This YouTube expert made creators $100M+ (Not clickbait)

Join me as I chat with Paddy Galloway, a veteran YouTube strategist who has worked with major creators like MrBeast, where he shares a comprehensive blueprint for YouTube success. The discussion covers everything from initial channel strategy to advanced content packaging techniques, emphasizing the importance of consistent posting, strategic ideation, and effective thumbnail design. Galloway presents a structured approach to growing a YouTube channel over 12 months, with specific benchmarks and goals for each phase. Growth guides to turn your startup into a money printer Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/growth-guides Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 03:41 - Why YouTube 09:26 - Evergreen Content vs Timely Content 11:54 - The Value of Comments and Engagement 14:44 - YouTube's Unique Position in Content Consumption 15:26 - Monetization Potential on YouTube 17:14 - The Challenge of Mastering YouTube 19:36 - YouTube's Popularity Among Younger Audiences 20:35 - Algorithm Stability on YouTube 30:27 - Depth vs. Discovery on YouTube 36:51 - The 12-month growth strategy breakdown 1:17:38 - Content ideation framework discussion 1:32:26 - Thumbnail and packaging strategies Key Points: • Success requires a 12-month commitment with specific phases: establishment (months 1-4), improvement (months 5-8), and optimization (months 9-12) • Content ideation should follow a 0-100-10-1 framework: start with zero, generate 100+ ideas, filter to 10 strong ones, develop 1 final concept • Thumbnails and packaging are crucial, with recommendation to create 3 distinct thumbnails per video and follow the "three focus area rule" 1) First, understand what YouTube really is: • It's NOT social media - it's a streaming platform • 60-70% of views come from TV screens • It's the biggest streaming service worldwide • Videos = digital real estate that appreciates over time 2)The 12-Month YouTube Growth Plan: Months 1-4 (Establishment Phase): • Find your niche using triple Venn diagram: 1. What you love 2. What you're good at 3. What people want to watch • Post 2x per week consistently • Don't overthink quality yet 3) Months 5-8 (Improvement Phase): • Generate 100 video ideas weekly • Make 3 thumbnails per video • Study outlier content in your niche • Switch to 1 high-quality video per week • Focus on packaging (title + thumbnail) 4) Months 9-12 (Optimization Phase): • Analyze your top 10% performing videos • Double down on what works • Spend 4 hrs/week studying YouTube • Make small 1% improvements each video • Build systems for consistent output 5) The Golden Rule of Audience Overlap: Each video should have 80%+ audience overlap with your other content. If someone watches one of your videos, they should want to watch MOST of your other videos too. 6) Thumbnail Psychology: • Use the "3 Focus Areas" rule • Pass the "Glance Test" (1-second viewability) • Max 4-5 words of text • Make it bright and clear • Being good at graphic design ≠ good at thumbnails 7) Smart Title Strategy: • Keep under 60 characters • Use simple, universal language • Include superlatives when possible • Write for humans, not algorithms • Grade A readability score (7-8 year old level) 8) The CCN Framework for Ideas: Every video should appeal to: • Core audience • Casual viewers • New viewers 9) The Video Idea Pipeline: Start with 100 ideas → Filter to 10 strong ones → Pick the best one 10) The ROI reality: • Expect 12 months minimum before seeing real returns • Need 50+ videos to find your groove • Success = Volume + Quality + Consistency • Best converting platform after email • Worth the long-term investment Remember: YouTube is a game of marginal gains. Notable Quotes: "YouTube is not a video platform... before making a video, you need to understand what video to make, the strategy behind choosing ideas, packaging." - Paddy Galloway "If you're going to do something for 12 months on YouTube, you have to be willing to eat shit for a long time before it might pay off." - Paddy Galloway LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/ BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND PADDY ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/PaddyG96 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@paddygalloway8780 YouTube Job Board: https://ytjobs.co

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Paddy Galloway, this is the guy that's worked with everyone from Mr. Beast to Red Bull on their YouTube strategy. And in this episode, he walks through in about 90 minutes, a 12-month plan for you to kickstart and build your very own YouTube channel that can scale to millions of subscribers. Now, this is important, not just if you want to create a personal brand. This is also if you're creating a business, YouTube is an incredible place to have an audience. And he walks through this whole, whole, whole YouTube cheat sheet he prepared for everyone on the Startup Ideas Podcast. You're gonna love this episode.

