, all of a sudden, that authority ends up being linked to like, oh, this is like just low quality, this person just putting out junk, which is a loop you don't want to be in. So I do think it's really hard though, because, like we said, podcast discovery is very low. People start podcasts because they want to grow them, they need some discovery. So, like, how do you connect those dots? It's just a very hard problem. That's why you don't see that many big podcasts.

Darren: 28:40

Yeah, man, there's a thousand ways to kind of slice and dice it right. I think that, to your point, you need to get better at speaking right. You need to get better at becoming someone of delivery and be able to articulate your thoughts, and that's why, for everyone, I'd always recommend, like, working on their story, working on their frameworks, working on their authority pieces, so that they can show up and almost deliver it. Now I want to get your thoughts on that because, like, how does someone improve the tactics side of short form, which is the pacing, the storytelling, the hook? Like, like, how do you think about that? Because your build-alongs are really fascinating around this.

Kane: 29:10

Yeah, I mean the. So the best way to improve at writing is like copywork, right? So you? You find a piece you like and you literally hand write the exact thing line by line, and it trains your brain to think in the phrasing and pacing of that writer. Copywork's been going back like a concept that's been popular for many decades. That's the best way for writing. So I think something similar for short form video could work also, which is like you go and consume short form video for several hours.

Kane: 29:37

You kind of like bookmark the things that you naturally feel gravitated to. It's not necessarily the things that look the best, it's the things that you end up watching to completion, which is usually made up of some concept of visual audio, the subconscious pacing, the storyline, whatever. Create like a bookmark list or like a saved list of 20 or 30. And then really analyze those Like what about? These drew me to it? Is it the relatability, like approachability, of the tone? Is it the format? Is it the type of topics they're talking about? Is it the delivery style? Like whatever it is, and you basically just try to find a pattern, because whatever that pattern is is whatever your brain connects with. Then you can start trying to mimic that through your own content. So then you're just like all right, my only goal is to make one rep as good as I can, following the pattern of these Cause like these ones got me so like, if I like these, I need to make something that others like. Similar Cause.

Kane: 30:31

I think a mistake people make is like you go down the feed and then you see something that's crazy. Like like, let's say, you've never used a camera before you see some cinematic crazy shit and you're like oh, I want to make those, it's too much to bite off. Like you don't have that, you know. Like it's just not, it's it's. It's not an incremental step, it's like a huge, major, stepwise change. So what you're better off doing is just like trying to silently consume a bunch of stuff, create a bookmark folder and then find a pattern that you like that hopefully isn't visually tied, because if you can't replicate the visual, whatever, but more like the storyline pattern or the rhythm or the pacing. And then the key is like what topic do you make stuff on? Cause?

Kane: 31:10

I think most of success in chore form just comes down to the idea Like, is the story frame novel enough? Hasn't been told enough that when someone who is the right audience watches it, they're like, huh, that was interesting, because that's really what you're going for is the that was interesting moment. So my tactical advice on that is walk around for seven days, carry a notebook and just anything you find yourself thinking about or talk, like getting into a casual conversation with someone about, or like your friends just write that down in a notebook. At the end of seven days you'll have like five to seven topics that these are the things you actually care about. It's not like you're trying to force quantum physics, that like you don't actually care about at all, but you think there's a good monetization at the bottom of that funnel.

Kane: 31:57

Actually start making content about stuff you think about, because it's going to take you more videos than you think to get good enough for it actually to work. And if you pick a topic you don't give a shit about, you won't stay in it long enough to let your skills catch up to that point, and so that's the easiest way with a topic, and then I would just combine those things right. You've got a topic you care about. You have like a pattern of types of videos, types of stories that resonate in your brain. Try to combine that and make the best rep you possibly can post it. Do that again 50 times. If you do that you should be you should start to have some traction one way or another, like some signal that oh, that topic's not interesting enough, or I'm not picking the right ideas in that topic, or, like my story frame is actually not that good. Right, but 50 reps, 50 reps is what I'd aim for initially.

Darren: 32:44

Love that. The way I kind of think about this is like I would recommend people not to start a podcast unless they can do it a hundred times over, because everyone has an idea, everyone has a big idea, but it's like, can you really execute on that? Or just iterate even on that continuously for two years, right, one a week or whatever? So it's a great, it's a really good frame. I like how you talk about kind of leaning into what you enjoy, right, and even like documenting this. If you're familiar with Storyworthy by Matthew Dix, you'd actually love that book on story writing, on storytelling. He recommends creating like a story diary and I just call it like a founder's folder.

Darren: 33:22

So I have like a spreadsheet which is actually open right now and it's like you capture five minutes of that day, like the moment, the five minute moment of the day. So it could be, you know, sitting on the sidewalk just having like an ice cream with your partner, or it could be interacting with your dog or like whatever, or like a big win in the business. And as you document the stories you've like one per day, then you can go back over the course of a month or whenever and start seeing like the pattern like what's your big story? Moments that you want to even relay, and I found it just so helpful to crystallize my own thoughts and realize, like what, what is the stuff that I enjoy? Right, because a lot of things go back into like health, wealth and relationships, but then they subdivide, of course, and subdivide further.

