People do not want information. They want a feeling. There is no such thing as too long. There is only too boring. You need A+ content with C-minus delivery. The rule of 100: 100 videos every time, choose one thing to do better. If you've ever thought about building an audience or building a brand online, this video is for you because I've done it.
In the last five years, I've built a podcast. This podcast has done over 100 million downloads. We've got a million YouTube subscribers, half a million on Twitter. I've got some experience at building audiences, and I've learned what I would call a pretty non-conventional playbook. So this is my non-obvious advice for you, because you've heard all the obvious advice. The obvious advice is you should post consistently and you should do XYZ. This is not that. Okay, so here's the advice that if I was sitting down with younger me, who was interested in doing this, actually wanted to be a content creator, wanted to have an audience, these are kind of the hard lessons learned.
Non-obvious piece of advice number one: who follows you is what's important, not how many people follow you. I heard Tim Ferriss say this once. He said, 'Would you rather have 100,000 people on Earth at random read your book, or, you know, the 100 CEOs of the Fortune 100?' That hundred is worth more than 100,000. And so you really want to get intentional about who is the audience that you really, really care about. If you're making sports content for athletes, then you really want to figure out who's that type of person. How do I make sure that my content will resonate with them? I'm okay getting less views. I'm okay getting less likes, as long as it's the right people and the right likes, that my message is finding the right ears.
You know, just to give you like a business analogy, there's a car analogy, which is dangerous because I'm like the only guy on earth that doesn't care about cars. But General Motors will sell, I don't know, two and a half million cars a year. The company's worth $50 billion. Ferrari sells 13,000. So 2.6 million versus 13,000, but Ferrari is worth 80 billion. It can sell 200 times fewer customers than GM, but still be more valuable because it's getting luxury customers, high-end customers. And I think if you are like me, you're creating ideally like sort of upmarket content. You're creating content that, you know, is a little bit more intelligent, not the sort of like mass-market stuff, unless that's really the game you want to play.
Hey, real quick. If you're listening to this episode and you like what you're hearing, don't worry. You don't have to take any notes. The sponsor of today's episode, HubSpot, has put together everything in this episode as a free guide for you to download all the notes, everything I'm talking about here in a nice, clean little note structure for you. It's in the link in the description below.
All right, number two. Most people don't know what they should talk about. And I have some advice here which is very simple. I got this from my trainer. He said, 'Look, the best products in the world are ones where the founder just pushes a little bit of themselves out into the world. It's like, you know, going inside out. Just whatever is in your belly, how do you push it out?' I call this finding your inner nerd. The question you should ask yourself is not kind of like what does the audience want, but what is the thing you nerd out about the most? Maybe it's something that sounds a little boring, or you like it to a degree that's sort of abnormal. That weird is something you want to lean into, not lean away from. So it might look odd to others, but it feels right to you.
For example, I remember going to my uncle's house one time, and he took me to the basement. Don't worry, it's not that type of story. He down in the basement, he's got a model train set up, and every night he was spending hours tinkering with this model train set. It was so elaborate. And he flicked it on to show me, and he showed me that the lights, the timing of the green lights and the yellow lights were like realistic. So he's showing me like his proudest work, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, my uncle's the biggest dork.' But for content, that's actually what you want. Because it turns out the internet is this amazing thing where you will find the other thousand, 10,000, 100,000, or million people who are just as nerdy about the same topics as you.
This is why you'll see creators who go viral about random stuff. We talked on this podcast before about the woman who's doing perfume tours in New York. She's just nerding. Her inner nerd is about scent, and she knows more about scent than you know about scent. She cares more than you care, but she will find the audience of people who care as much about perfume and scents as she does. There's a guy who does workwear, like men's style, and he just loves writing about the pant cuffs and the hems and the cuts, and he'll write a thousand words on this stuff, something I would never do.