• 0:44Greg Isenberg?

  It's long, I will say, but if you stick through to the end, you'll know more about YouTube than 99% of people.

• 1:14Greg Isenberg?

  Paddy Galloway on the pod. What are we, what are we learning today, Patty?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  I'd love to give your audience a bit of a cheat sheet into YouTube, into YouTube strategy, because this is what I do all day, every day. This is what I focus my life on. And I think if by the end of this podcast, I can sort of dispel a few myths and give people some good ideas of how to tackle what is, in my opinion, the best platform to grow an audience on, I think that would be a great use of time.

• 1:46Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I'd be honored. You know, Patty, you, you work with the biggest creators in the game. You've worked with Mr. Beast. You've worked with small creators who've become big creators, the Noah Kagan's of the world. I see you out there. So I'm excited to hear what you, what you've got in this cheat sheet. By the end of this pod, what's, what's someone going to be able to, to take away?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  I think the main thing for me when it comes to The sort of basis of what I teach with YouTube is that YouTube is not a video platform. Like, everyone thinks YouTube is like YouTube videos, obviously. And, you know, I'm being a bit silly, but realistically, most people look at YouTube and say, I need to make a video. What I'd love for people to think about by the end of this call is I need to make a video, but before that, I need to understand what video to make, the strategy behind choosing ideas, packaging. So when a YouTuber says packaging, they're referring to title, thumbnail, basically like the packaging of a product. Just in how when you're building a startup or a consumer product or whatever it might be, you have to think about your marketing, your branding, your packaging, the same is true for YouTube video.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  And that's a big difference when it comes to other platforms, like even something like a TikTok where content is served to you. YouTube, there is still that decision made by the user of clicking on a video. And so I'd love for people just to have a really good understanding of how to think about that. And I also have a bit of like a month by month plan. So if anyone is, you know, watching this podcast and is like, hey, next 12 months, I want to like build a a channel, maybe for their personal brand, for their company, to just like learn the game of YouTube. I have a month by month, really simple plan that people can follow. And so, yeah, if we've kind of changed some hearts and minds about how this platform works and give you a plan, I think that's a really good use of time.

• 3:41Greg Isenberg?

  Before we get into that, why should a founder or someone building a business even care about YouTube?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  I mean, that's such a really good segue to start screen sharing because I actually put together a little sheet with some points on why I think YouTube is so important. Let me just start sharing my screen and I can actually get straight into this.

• 4:03Greg Isenberg?

  Nothing gets people on this podcast more excited than when, when the guest starts sharing the screen. Oh, like dopamine, just let's go. All right. Patty's sharing the screen. What do you got?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Amazing, amazing. So I'll talk a little bit about this graph in just a second, but this is a viewership graph, graph for long form views for one of our clients. And there's a point here we want to make, but I think when I, when it comes to why YouTube, which is literally, literally the question of the top of this page, like why YouTube? Why should I put focus on YouTube? And one of the first things that comes to mind for me is I think people put YouTube in the same bracket as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, even maybe X to an extent, and look at it like a social media platform. But when you look at who YouTube are competing with, and when you look at what YouTube is becoming,