Darren: 34:03

So it's almost you can kind of find that blend of what's working for you and that could be other things too, right, like I know you go on about brand building. That could be like looking at a Nike ad or night or like an advertisement or whatever, but it's like you need to document that versus like looking at, you know, complete noise and not being able to see what you want to do. And I recently was following Justin Welsh's approach on, like his newsletter writing, which is quite similar to mine, which is like throughout the week we're looking for signals of what's working. And you do a reflective look on your content, and so do I. I'll do a weekly deep dive, usually with my biggest problem, like generally and last week, was like how do we get more leads from content? So I was able to document that entire process down, look back on a week's progress and see what worked, what didn't work, and so on and so forth.

Kane: 34:49

Yeah, I think that's a great way to. That's a great way to mine for ideas and for long form especially. I think that's like you can't go wrong with that right. Like any YouTube video, podcast, email newsletter, I consider all those like longer form. That's the best way. I think that's the best way to mine for stuff that's actually high signal.

Darren: 35:07

And also what's important is like to figure out what's helpful, right, and that's what I always get kind of got caught on too, because you don't want to be consuming all the time Like you're someone who's creating continuously. I want to ask you about the building the audience so I mentioned before about transferring overviews how much do you see that kind of attrition happening?

Kane: 35:31

it's very tough, like so I've tried to make and I haven't been super consistent with youtube videos. I I hate, I hate editing video, like if I'm being super transparent and so right now I'm just a one man band, like I don't have an editor and so any any youtube video I've made has been an absolute slog and I've like hated the process of making it, to be honest you should get an editor, yeah I'm in the process of fine, I've had, I've tried a few and they weren't a fit, so I'm about to nail one down.

Kane: 35:57

But, um, yeah, so I like I've spent a lot of time making a youtube video and then I'll do. I've tried so many things, from the short form to long form, connection, right, that ramp. I've tried so many things to try to get that to work. I have tried, you know, just making the ig story post, which is like the lowest level of effort. That basically doesn't work. I've tried making a dedicated short form video, native about the youtube thing. That worked pretty well, using many chat as the integration. So I don't know if you've used many chat, but super powerful, uh like Instagram automation tool. So basically I a good example is the Stanley the build along the Stanley cup video. So I put a ton of time into making sure that was high value and so I I didn't want to just like post a story and I wanted to test if many chat worked. So basically what I did, to be super tactical, I made a short form video basically explaining that that long form video existed. So it was like you know, if you make content, this is my whole blueprint open sourced and all my tips and tricks are in this video. But then, instead of being like go to YouTube or you know, I'll link it in my bio, which I think there's just so much attrition I was like, just comment, stanley, and I'll send you the link, and you use many chat, and so anyone that comments Stanley, it auto sends them a DM with whatever the message I want. So, like I said, hey, here's the link. And then the link was in their DMS, which it had like a 60% conversion rate, I think of. It's basically like there were 3000 people that commented or I think there were 3000 DMs. So like half of those were me responding hey, I'll send it to you. So there's 1500 people that commented that they wanted it, and then 60% of those, I believe, open the DM and click through and then, like a certain percent of those actually watched the video for a certain amount of time but many so the the. The truth is like if you want high conversion, you want one-on-one messaging, so either text or DM is the best way to get people to actually click your thing.

Kane: 37:56

And so that was a really good, that was a good experiment of, or a good uh situation where I I took a tool, experimented with it and tried to create a smoother ramp right. So, like very high friction ramp, typically IG story to YouTube. Nobody wants to do that. They're flipping through stories. They're not going to watch a 20 minute YouTube video tried to decrease the slope of the ramp. So, like all I had to do is just get them to comment, stanley, instead of go to YouTube, I just wanted them to comment, which is an action that they would typically do, so it's smoothing the ramp. Then I got to their DM and in the DMs, people are willing to click out because, like DMs, you're looking for things to go do other things with, and so that's it. I think that's a helpful frame. Honestly to think through is like that island ramp idea.

Darren: 38:38

Man, that's insane. I'm going to start using that right away because, yeah, that's exactly what I've been looking at, because even yesterday created a lead magnet around that linkedin shorts thing. I was talking about um and it was again sending them a link that they were reopening. Now I didn't use that um automation tool and I want to get your thoughts on is there any kind of risks for using those? You know, in terms of you get like blacklisted or whatever, but it's been super effective. We had like 60 open rate um. A ton of people watched the content as a result. It was just a loom video. I always do those kind of loom breakdowns and go through like you know, a mirror board or whatever it is, but being a bit more intelligent like that just puts you in a category of one yeah, exactly nobody's doing shit like that, especially for youtube.

Darren: 39:36

walk through what you did. So you made a video video about the LinkedIn shorts thing and where'd you post that? The highest like leveraged for like people to do like B2B business. So when the news kind of came out for that, I wrote like a long form piece of content on LinkedIn. That was actually quite like splitting the audience was like you can get left behind, do the old style or you can move with a new style. If you want to move a new style, be an early adopter before the feature is released.