But one, it eliminates competition, because while there's many people creating content, very few people will have the same taste palette, the same inner nerd as you. So you end up in this, if you just follow that, you're just honest about it, you'll end up almost with no competition, which sounds crazy. It's like being in an incredibly crowded room, yet you have five feet of space all around you. And the second is that success is a guarantee. Because if your version of success is, am I famous with millions of followers yet, you're going to be unhappy for a long time, probably forever. But if you really just focus on, dude, how do I just talk about the stuff that I love, the stuff that I find really fun, then every day is a win, and you will attract brick by brick the right audience for you. You shift your odds of success from less than 1% to 100%, because you're going to be playing a different game. You know, the game you'll be playing is winning, versus only if I'm successful, then it's a win.
Learn the five Ds. So most people just want to be famous, but I recommend having a different goal. The goal is not to be well known. It is to be known well. What does that mean? What does it mean for somebody to know you well? Well, you want to be able to share your stories, your hopes, your dreams, your fears, your obsessions. I call these the five Ds. So the first D is done. What have I done? What is my track record? Your audience should know that about you. What have you done in life? Deliver. What do you deliver for people who follow you? What's the service you offer? What's the value add you give them? Why should somebody follow you? Do, what do you do for work? What do you do for fun? What do you like to do? People should know about your work, your hobbies, those sorts of things. Dreams. What are you shooting for? What's the dream?
For example, if you follow Gary Vee, you might know that Gary Vee's dream is to buy the Jets one day. And he tells people this very openly, and it's a way, it's a point of attachment. It's something people can remember about you, something they can know about you, something they can relate to. So you got to know what you do, what you deliver, what you've done, what you dream about. And lastly, dork out about. What are you really into? What do you collect? Because that's the stuff people are going to send you. And it's amazing when you wake up and your inbox is full of almost like people all around the world hunting down the things that you will find awesome, because they understand you and they know you well.
And every day you're going to be receiving little gifts, little nuggets from people. Not just people saying, 'Hey, I love your content,' but, 'Hey, man, have you seen this? You're going to love this.' That's what happens with me with this podcast. People know I nerd out about, I dork out about, niche internet businesses, businesses that are, you know, off the radar, you know, people who live life a certain way, highly intentional ways they live life. And so that's what they send me. Everywhere I wake, every day I wake up, it's like Christmas day. I got gifts to unwrap about that stuff.
If you do the five Ds, you know two things will happen. One, the audience feels more connection with you. So the key is connection. They don't want, you don't just want them to know your name and your face. You want them to actually know your story, know what you're all about, know what you're into, know your dreams, all that stuff. And the second is that you get luckier. You know, when people know you really well, they're going to send you the right types of deals, the right types of recommendations, the right types of products.
Lesson number four. Part of me is thinking right now as I'm recording this video, man, this is getting kind of long. Should I keep this shorter? But you're still here. There's a rule in content, which is that there's no such thing as too long, only too boring. If you want proof, go look at the number one podcaster in the world, Joe Rogan. His average episodes are three hours long. And he said when he started that, all of his friends told him like, 'Dude, that's ridiculous. You need to have like a 22-minute podcast, a 44-minute podcast, the average length of the average American's commute.' And he just said, 'No, I want to have the types of conversations I like having. Long conversations with people. I like hanging out with people for a while. That's when I feel like I really get to know them.' And it works because there is no such thing as too long. There is only too boring. And if you ever feel like something's too long, you just have to reframe it as maybe it's too boring, and try to make it more interesting instead.
All right, number five. Don't worry about your writing style or your production quality up front. What you want to do when you start with content is avoid the trap of thinking you need a fancy camera and a fancy set and it needs to be written well. No, no, no. You need A+ content with C-minus delivery. That is a great starting point, because what people try to do instead is they try to have A+ delivery with C-minus content. And that's a death trap. You're going to waste hours on your packaging, on your post-production, instead of just trying to find the most interesting stuff you can and have interesting things to say.