• 4:53Speaker 01

  to me, it's much more like a streaming service. It's much more comparable to a Netflix or an Amazon Prime in how people actually consume content nowadays. Like, for example, this might shock some people in the audience, but for a lot of our biggest clients in my company, we're getting sixty, seventy, sometimes as high as ninety percent of our viewership from TV. So from people watching on TV as their primary device type. So I think there is this kind of perception that YouTube is like this, oh, you're on your phone, you're flicking through cat videos or whatever. But in more recent years, I think that's changed to being, hey, this is actually a streaming service. This is TV. This is TV in twenty twenty five and beyond.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  And so I always like to sort of start with that point of like, no, this isn't just Instagram or TikTok. This is its own streaming platform. And the interesting thing, if you look at data, Nielsen actually put data together, YouTube, when you look at the total time spent streaming content on YouTube, it's the biggest streaming service in the world. So more people stream content on YouTube than on Netflix or any of these other big streaming platforms. So it's the biggest streaming platform. And one of the reasons I think YouTube is so useful for founders or just entrepreneurs in general is the fact that it's not just a, I post a video and then that video does okay, and then I post another video and that does okay.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I almost like to look at YouTube content like digital assets. And people might have heard that term before of like, oh, you know, create digital assets online. But I think every YouTube video I post, I try to view it through the lens of this is. Almost like real estate on the internet forever. And to kind of back up this point of like evergreen content, I'll bring us to this graph here. Let me just zoom in a little bit so people can see it quite clearly. But this is just month over month viewership again for long form, no short form included on this graph for one of our clients. And you can see in the month, this is viewership from videos we posted inside the month. So inside the month of June, we did 2.6 million last year in 2023. And on the bottom is catalog, so videos posted before the month.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  And you can kind of see that in the month viewership is very up and down. We usually have like quite slow stats of the year. You see like 1 million in 2024 January and whatnot because we just don't really have a consistent schedule all the time and things can happen. Somebody has performed, somebody has done. So you see this very like up and down sort of cycle of in the month viewership. And you look at your catalog. You see like in the month of December, we did 27.9 million views. So this is just the December that went by, 27.9 million views from videos posted outside of the month of December, so older videos. So we kind of have nearly 30 million long form views coming in every month from the catalog.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  And you can see this number is a lot more consistent than it's growing over time versus the in the month being a bit more up and down. So I really like to look at YouTube like, hey, this is a platform where you can make content that lives forever. And I don't think that's necessarily true of a lot of other platforms. It's true for things like search, like Google search, you know, you make a blog post, it might be very evergreen. But we do look at like X and you know, we both love Twitter, X and use it very heavily for promoting ourselves. But I could make a banger tweet, it could get 600,000 impressions in 24 hours. But after that point, it's pretty dead. And I think Instagram is pretty similar. TikTok has some like evergreen longevity of content, but.

• 8:25Greg Isenberg?

  But does it do? By the time we launch this podcast, actually it'll be January 15th, so it'll still be live, but.

• 8:34Greg Isenberg?

  Yes, I hear you. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now, they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas, or it's for people

• 9:16Greg Isenberg?

  who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startupempire.co in the description. My question to, I'm just looking at this, I'm like, yeah, I buy that videos are digital assets. But when I think about making content for myself, one of the things I've noticed is if I newsjack, meaning if I create a video that, you know, is based on some news event, like TikTok is shutting down, here's the five things you need to do, those videos end up outperforming by 2, 3, 4, 5X.

• 9:57Greg Isenberg?

  So how do you, how should people think about, you know, newsjacking timely content versus what you call evergreen content? And could newsjack content become evergreen content?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. So I think that's a really good point because a great example you'll see is sometimes like a YouTube strategist like myself will be like, you should spend more time making videos. You should make really quality videos so they become evergreen. But if a channel that's audience is news-based, you know, covers the California wildfires,

• 10:30Speaker 01

  You know, three, four weeks after it's happened, no one cares. The news has moved on. So I think that's a really good point. I think I always like to think of channels. If you are a channel that covers a lot of news events, you're either all in on news and then you have to sort of admit that you're not going to see good catalog viewership. And at least compared to what you could do with other formats. But for most channels, I don't think, you know, even in your case, I don't think you're all in on like being super time specific all the time. So I think it's just about having a nice mix and balance of, yes, I make time specific videos, but I also make videos that are have a longer tail and that aren't just as focused on right now. The difficult thing that I noticed is even when you're thinking about this for your content, you say, you know, it's performed three or four times better.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  That might be true for sure, but the timeline over which you're measuring might be quite short because of how just naturally YouTube shows you, oh, this is doing really well. And it's like first 24 hours. When you zoom out a bit, maybe those other videos that don't start as well do pick up a little bit. Have you noticed that with like videos that aren't just time specific, having a bit of a longer tail on your channel?

• 11:35Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, yeah. And also sometimes I've noticed that there'd be these videos that actually I thought were timely at the time weren't timely. And then like six months later it just become timely or become more timely. You know what I mean? And it's just like,

• 11:55Greg Isenberg?

  I think of a, I think of a YouTube video, and I'm curious your perspective on this. I think of a YouTube video as like

• 12:04Greg Isenberg?

  a bet. And I'm just like, okay, I'm putting this out there and the time scale for me is two years. Like I need to think about

• 12:16Greg Isenberg?

  will this video get, and for me, my metric is comments and likes. If, if I see, like, I care about views way less than comments and likes. Cause the comments and likes to me tell me, am I pulling on the heartstrings of people? Am I actually creating value? Am I actually getting them to think?

• 12:37Greg Isenberg?