Darren: 39:59

We have like a video, a complete system that we're using, which is exactly what we use in the backend. You can comment down below. I'll send you the video. So we had a bunch of comments on LinkedIn. I also use it on Instagram to Instagram story. We had people like direct access to the link. And the last aspect was on treads. Treads, for me, is working like incredibly well, I don't know why. So put up a long form piece on there and had like a CTA and again message people, respond to people on there. I think we had like a couple of hundred signups in the first 24 hours and that wasn't automated, it was just manual. It was just like me, you know system, without a similar message. I didn't even hear about those tools because my fearful, my fear with those tools is the fact that I don't want to plug something into Instagram because, like Instagram was always just deactivated, I've had two accounts already deactivated. Um, I'm just fearful of that shit like fucking shutting me down.

Kane: 40:49

I think so. Yeah, many chat only works Instagram, so that that wouldn't have helped with the LinkedIn stuff. But my, my, so I think, with people are constantly being like yo comment this and the comment this, comment that, comment this, and it feels it starts to become spammy. The way they like the way your content comes off. But once in a while I think it's very powerful and I haven't seen anyone use that and then get deactivated by Instagram. Like, I only tried it the one time it worked so well and I'm kind of like picking my spots.

Kane: 41:18

I've seen people use it in their bio where, like, they just say there's always on constant call to action their bio. This is like DM me this or comment this on any of my videos and I'll send you the link. And then I've seen people do it. You can also do it with Instagram stories too, so you can be like you put up a story and then say comment with it. Yeah, I think it's interesting. But the blacklist thing is definitely worrisome, right, like it's not. I'm sure if you overuse it, I could see them doing something.

Darren: 41:45

Yeah, I've never actually used it until that moment, which was only like two days ago.

Darren: 41:48

So that's why it was like super effective and it's all, but just using much more intelligent ways.

Darren: 41:53

Because if everyone's going this way, you want to go that way, right, you want to find your zone of genius, you want to find your competitive advantage, and that's why we were just very big on that, on the shorts for LinkedIn.

Darren: 42:05

Just because I've seen what's happened for Instagram, I've seen what's happened for YouTube, like, if you think about it, right, youtube and Instagram have completely re-engineered their platform on the backend to benchmark off TikTok that now, you know, anyone can blow up, whereas before it was kind of like the opposite, right, and it's like this we're just in a very unique stage whereby, if you are someone like yourself who's a key person influence and you do know your shit, you can move quickly on this stuff, right, because four hours of your time to condense this knowledge down is the equivalent of someone spending a year doing it elsewhere.

Darren: 42:37

Um, so it's just being a bit mindful of that, and that's just on the monetization side, right. It's like, how do we position ourselves as a key person of influence? Because otherwise, like the way I can think of is like if you don't do it, it's going to happen two weeks later and someone else is going to take that idea from you. So you can move quicker quicker than people if you already have the knowledge in your brain yeah, the linkedin shorts thing is I've got linkedin open over here.

Kane: 42:57

I need to check that out because I think, yeah, linkedin's very underutilized platform for me because I I like I said at the beginning I was my kind of personal brand approach at the at the very start was, just like yo, nobody knows who I am for anything, the best way to make the best content is just to pick stuff I'm interested in, even if it doesn't tie together. And so that led me to make, like you know, leo Messi, sports deal, taylor Swift, this, you know, ai, that like all over the place in terms of content categories, which actually, like the engagement on my videos was higher than almost anyone I've ever seen. But the follower growth it was good but it wasn't as explosive as it could have been because I was so disparate. Like if someone sees a Taylor Swift video but then clicks my profile and sees I'm talking about AI over here, they're like, oh, I don't want to follow this guy, but I really liked that Taylor Swift video.

Kane: 43:48

And so now I'm what I'm trying to do is compress back down to like who is? I'm trying to get real, real clear on like who is the audience that I'm trying to build so that I can do what later and then gear all my content. I don't want to like get too narrow, but like gear all my content, funnel it into that. So, like LinkedIn, I want to start using LinkedIn to target some kind of B2B audience. You know that goes along with my shorts, so I definitely want to check that out.

Darren: 44:11

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Darren: 44:28

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Darren: 45:07

Right, because I was in a similar position. It was just creating fucking podcasts about business and then our media company you know it doesn't serve 99% of people that have ever existed in the entire world, right? Because it's like B2B. It's a B2B service. So then I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to create videos on podcasts. It's going to be still an entrepreneurship to create videos on podcasts. It's going to be still an entrepreneurship, but it's going to be telling my story, sharing my values, sharing what I'm interested in, and then people will come along as a result.

Darren: 45:30

Right, it's like I don't know. It's like there is that separation which isn't an issue. To some degree, I thought it would be an issue, but it's actually not right. So the reason I'm saying this is because you know, that's why I think your lean on. Messy videos work really well on Instagram and YouTube, because it's kind of like a younger audience. But my audience is at 25 to maybe 34 bracket young guys that want to be entrepreneurs or first-time business owners, and that's kind of like enough. It's like enough in that bracket, right, versus like super, super close demographics because, like otherwise, it's just interesting, right? Otherwise, you put yourself in a position whereby it becomes like a grind. You're just doing this for the sake of selling the course in the backend right, which I think is not what your reason for doing it. You're much more following curiosity Same myself.