If you want evidence, go look at some of the most famous podcasters you see today. Go look at Chris Williamson's old, you know, videos. They're all there online. You can go see them. Go look at MrBeast's channel. Go scroll. Just go on YouTube and click oldest. You'll see him in his bedroom in a white T-shirt with no production value, literally counting to 100,000. He's doing something interesting, but he doesn't look that interesting. Go look at Joe Rogan's original episode. It's like After Effects snowflakes falling on his head. It's like cheesy as all hell. He's using an old ugly webcam, and you know, he became the king of podcasts. And the reason that works is because you focus on content first, packaging later.
Number six, all right, we're getting to the end here. Create a binge bank. At the beginning, when you try to create content, your numbers are going to be small, which will lead you to have doubts, which will lead you to think to yourself, man, should I even be doing this? This is kind of embarrassing. What's the point of even doing this? Well, here's the trick. At the beginning, instead of focusing on the fact that eight people viewed your content, tell yourself you're building an asset. You're building a binge bank. A binge bank is sort of like your personal Netflix, like bingeworthy show. It's like an hour of content that if somebody consumed, they would love you.
And you just need to have an amazing hour, whether that's, you know, six or seven blog posts, whether that's, you know, six or seven videos or podcast episodes. You just want to create that seven, eight, that first season of content that sure nobody's watching today, but if they ever did binge it and they went an hour straight of your content, they would walk away being like, 'Wow, who is this guy? Who is this girl? I love them. This person's amazing. Why aren't more people talking about this?' That is your goal at the beginning. You don't focus on the number. You focus on creating that power hour of content.
Lesson number seven: people do not want information. They want a feeling. I was wrong about this for a long time. I thought that I needed to have the most interesting, intelligent information in the world. And I really focused on content as this sort of transfer of information. But the truth is that if you ask people, even people who are a fan of you, hey, you know, people come up to you all the time. I'm out with my family. They'll say, 'Oh man, hey, I love the channel. I love the show. Love the podcast. Ah, it's so amazing.' And I'll say, 'Awesome. What's something that you've taken away from it?' Right? What's your favorite episode? What's something you learned recently from it? People really struggle to do that. And it's not a knock on them. It's just the way that people consume content, which is that a lot of content is going to go in one ear and out the other. But something happens in between it coming in and it coming out, which is that a person has a feeling.
And so the advice I got on this, which turned out to be very true, was to think of your channel, your blog, your website, your book, whatever it is, as a little shop in the world's most crowded flea market. And you're not selling stuff, you're selling a feeling. So, for example, David Blaine sells the feeling of awe. When you see him do something that just blows your mind, it's awe-inspiring. It doesn't matter whether he's swallowing a frog or he's, you know, suspended in an ice cube for 18 hours or he's levitating on the street. He is trying to sell the feeling of awe. He finds a million different ways to give you that feeling.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, sells the feeling of self-control, a feeling that you could take control of your life. And all of his advice, no matter what the blog is about, will give you that underlying feeling of control. Dana White has said this. He goes at his press conference, he said, 'We sell holy moments live on pay-per-view.' You know, holy, that's the feeling that they sell. Every fight is just designed to create a holy moment. Tony Robbins sells a feeling of motivation. And CrossFit sells you like a satisfying sweat at the end of every workout. Is CrossFit actually the best workout? No. But they're amazing at delivering a satisfying sweat, and that gets people addicted.
And if you give people a feeling once or twice, you might get a follow. But if you can give people that feeling every day, you'll get a lifelong fan. And so find out the feeling you want to sell, and then figure out how to deliver that consistently, more reliably than they can get anywhere else, and they'll keep coming back to your shop.
Lesson number eight: be so good they can't ignore you. So I've become friends with MrBeast over the last few years, and I love his attitude towards winning. When people ask him for advice on how to be a successful YouTuber, which he gets all the time, he just tells them one very simple thing: make a hundred videos, and every video pick one thing to do better. The rule of 100: 100 videos, every time, choose one thing to get better. It could be the thumbnail, the hook, the storytelling, the color editing. It doesn't matter what it is. Pick one thing every time and do it, and come back and talk to me after you've done that a hundred times.