  And if I do that, then to me it's worth reinvesting in content, in video content. Cause it, yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I was worried where you were gonna go at that point for a second, but I love where you ended up because I thought you were gonna say you care about comments and likes because algorithmically that's important. But it sounds like it's purely sentiment, like it's a good indication of hey, how much my viewers actually really enjoyed this. Versus, yeah, like for example, comments have no algorithmic weighting, like you don't look at comments for video performance, but it's a great indication of hey, like especially with an audience like you have here that is quite like a tribe of people into similar things. I guess it's a really good like noise indicator of how well you've done.

• 13:22Greg Isenberg?

  Well, I think, I think for me, like what gets me really excited is when people use the comment section as like a social network. I think that's a good milestone for any creator. So when you, when people, for example, a startup ideas podcast, if people are like, I really like this idea, I'm looking for a co-founder and someone like people have commented before, be like DM me on, you know, DM me on Twitter or whatever.

• 13:49Greg Isenberg?

  To me, that's like, you know, a sign that you, what you've built is working.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And that also just made me think as well as like in this first point of streaming service versus social, I think what's interesting is like YouTube has that kind of like time spent that you get from like a streaming platform as in how long you're spending with the viewer. And but there is like some social media components, which is a comment section, like Netflix doesn't have a comment section. So you feel more connected to the community than just watching content.

• 14:24Greg Isenberg?

  Hundred percent. All right, let's keep going.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Totally. So yeah, really do like to look at content evergreen. I think that that is a really good point, though. Not everything is evergreen, but there is like algorithmically, nothing that punishes older content. If older content started getting more views than newer content on YouTube, that's what would be promoted. There's no like bias towards new content on YouTube. And in my experience, I'm curious what you think about this, Greg, but in my experience, and from comparing it to other like marketing forms, like I find that YouTube converts second best only to email when it comes to selling to a product, when it comes to selling or promoting a service, I find YouTube converts really, really well compared to other platforms,

• 15:09Speaker 01

  and at least at a per user basis. So that's also something to really consider as well as like, you can build really big audiences on other platforms, but YouTube, especially if you do have like a quite defined, clear audience you're going after, after, I find converts really, really effectively. And this might not be as big of a factor for people in your audience, but it's also worth mentioning, and I'm sure you've noticed this as well yourself, is like, you're kind of getting paid to make advertising content in some ways, like your content is advertising what you might provide or do, or even if it's just purely because you want to build community, you're getting paid to do that. YouTube have AdSense built in. I would say the kind of range I give most people here is,

• 15:54Speaker 01

  if you have a Western audience, if your audience is primarily English speaking in America, Canada, UK, Europe, and you're probably going to see a $3 to $10 RPM, so that's the amount you get paid per 1,000 views. So if you're gonna do some basic maths on that, like you look at the viewership that we see on these channels, and you just look at like December, 27.9 million views, you apply a $10 RPM to that, that's $280,000. So like, there is a lot of potential money just to make just from that. And even if you are a smaller channel, like I've worked with channels that are maybe doing a couple million views a month, which is still big in the grand scheme of things, but a lot smaller than these numbers.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  They're promoting a service, they're promoting their book, their service, their product, whatever it might be, but they're still making 20, 30K a month from YouTube, kind of seamlessly. And the audiences are also so used to advertising that it doesn't have any cost really when it comes to frustration or people feeling like you're selling too much, because this is just so seamlessly integrated that it's like, I can just turn this on and make money from my content, which if we're being honest, although we don't want YouTube to hear this, like, most of us would make for free, like we don't need to get paid directly from YouTube. It's like such a, such an extra little bonus that I think is, I think is great. Another thing is it's really hard, which could be seen as a bad thing, but I think when

• 17:19Speaker 01

  you compare it to other platforms, YouTube is the hardest, one of the hardest to master, which means there is a big moat. I think it's hard to compete with someone who has a good understanding of YouTube and knows how to make content on the platform. And I do think there is more barriers to entry, but that makes it a bit more predictable and more stable of if you get good at this, you can consistently grow audiences on YouTube. And it's kind of how I made my career. I've been doing YouTube since 2007. I've just got really good at growing YouTube channels and I find lots of people into the space and I still have that advantage of I know these skills. I've been through all of these different journeys of these different channels and that's a hard skill to compete with, whereas I have