Kane: 46:18

I'm trying to build products at the bottom, though, like my whole goal was starting, like when we go to the backstory, like my whole goal from the beginning was I want to own a portfolio of products and services that I sell to an audience that I I acquire for zero CAC or low CAC. That was the whole premise, and so I enjoy making content. I'm very creative, I like the process, but, like I don't want to lose sight of the fact that, like I'm not just a guy that's going to be making videos for 20 years, like I very much want to build products at the bottom, and so I'm in this weird middle ground. I thought it would take five years to get to where I'm at now. So I'm at this weird middle ground of, like I haven't really built the cult fandom that you need to support an owned product, but I have the numbers that would support, that would suggest that, and it's principally because the short form video has, like this, outsized Algo tailwind, and so over the last three months, I've definitely been thinking like, all right, let's kick the tires on a product. So then I go down the road. I just had a gut feeling that, like, my audience wasn't durable enough to support it. You know, try to figure out what the product could be. Go back to the drawing board. Now I'm back to like audience.

Kane: 47:24

You know, build the cult Cause at the end of the day, like five years ago, if you took 18 months of content creation like I'm at, like I have right now, you'd probably be at like 20,000 followers and a lot of those people would be like very robust, diehard fans. You would have had a lot of churn but, like you, have very small numbers. I have like half a million followers across platforms but it's, it does not have the depth that I expected it would have with this big, big of a size. So I think it's something that, like I haven't seen anyone really talk about, is a trade-off or like unexpected.

Kane: 47:58

Uh, reality of the way that the algorithms are rewarding growth is people won't have the depth. Like you, you shouldn't compare follower numbers apples to apples when you're comparing yourself who's been doing it for five years against someone who's been doing it for one, but as five times the audience. Because even if they have the audience, the depth isn't there to sell through through and so like. Unless they're just a hobbyist video maker, they're not going to be able to sell that, to sell through to that audience for a product that they own. So it's interesting, the interesting dynamic. I think the answer is just you got to keep. You got to keep making content in that grind mindset, even though you have hundreds of thousands of people watching, and you have to deepen the cult over years. It's really the only way.

Darren: 48:39

Yeah, man, it's like a lot of people I speak to you know a lot of, like, big entrepreneurs. A lot of the business they have comes from the content years ago. Right, it's a snowball compound effect and like, we obviously know this. But it's almost like less to do with the content but more to do with you developing the relationship, like, as we talked about previously, putting a time in with your audience so that they just know that you're going to be around. And I think one thing that's benefited me a lot was the fact that I haven't had shiny penny syndrome but or whatever it's called, with other vehicles.

Darren: 49:10

It's just been like this, and the reason why did that was completely intentional because, like, I didn't want to be like someone who runs multiple offers and we're doing this and we're doing that. We're doing that because I see those guys yeah, right, I see those guys doing it and I don't want to like name names, but I've known people that have completely lost trust with their audience because, like, they have this offer, then they have that offer and then they're throwing stones at someone else, but now they're also in that bracket, right. So it's like you're confusing everybody, so you don't have to be the short form guy forever. It's just the fact that you have to be the person who's committed to it. Right, and, yes, I love the podcast medium but, like I'm an entrepreneur at the end of the day, right, I kind of think through that lens first. But it's just. This is a really good opportunity for people to be able to tell their story in their journey.

Darren: 49:53

Now let's get into some of the monetization stuff, because that's super, super interesting. So the way I view this is that I feel that people who have small audiences can basically build like a tiny, small kind of cult, like a very, very small cult, just based off like who they are and their experiences, right, and therefore, as a result, a low hanging fruit is a higher ticket offer, right. Let's say you are let's just do an example You're a copywriter and you have a copywriting content framework that you're sharing. It's going to be almost easier to get one person to pay you 3k and then two people to pay you 3k and three people pay you 3k to get the 10k a month, versus selling, I don't know, a hundred dollar product and selling that.

Darren: 50:34

How much times you do it? A hundred times, right like that. And that was my story. Right, it was the fact that we just started doing high ticket stuff three, six, nine, twelve month packages and it was almost easier to build. And the way I kind of see this is like when you reach critical mass whereby the demand is higher than the supply, because it's just you in the done for you agency model. That's when you can add in like cohorts coaching, group coaching, so on. But it's almost like to alleviate you of the pressure that you feel in the done for you and that's just been very helpful for me because it's almost taking the pressure off of, like you know, we need to have so much views to get so much people to click through to hit a course.

Kane: 51:14

Yeah, I mean this. This is a really interesting, interesting, interesting convo, cause I'm I'm pretty, yeah, I'm very open-minded on the monetization, trying to figure out what makes the most sense. I think the to go back to what you said the reason why a bunch of people end up having multiple offers and confusing everyone is because they don't do the math on the first one and they end up launching something that's too low priced. They don't do the math on the first one and they end up launching something that's too low priced and then they get to scale or like expected scale, and the amount of money they're bringing in is not enough, and so they're like shit, I can't scale this low offer bigger because it's already at what I felt like it could support, especially like there's certain business models where, like you are hard capped, and then certain ones where you're like, yeah, I just exhausted whatever the potential market size would have been of this offer for this, like strata. So then they launch multiple things. I'm still like trying to figure out what the right path is. I've experimented with so like obviously I have brand deals coming in for the content for like sponsored videos and like AdSense and affiliates. That, I think, is like table stakes.