This is amazing advice on two levels, because number one, it just chews people away, because most people are not serious. And so you gave unserious people a serious task that'll just keep them busy. They won't ever come back because they won't do it. And the people who do do it, by the hundredth video, they never need to come back. They don't need his advice. They're too busy with their success. And so this rule of a hundred is the real algorithm that you should follow. Forget the news feed. The algorithm is 100 pieces of content each time. Pick one and do it well. If you do that, you will become so good that they can't ignore you.
And so that's my unconventional advice for anybody who wants to be a creator. Let's review. So the first thing you will do is you will stop worrying about the numbers. You will think about who you want to follow you more than how many people follow you. And you will try to make content working backwards. Imagine they were sitting in that chair in front of you. Could you, with a straight face, tell them this? Would they get excited, or would they be like, you know, this is kind of whack? So focus on who, not how many.
Number two, unleash your inner nerd. It is what differentiates you, and it creates a world where somehow there's a billion people creating content, and you will have no competition because nobody can match your taste palette, the things you nerd out about, and the way you nerd out about them more than anybody else. Number three, you want to remember the five Ds. So when you create content, write these: What have I done? What do I deliver? What do I do? What do I dream about? What do I dork out about? And create. That creates your content list. You want to create storylines underneath each one of those. If you just sit for 10 minutes and you just brainstorm ideas under each one of those Ds, you'll have like a year of content, a pipeline that you could then attack.
Number four, there's no such thing as too long. There's only too boring. Content should be as long as it is interesting. That's the rule. Number five, don't worry about packaging. You want A+ content with C-minus packaging, not C-minus content with A+ packaging. Go look at all your favorite creators. Go sort by oldest. Go read their old stuff. It's terrible. The packaging is always terrible. But the interestingness was always there. They always find heat first before they find polish.
Number six, the trick at the beginning when your numbers are low is to focus on not the numbers, but creating a binge bank. Create your one hour of material like a Netflix show. If somebody binged you, they would walk away saying, 'I love this person. This person's amazing. I can't believe they don't have a big following. I'm so lucky to be here first.' Number seven, make sure you remember that you, at the end of the day, you deliver a feeling to people, not information. Find out what that feeling is. David Blaine's feeling is awe. James Clear's is self-control. The UFC's is holy moments. You know, CrossFit's is a satisfying sweat. Figure out the feeling you want to deliver, and then deliver that more consistently than anyone else. That is your winning strategy.
And lastly, the rule of 100 from MrBeast. If you're going to make content, focus on making a hundred of them before you judge yourself. And each time, just try to make one thing better. And if you do the real work, you will become so good they can't ignore you.
If you look at what people hate about content creators now, there's definitely like a processed foods type of thing. It's like there's something artificial about the whole thing. People, you know, it lost some of the charm of the early days when people were just vlogging their life, or people would sort of stumble into an audience. They didn't start for that reason. They were just sharing their work online, or expressing themselves, or putting their art out there, and like they would get a following. And now people know there's big rewards for doing it. And so it attracted kind of the wrong type of person or the wrong mentality.
And I think in a world of AI, where any, you know, literally the computer's going to be making content that's hyper-addictive and hyper-entertaining, what's going to be left is going to be when you bump into a person that feels real. And we all have very good detectors. We can actually sense when somebody's real, and it stands out, and it's very different. And so I just think that's going to be the place where, you know, the water's not going to drown you if you actually operate that way. That'll be what sustains in the future, and I think is what people crave more than ever now.
You see this like Sam Sulek, he's a bodybuilding bodybuilder guy. You just kind of get to go on a workout with him. He talks while he's doing it. It's pretty live. He doesn't feel like he's performing for you. He feels like he's letting you in. And it's surprising to people why that was so successful. But to me, it's not very surprising, because I think if you notice, a lot of what I said boils back down to like just be yourself. But the problem is if you tell somebody just be yourself or be authentic, these are hollow words. And so what I wanted to give people was the actual playbook of how you actually be yourself.
At the end of the day, you do all that stuff, I guarantee you will have as big of an audience as you desire. And maybe you'll find that being famous wasn't all it's cracked up to be. But that's another message for another day. For now, take this, use this well. Go forth and prosper.