• 18:01Speaker 01

  some friends that are into like growth hacking on Instagram, which I used to do at some point as well, and other platforms. And it does seem to be more of a kind of like fast turnaround over marketing tactics that are working, like how can we kind of like game this system really quickly and then that gets overutilized, move on to something else. There's forms that that takes on YouTube, for example, like a new video format that everyone's copying or whatever. But generally the platform is just a bit more stable and mature. And you just need to be able to make really good videos. If you can do that, you're going to do well on the platform. And kind of building on the same point, stable, there's no ban coming for YouTube anytime soon, at least not that we know of. I think I feel good

• 18:43Speaker 01

  building a house on YouTube. And as much as I really like X and I admire Elon in many ways, like I do sometimes feel a little bit unstable on X. Obviously TikTok, if you have a TikTok account right now, you're feeling a little bit unstable. I know there's that quote of like, you know, building on rented land and you know, it's still owned by YouTube, but it's an American company, super stable, makes really good money, has good leadership. I've met the CEO of YouTube and you know, I felt really good about him. That doesn't really mean that much, but I felt, wow, this guy is a really prioritizing creators and prioritizing the platform. So I think that's worth considering if you're willing, because it's such a big thing to invest time into, like with this previous point of how hard it is, that if you want to, if you want to decide if that's a good use of time, I think

• 19:28Speaker 01

  this is a platform that's going to be around for indefinite, like this is here. Something as well that

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Maybe it's a point that doesn't need to be made too much, but anyone that has a kid, younger siblings, like it's kind of crazy how popular YouTube is with those younger demographics. So this is off the top of my head, but I believe total market share of the streaming market for the US as a total number is about 10%. YouTube 10 or 11%. I've seen it get as high as 13%. With two to 11 year olds, it's 33%. So that's 33% of basically what they're watching is YouTube, which is kind of crazy. And again, when I look at any of like younger siblings or cousins

• 20:17Speaker 01

  that are in that age cohort, they're watching YouTube pretty much exclusively on their iPads, on their TVs. And all those viewers are going to grow up and still watch YouTube in different forms. They're going to, you know, want to learn about business. They're going to want to learn about different things. Your audience might be building products and offerings around. And I like to look at YouTube as like pretty stable algorithmically as well. And it's not always the popular narrative, but having built on this platform for years, like what works now hasn't changed that much from what has worked in the past. And that's kind of my previous point around it's less lottery based, there's more stability, there's not as much sort of gimmicks and growth hacks. And when I first started on YouTube, I mentioned 2007, back then it was like

• 20:58Speaker 01

  the Wild West. Like I was, you know, doing some outrageous things to exploit things I noticed around YouTube's algorithm, like different things I could put in a title, different things I could put in description. All that doesn't work anymore, which sucks in some ways because it was so fun, but it's actually good now because it means that, okay, we kind of understand the rules we're playing with. There's no way to really exploit this system like there was previously. And then I would say the final point is-

• 21:24Greg Isenberg?

  I want to talk about that for a sec.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 21:27Greg Isenberg?

  Because on my good days, that's what I believe. I'm like, YouTube has this stable algorithm and like, you know, I'm building on such a solid foundation and I just have to create good content and I'm going to let the YouTube gods just lift me into Valhalla. But on my bad days, like today, for example, I posted a video. Okay, so-

• 21:54Greg Isenberg?

  I'm in Miami. I spend thousands of dollars to bring people to Miami to do an IRL pod with Cody Schneider, a friend of the pod. And cameras and people, I put, you know, I think I have an incredible conversation about this concept called digital gravity around how to actually use a lot of AI tools, actually, to basically create, you know, internet audiences and how you funnel people into customers. And I post, me and my team post the video. It goes nowhere.

• 22:33Greg Isenberg?

  I refuse to believe that I was like, okay, I'm just gonna have lunch. I'm not gonna change the title, you know, right away. Not changing the title. I'm gonna have lunch and just like be a calm stoic person. And by the time I get back, hopefully, you know, the comment section is buzzing and stuff like that. And by the way, I'm not talking about views. To me, like, again, likes and comments.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:55Greg Isenberg?

  Specifically comments. And it's ghost town. Ghost town, USA, bro. So that's when I'm like, oh, man, do I have to do a clickbait title change right now? Did the clickbait title change? Ended up, so the video was called, I'm gonna tell you the official, here, I'm gonna give it to you straight. The only marketing you need, the only marketing strategy you need for 2025. And then I changed, so that's what I had previously. Then I changed it to, "He built a startup using AI that prints money. Full tutorial in brackets."