Kane: 52:16

I would say for anyone making content, you know like you're going to get those requests, especially with short form. You're going to get those requests. But if you think like one level up of what can you sell where you don't erode trust, that's like detached from your time input. That's really important to me right now. I don't want to erode like 10 out of 10. Trust has been my number one thing the entire time and I think I've done a good job of that with the shorts. But I also haven't launched anything. I haven't sold anything yet. I've only given. So I've experimented with like all I do is go B2B and I sell like five to 10 K a month packages where, like I just become like a fractional head of content. You just plug me in. It's more strategy based, like I don't really want to edit people's videos and then I can be like a lead gen engine for a video editing service or placement or whatever. That's like the obvious consulting model. I would say I haven't really turned that on because it's not super interesting, but that's there always. And then there's like the thing I'm probably going to do is launch a, a paid membership that is principally designed to help people level up their content. But the expectation in terms of the product is not me driving daily chats like in Slack, or me producing a certain minimum amount of courses every month. It's literally just live consulting at scale. So what I mean by that is I'll have one to two calls a week where anyone in the community can join live and if you join, someone's going to randomly get picked to go up on stage with me and I'm just going to help improve their content live. So like if it's a business and you're like yo, these are the videos, break them down but anyone can watch and like that'll be recorded for me. Like that's that type of stuff is like more interesting Cause cause, go back to the wrapping I just like freestyling. Like I like when people ask me questions I haven't prepared for and trying to like figure that out on the fly. Like that's fun for me and so that's something that's interesting to me.

Kane: 54:14

All these other business models other than like owning my own products and brands are not that interesting, although they probably are the right move, right Like the high ticket price. You only sell to a few people. You're at 30 K a month, so I'm still trying to figure out like what makes the most sense, because I imagine you have a team right and so like, as you've scaled the high ticket offers, it's probably awesome, you have the team executing it, you're probably selling it in focused on the content and then the money prints. So that's definitely like. I think that's compelling. At maturity you will say Like, once you have that, I'm like that's sick to have. I don't know if I want to go through the process to build that.

Darren: 54:51

So there's a few ways to look at that. So just looking at the community side, so I think the community side like crushes right and I, whenever someone thinks about like how much is involved in the I call it group coaching, like want the money, I always think about sam ovens. So sam ovens, when he ran consultantcom and his masterminds, he did nothing. He told everyone as well who ran masterminds to do nothing but to sell the program. And then on the calls or on the meetings or the meetups, everyone asks the questions. You come with the problems and he solves them.

Kane: 55:24

Yeah, exactly Because he's the key person. I didn't know he did that, but that's what I would do.

Darren: 55:28

He would literally sit there. It was like a two-day mastermind. He told Chris you know Christo, right, christo is a awesome creator. You should definitely have him on your podcast. He's a fantastic guy. I spoke to him a couple of months ago. He told Chris, basically, chris didn't do this, but he told him to run a creative entrepreneur podcast mastermind Day one, people ask the questions and day two, you ponder on some of the things that were asked and you respond Basically, that was it and that's how you're going to get the best kind of ideas from, and I know lots of guys that run like these community pages, and it's exactly the first thing I recommend, because if you come with all the ideas and this is how you do a hook and stuff, it's just solving kind of the wrong problems.

Darren: 56:05

Right, it goes back to almost being in school. Right, it's like we want to learn algebra because we suck at it, but this person is teaching me trigonometry. It's like I want to know this and this is why I pay for private tuition, which I actually had to do for this exact reason. Um, and it scales, it's. It's a really good model. It's just very hard to go zero to one. However, we've launched a few community pages for small podcasts and they've smashed it. There's some of them are on discord, got like 500 people in the group, uh, on a zero, zero membership, and then the back end then is coaching, paid coaching free, a free membership, and then you upsell coaching yeah.

Darren: 56:40

So it's, uh, zero dollars in, so we were able to fill that up and it's a lead list, how I describe it. And then we had low ticket courses at like 400, group coaching at like 2k, and then one-to-one coaching that solves a specific problem in their business for like 10k, basically, and I think that model works really nicely and it scales just very kind of elegantly because you can still come and get all the free stuff. Right, we're not saying no to people, we're just saying that if you want to pay, it's paid to play from that point forward it's a lead engine or like a, yeah, the.

Kane: 57:12

the question is, if you were to make that paid, if you were to make that front part paid, what do you think a fair price monthly for that is assuming the Sam ovens, cause what I was thinking about doing, to be fully transparent, is two calls a week, an hour each, that are literally that right. I didn't know Sam ovens did that, but that's funny, cause that's exactly what I was going to do, which is like I have a ton of knowledge in my brain and an ability to problem solve in this domain. Well, come to me with whatever you have. I'll live a live answer and also everyone watching can can like absorb that for their own and like adapt the solution for their own problems, and it gets saved in a repository right, a searchable database, where same question comes up another time six months from now. We have that clip there Like what. What do you think is a fair price for that?

Darren: 57:57

So it depends on the consumer, right. If it's people going zero to one, I think that $37 is just such a nice month monthly reoccurring, and my kind of advice on this is to jam pack it first like hit your first thousand true fans in the community, add in the payment, add in the cost or add in the payment. You get a 20% churn roughly. And then you're you have 800 people paying you $37 a month. And then you have all the high ticket one-to-one stuff, because there will be people that will just say fuck this, just just give it to me, just give me the one-to-one stuff, right, that that will happen, right, and you'll open yourself more to that exposure. And it's going to be less, more like fractional COO, kind of like heavy duty stuff, just more one-to-one stuff. And it's a snowball effect. The more you build your influence in the community, the more you build your influence with the group coaching. People just want that, natural. It's a what's it called? It's a offer ladder or whatever.

Kane: 58:53

It is right and it's dude, there's so many things people need at a high, like you can charge a high, it doesn't matter what the price is. There's so many things people need one-to-one because they just don't have the ability to close the gap themselves. And so, even if the community is free, I was thinking about doing the first month free, then, like you said, introducing a paid tier, some level of churn, but I've demonstrated so much value in the first month and like proof that it works, that a lot of people would stay. But the whole goal is not to you're not trying to break the bank on the paid membership, the paid membership. Anything I sell, I always want it to feel like I'm giving 10 X value for what the price is. That's what I've always thought, so that's awesome.

Kane: 59:29

But then there's for me, specifically if it has to do with content, there's so many long tail, huge services that people will need. People who are running brands come in. They need videos edited Boom, there's a video service. Or like a full agency, full editing agency, right there. They need talent for onscreen clips Boom, there you go. You can have a placement agency. They need editors, like bodies in the building Boom, hiring it. Like there's just so many things that you could offer if you want to go out and build that whole infrastructure. So that's what I'm going towards.

Darren: 1:00:03

It's a combination, right. And just to go back on, you know, you mentioned about my kind of offer, just because it just kind of completes like the circle on this. So we started off doing that high ticket stuff, right. And just because I was like I need a way out, I wanted to get out of the tech world. I knew we had a lot of interest in people because everyone would just be like, hey, how did you do this for yourself, can you do it? But what I felt was that when I was doing one-to-one consulting because it's so tactical, you need to make podcasts this way people just didn't have the information or the skill. So that's when we started executing on their behalf.

Darren: 1:00:37

And then we got to a point whereby we were just below seven figures a year and I was like, well, fuck, like trying to scale this from here is tough. And like people say agencies are tough to scale but that's cope to some degree because they don't know how to do it right, it's a complete different ball game. When you get into 10, 20, 30, 40 clients, the role changes Like as you're not, you're not someone who runs a business anymore, like you're a CEO. So we had to make a decision quite recently which was like, are we going to go and go big and try to go really like big and broad and start build that MRR continuously, which we decided to do, which is like, okay, we're trying to go from like 10, 20 to like 30, 40, 50, but have the same execution level, which means bigger team, bigger systems, bigger processes, so that runs. Okay, that's like, that's like one machine. You're trying to scale that. I do believe that that does a cap out of like three million a year.

Darren: 1:01:30

I just don't, I think I don't see a viable path where you can get above there with a crazy performance bonuses but then on the flip side, when you have that being built and that is built, the other idea then is you can insert the coaching. You can insert group coaching, which is low, come much lower and people will graduate from the group coaching up further then. But there are two different things, right, and I think you do. You do need like you do need that, you do need a roadmap and a plan in place for that. Just the fact that everything works right that's the thing is that this all works is the fact that if you pick that vehicle, you know you're going to need to make a few changes.

Darren: 1:02:06

And last thing I'll say on this before I keep rambling, is, like you know, there's that kind of philosophy with kind of coaching on its own that oh, it's a super small team and all this. Like I know some of the like good guys, man, it's a super small team and all this. Like I know some of the like good guys man, that still have 20, 30, 40 employees, just because it's becoming more complicated to fulfill um, community plus coaching. Now, because because not for you specifically, but the traditional approach is like, let's say, it's like 6k or 8k, you still need a closer.

Darren: 1:02:34

Unless you take the calls, you're still gonna need a setter, you're gonna need someone to has customer experience and helps them, some more people to run the operations, and then it's going to be a bit of a headache. So what I'm trying to say is that all business is difficult, right, and all of it requires some help, whether it's fractional or freelancers. It's just the fact that there's honestly no escaping some difficulty unless you get to that higher echelon. Now, there's, of course, nuances to it and there's outliers to it, but I just mean, for someone like myself, I'm much more comfortable having a team because coming from the consulting background and coaching them, versus like slaving it out on my own effectively.

Kane: 1:03:13

I'd much rather have a team, I agree. I agree, that's definitely.

Darren: 1:03:18

Even for yourself, man, like with the editing that you do right now, right.