• 23:36Greg Isenberg?

  Put that, you know, it's, right now, it's already at three on 10, you know, 10, in an hour, it went from a 10 on 10 to a three on 10, and the comment section and everything. And it's like, damn it. What do you think, what do you think about that?

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think what you're describing is a very like,

• 23:56Speaker 01

  It's a common thing that YouTubers often find, which is like, hey, like, I've put effort into something. Cause you described this was like IRL, you got these cameras, spent this money. You put effort into something which is important, but it's less important than packaging. So like, you could do incredible. I have a friend in Austin who is just like, he's shot advertisements for like Porsche, Aston Martin, Adidas. Like he's like this incredible like creative mind. He gets no views on YouTube, you know, his videos are incredible. Every time I watch them, I'm like, this should get more views, but it's because his content isn't packaged. He's not actually a really good title thumbnail wizard when it comes to his content.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  So the point you're making, I don't, I don't think that contradicts the point of that YouTube is a stable algorithm. It's just that maybe you dislike a little bit of what that game is in that sense. Like, hey, I put this effort into something that wasn't rewarded. But to me, I would look at that and say, well, it's still, even if something is not, even if something is focused on being quite clickbait in some ways, or like being over the top, exaggerating, like using superlatives.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  At least we can say, well, that's what works and we can build around that.

• 25:09Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. Don't hate the player, hate the game type thing. It's like, I'll tell you what works from that experience. It's like, the only marketing strategy you need in 2025? Dude, no one's looking for a marketing strategy.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:24Greg Isenberg?

  It's just like, it's like eat your vegetables, right? Like no one wants to eat, if he tells a kid to eat your vegetables, they're not going to want to eat their vegetables. Not going to work. But what we ended up with, which was he built a startup using AI that prints money, full tutorial. It's like, ultimately, what do people want? They want to create startups that are successful.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:49Greg Isenberg?

  He built a startup that prints money. He, that kind of adds like, who is this guy? Intrigued, maybe I'll click in. And full tutorial, just the, just basically, it, it says that, it says without saying that here's a bunch of information that's going to be really valuable.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Totally. I think a similar parallel to this is just one of our clients in the business is a personal finance creator, one of the biggest personal finance creators in the world. And if we make content that's around things that realistically, the average American should really be doing, like paying off debt typically doesn't perform well. If we make a video that is like, how to become a millionaire in 2025, following this system or playbook, it's like, everyone's clicking that, which is like, yeah, maybe the maybe the viewers need a marketing strategy for 2025, but it's less sexy. It's less interesting than seeing this big case study that you did instead.

• 26:50Greg Isenberg?

  Totally. It just, I will say, I have to admit that it does make me feel a little bad. You know what I mean?

• 27:01Greg Isenberg?

  It makes me feel bad because I want people to, I wish I could say eat your vegetables, but I end up having to make soup instead. You know, I'm making vegetable soup instead of, here's a piece of broccoli, here's a dry piece of broccoli that's gonna have like, you know, it's gonna be like eating like a box and you're gonna have like broccoli stuck in your teeth. No one wants that. But like, here's a hot vegetable soup on like a cold day with like a slice of sourdough bread. You know what I mean? But I do, I do feel a little bit bad because I'm like, I don't want people to be like, I'm gonna watch this and I'm gonna be able to build a

• 27:46Greg Isenberg?

  business that will print money. Right? Like that you have to put in the work and you also, there's a certain degree of luck that is necessary and you have to like have placed bets consistently. But I, again, I think that

• 28:03Greg Isenberg?

  It's helpful for people to hear these stories and have these frameworks and have these tutorials because I do think it increases their odds of winning.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I made a tweet one time where I was like, I'm 28, I run a seven-figure

• 28:20Speaker 01

  consulting firm for the biggest creators in the world, ask me anything. And someone in the comments replied saying like, how do you not be so arrogant or something? And I was like, I know how to not be arrogant, that would just get no views. You know, like if I was just like, I run a pretty successful and people aren't gonna ask questions. So I think so much of these things is interesting. And even the conversation we've just had the last three or four minutes, it hasn't been about the algorithm. It's been about people. It's been about human behavior and what humans are drawn to. And I think what helps me sleep at night when, you know, I'm coming up with tile thumbnails that are on the verge of being more clickbait is always like, if I feel that the video has really good value in there