Kane: 1:03:20

Exactly, and that's I basically. The first phase was can I learn the skill at all? Then the second phase was can I apply the skill at leverage? Then the third phase is like, can I get myself out of it? Right, so I'm like just getting to the third phase where, cause I'm, I was, I've been very conscious that I don't want quality to drop off, and quality is a very subjective thing. It's like I can't tell you the amount of editors that I've trialed for my shorts to try to get this off my plate and just the quality never came back where I wanted it and like, even if the market didn't know, I would know that like it was not as good as it could be, so that, but that that could be an Achilles heel as well. You know that I think good is better than nothing, right, if you're going for, if you're going for amazing. So it's an interesting game though Interesting dance.

Darren: 1:04:09

It's, it's part of that creative. It's like the creative kind of mind, the kind of Rick Rubin approach, of a beginner's mind as well, because you know the flip side of that. The more like economical side is, like jim collins, which I think it's like. I think it's like night. You want like to get someone up to like 80 or 90 and it's like 90 is like better than like you doing it yourself. So it's almost like if you do build someone or you bring someone in, you expect there to be like a tiny variable drop in performance because like they're not you right, they're not the expert, they will become better for sure, but you have to like almost forfeit that to some degree or do it yourself. Um, I don't know.

Darren: 1:04:46

It's just interesting. It's more like it's more like a sobering conversation right now versus like yeah, just build a team and remove yourself. Like I have a mentor at the moment who is like super against removing yourself from your business, as in like you know, he's made like 200 million with his agency and he's like yep, the reason why we did it is because I wasn't out of the business completely. You know, I was still and he was. He was telling me a story how he was setting up like someone's godaddy server recently and the dude's like CEO of a massive company, and he was like the reason why is because I can do it. It saved me. I could do it in five minutes, versus handing it to a system that would do it after lunch break and I don't know. It's just interesting, right Is it to see what level you want to play at?

Kane: 1:05:27

It feels like there's many routes. There's many routes to get there. It just depends on like. Yeah, I think. I think it depends on the style, like, just like the management style, implementation style. It varies, but I think there's. You can win at all of them.

Darren: 1:05:38

Also depends on what you want to achieve right. Like if you wanted to build, like a six figure business, seven figure business, or you want to do the portfolio approach, which is like multiples, multiple businesses, and how do you think about that now, because that's where you wanted to originally start with. Like, how do you envision that playing out?

Kane: 1:05:55

I'm not. I'm not too sure, to be honest. I think it's easy when you have nothing to say, like I'm going to build a portfolio. I think the the most important part of the portfolio is the engine at the center, which is the cult fandom. If you have cult fandom and you and we've seen this with obviously, like the upper echelons Logan, paul, mr Beast but even as you go down, like once you have the cult fandom, it's very easy to like partner with an operator and build a spoke and like, all of a sudden, for a decade that person had nothing but content and then after two years they had six businesses that were seven or eight figures. Like it just flips so quickly once you decide.

Kane: 1:06:31

So I'm still in that you know, like I don't want to be too naive or too ignorant to the fact that, like I'm still in that I got to build the call in the engine. I'm very much on the way and I I know the path is there and I'll get there. So I don't know yet I I don't like to play too far in the future because so much can change, like just even platform, not platform risk, but just like platform adaptations can change the strategy so much. So right now I'm just like laser focused on. Can I build a super deep cult around the type of like stories that I tell and like the type of topics that I cover Mostly people who are interested in content, marketing, brand building, entrepreneurship, like that kind of vector and if I can do that at scale hundreds of thousands of people that like can't wait to see my videos every day I think the rest should like I'll have to partner with operators, but the rest will kind of solve itself, I think.

Darren: 1:07:21

For sure, man, and the way I kind of describe this is that you know it's easy to look at Mr Beast, but someone like Alex Lieberman from Morning Brew you know he left Morning Brew, he was writing for a ton and now he's like he calls like the ghostwriting agency which just popped up overnight and he had like he got like a million in like a day, like annual recurring revenue right, because it's like he has his brand and everything. Greg eisenberg does something similar. Mac great is something similar as well. Like a lot of these guys just built that content machine and then they still feed it every single day. You mentioned about the. You mentioned about the risks, so let's talk about that. So what you think is the biggest risk to short form today?

Kane: 1:08:00

I don't think there's a risk to short form. I think, well, tiktok may get banned in the US. I'm not sure about that, but something new will pop up. I think the consumption pattern of short form is never going away, like people have just tried the dope too much, too many people have tried the dope and they're just like addicted to it. So I don't think, I don't think short form as a medium is going away.

Kane: 1:08:23

Uh, I definitely don't like being singularly focused on any one thing. I just think it's better to have awareness elsewhere. It's like I'll never be like only on one platform. I'll never make content only in one medium, cause I think that I think that's just too closed minded. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think most things in life are a barbell and so like if you think about content, the the most highly sought after content right now is hyper short form and then hyper long form.

Kane: 1:08:50

So it's like I either want a thousand bits of a topic covered by anything. I don't care who they are, what they're saying, just like feed me. That's like the short form thing. Or I want to go super deep on one topic or with one person and I want to hear everything they have to say, and I can't get enough, and that's like the long form podcast, not to say there's not a place for the YouTube videos.

Kane: 1:09:09

But you even see, like Mr Beast is shifting from like 20 minute cracked out videos to, like he just said the other day, like 40, 45 minute with like story and character. So I think we're shifting, I think we're going barbell and I'd like to be playing on both, both ends of that. I like, I really like podcasts as a medium, so like I enjoy hosting it, and short form is kind of like where I started. So yeah, it'll be interesting. I try not to get too attached, though, to anything. I just I like, I just like reacting and just like making the best possible thing I can that day, and I think it'll all work out 100%.

Darren: 1:09:41

Before we finish up, I wanted to ask you about that kind of interest you have with. You know you follow like cult brands and how they kind of build and what's the attraction there. So what's the attraction for you to that and also what's the attraction to cult brands?

Kane: 1:09:56

I mean, I've always been like obsessed with brands like my whole. I don't know what it is, but like my whole life I'm just very interested in I think. I think it boils down to like human psychology. So like if there's one thing that I'm interested in, it's why people do the things they do, and not necessarily like the sinister side of like trying to manipulate that for negative ways. More just like at a broad sense, just like there some people are very good at persuading others to do something and the people, brands like, et cetera, all the way up the stack.

Kane: 1:10:28

I think human psychology is a fascinating topic and content is like never really thought about this way.

Kane: 1:10:35

But content is like a free market experiment on human psychology at scale.

Kane: 1:10:43

So like every day, millions of pieces of content are made from people who are trying to get large groups of other people to do X action through their words, visuals, display.

Kane: 1:10:54

I just think it's like fascinating. So from a content perspective, that explains why I'm kind of interested in it. But then from a brand perspective, a brand is nothing more than like a made up set of beliefs that they got a lot of people to buy into, and so that also is like human psychology at scale, and so I'm just like very fascinated by how someone can sit with nothing, manifest something from their head, create a brand around a set of ideals that they made up and then create this like cult following around it. I just think it's like a fascinating idea, and so studying it is helpful because I'll make my own brand. I'm like I'll be building my own brands as we go but I think just like understanding the intricacies of like why people do the things they do is super powerful that's so interesting, man, because, like a lot of guys will not have that front of mind when they're creating content.

Darren: 1:11:43

They're just like, oh, like just fucking chug this out and see what happens. But if you're thinking through like a brand perspective and I've looked at it from like the category of one perspective, like how do we have like really high customer experience, customer service, but I like how you're doing it from more consumer good perspective, like the Gymshark, the Represent that kind of style, because that led really well into your personal brand, having that high level of integrity, high level of trust and almost kind of building a brand around that, what kind of influences would you take? Is there any specific books you could recommend on brand or even the type of content you're making?

Kane: 1:12:17

I don't read a ton of books, to be honest, but I think watching the cult brands that you like, watching their behind the scenes stuff. So I actually made a short about this and I posted it like an hour ago, ironically. But George Heaton would represent Marcus Milione with Minted New York, and Nick Baer Baer Performance Nutrition. Those are three people to look up on YouTube. Nick Baer is under his own name, but the other two I think or Marcus is under his own name but George Post under represent the common trend which I think is so powerful is it's the day in the life vlogs of the founder, but it's done in a way that's not like the Logan Paul style. It's more just like these guys embody the mission of their company to a tee, like there is no difference between them and the brand and Visually packaging that through like a long-form come along with me or like you're over the shoulder. There is no more powerful unit of content to red pill someone into your cult than that, in my opinion. So watching them do that, I just think it's.

Kane: 1:13:24

You can read all the strategy and framework books that you want and, honestly, most of these brands, incidentally, became cults. I'd be shocked if every move from these people was calculated. I think a lot of it was their best attempt at the time and then they just got lucky with some random tailwinds, but then they created the call and fed the monster. The best way to study how they're feeding the monster is to watch the behind the scenes content that they're making, because it shows like it just shows that the best way to build a call is to visualize the mission and you need a leader that there, where there's no difference between the leader and the brand who's exuding that mission visually, it's just like a fascinating little thing. So I think every business, whether it's consumer or B2B, should have content, whether it's short form or like horizontal YouTube, but like five minute bursts or whatever should have content showcasing the ideals of the organization through the human like through the leader. I think that's just so. It's such a powerful thing that we're going to see a lot more of.

Darren: 1:14:24

I love that man and that's also bakes into the culture of the company, right, because the culture isn't like what you say or your values, it's how you show up, right? So if the leader of the cult is exact same and they embody it right and they so like someone like george heaton, you know he's fit, he's sharp, he's focused, he has like, he's super diligent what he's doing, he never misses a beat. That's represented in the brand, how they show up with their, their products and services and growth and everything. And the way he gets ahead is just by living it, by basically living it and the culture within the company, you, you attract the right people. And there's lots of other examples of that as well, you know. But yeah, man, this was, this was awesome.

Darren: 1:15:03

I don't want to run on too long. We've been burning off for an hour and a half so far, but I want to say a big thank you, man. I'm very excited to see how you're going forward and I'd love to see how you can build out some brands going forward. And always happy to help too, man, just anything that you're struggling with with monetization or any ideas like that. You want to run some ideas off. Always feel free to just let me know.

Kane: 1:15:24

Amazing, amazing. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.