• 29:02Speaker 01

  and has like a good message and can be really good content, this person should have watched. Then to just sell them on getting them in there, to oversell them a little bit on getting them in there is the price I pay, you know, for my conscience. I do think there's some truth to like, I mean, even if you look at the world's biggest creator, right? Like the world's biggest creator, Mr. Beast, like he'll make a video on like $1 versus $100 million private jet. In the thumbnail, there's a solid gold jet, like it's just solid gold, the whole thing's made of gold. That didn't happen in the video.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  The video does 200, 300 million views because the video is still an incredible piece of content for the people that wanted that piece of content. So it's like, yes, we oversold a little bit, but it's kind of like how a movie poster shows something. And that might not exactly happen in the movie. So yeah, I think I think it's part of the game. It is like a human experience. It's a human thing of like, ah, like, I wish people would just watch what was actually important. And didn't need to be like, sold. And sometimes when the audience members give some backlash, it's kind of funny because it's like, well, stop clicking on it then. Like I have like, you, you're the guys that like, make me have to do this because every time I package it in the way that is is more authentic to what it is, you don't click. So yeah, it's a, it's a funny paradox.

• 30:24Greg Isenberg?

  Should we keep going?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And last point to have here, I believe, maybe I'd be interested to hear if you disagree at all here, but I think YouTube is the platform that has the best marriage between building real depth with your audience and discovery. So if we think about those two things, they're quite often inversely correlated. Platforms that have very high discovery, let's say TikTok, Instagram reels, whatever, aren't the best for building depth. And then on the flip side, platforms with great depth, like, for example, email, newsletter, but also things like Twitch. Twitch is a great example. Twitch creators convert insanely well, but there's no discovery on Twitch. There's really bad discovery on

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Twitch. In fact, most Twitch creators grow by going viral on X and on YouTube and then putting an audience towards Twitch. So I think it's a bit of a unicorn when it comes to you can build a really strong connection, a community around an audience and still have really good discovery. I don't think there's anything else out there. I'd be curious if you agree or disagree with that.

• 31:30Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think

• 31:36Greg Isenberg?

  I'm, I'll tell you how I think about YouTube. It relates to this and you can tell me if I'm thinking about it wrong or right. So I think that if you're going to be on YouTube, you have to have

• 31:56Greg Isenberg?

  two different types of bets, affinity bets and attention bets. So affinity bets is, you know, for example, I used to do these live streams where it was like, bring me your startup ideas and I'm going to like, work with you and give you feedback on it. Hundred people would show up, but it would be like the true 100 fans. And that's about like building that tribe. Attention bets are what we kind of talked about before, which was,

• 32:30Greg Isenberg?

  what's something that like top of the funnel, like pick your niche? And then actually pick your sub niche, because I think, if you know, your, your, your high level niche is going to be too big. If I would have picked business, that's too big, but I picked startup ideas. It's like a sub niche, right?

• 32:48Greg Isenberg?

  So pick your sub niche and then think about what's top of the funnel for that sub niche. And I think that if you do two thirds attention with one third affinity, it's probably your recipe for success.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that.

• 33:10Greg Isenberg?

  But, but dude, I'm, you're like the pro. I'm just like, don't know what I'm doing, putting out content. You know what I mean? This is just like, based on what I've known, known building on YouTube over the last few years, this is what I've learned, but I could be completely wrong.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  No, I, I think you're, you're hammering on a good point though, which is like, there, I mean, even, here's a great case study of this, right? Noah Kagan, you mentioned Noah Kagan earlier in this, in this conversation, is someone we worked with. When I first started working with Noah, he was doing, 10, 15, maybe 20,000 views a video. At our height of working together, we were doing four or 500K views a video. But in doing that, because that was, you know, when we met with Noah's team, they were like, we want to increase views. So I'm like, okay, we will work on increasing views. But what happens in doing so is, yeah, we go so tall, like I like your, your example of like looking at the very top of the niche, the, the broadest videos in the niche.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  We went so focused on making formats around there. But then on this kind of beautiful like 360 that can happen on YouTube, I think Noah kind of looked at it and was like, okay, now I'm getting loads of viewership. But when I want to promote something or when I want to make a video that's talking about me or my stuff, it does terribly. So I'm almost like being like negatively reinforced to not do that. And then I've kind of made a prison for myself of making these viral videos, which is the cost of going viral, which is like, hey, like if you want to go really broad, there is a downside, which is you're not going to be able to do whatever you want. You're gonna have to pander to an existing audience. And there are exceptions of that. Some creators who just like say,

• 34:47Speaker 01

  I make whatever I want and they can be very loud about how silly it is that everyone else panders too much to their audience. But I'm like, you're a unicorn. Like Casey Neistat, I love Casey Neistat to bits. And I'm not going to listen to him too much when it comes to YouTube strategy because he's a unicorn. Like he can, his like sense of what's good is so strong that he can make great videos. And I also still don't fully believe that he doesn't at least pander a little bit or think to the audience a little bit because I believe everyone does on some level. And but with most of our clients, like I always like to look at it like, how do we sort of establish the rules for what videos need to get made? And some of these points I'll bring in as we go through this, this screen share together.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  So how do we establish the rules of like, what's big enough for us? What's like an idea that will do well? And then mix in, you use the word affinity, whether that is like community, whether that is like, things you're generally passionate about, mix that into those ideas or after those frameworks have passed. So like, can this video do this, this and this? And then also can we include this in the video, like some form of community, passion, whatever it might be. And I have found that what's interesting is like everyone on the surface says their goal is to, you know, grow the biggest YouTube channel, at least when they work with me. But I've just noticed from observing people that you kind of have to let them at least one in every five or six, just let them try something and do something. And you know,

• 36:13Speaker 01

  some creators call it like one for me, one for the audience, you know, I would look at it more like five for the audience, one for me if I'm in control because you know, I'm prioritizing the audience over myself. And if I'm trying to build the biggest channel possible. But yeah, there's lots of like competing trade offs where I think people would be well served thinking twice over whether it is, it is they want to build the biggest audience possible because Mr. Beast gets worse conversion rates than you if you're promoting, you know, a business product, obviously. But his total volume size is so huge. That's powerful in its own right.

• 36:49Greg Isenberg?

  Totally. What else is on this cheat sheet?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  So next up, let me just scroll down here. I've actually just got my month by month. So like, this is going to be posted, you know, in January and kind of going through and looking at this year, like for anyone that is maybe they've already started their channel, maybe they're thinking about starting a channel, like this is the real month by month that I recommend people to do. Now, of course, with any kind of prescription, this is about adjusting it based on what you can do, what you want to do, whatnot. But like, we grow channels for fun with my business. And we, you know, work with these huge creators, but we also kind of incubate and work with these smaller creators from the ground up all the time. And this is what I found works. So if I was coming

• 37:35Speaker 01

  in and becoming a partner on a beginning channel, starting tomorrow, this is the, the month by month I'd follow. So maybe I'll go through each phase and then just pause and see if there's any thoughts from you, Greg, and we can go from there.

• 37:48Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, I wish I had this when I was starting out. Could you, can you just walk us through it?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. So month one to four, so your first kind of four months on YouTube, if you're starting from scratch, so zero videos posted, I like to look at this as the establishment phase. So it's kind of like figuring out what we are, what we're doing, like what are we even doing here? And just trying to kind of get to grips with the platform. A big mistake I think people make is they listen to people like me and other people talking about YouTube strategy too early and that pollutes their thinking and they end up like overthinking content, spending too long trying to make a video, trying to be perfect from the beginning. And I mean, it's the same with business, right? Like, you know, you can do all like the seminars, you can learn all the stuff, read all the books, but you know, if in four months you haven't launched anything, you haven't done anything, like it doesn't

• 38:40Speaker 01

  matter. So first four months for me, and step one, find your niche. Like, I really liked your point you brought up there a minute ago about niche versus sub niche. So kind of find what your niche or sub niche is. I like using the triple Venn diagram. So find the intersection between what you love, what you're good at, and what people want to watch. Very simple in theory, hard in execution, but I think when you're trying to identify what your niche is, whether that is your personal brand, whether that is something different, because maybe there's people watching this that would like to like make a, a channel as the kind of founding point for a business. And so to reverse engineer it, rather than just saying, I've got a business, can I build a channel, promote it? Someone thinking, hey, like, I, I want to start a business in the future that's in this niche.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Can I build in a, in a YouTube channel first? So I think, understanding that triple Venn diagram and finding that is really important. And then step two, laser focus.

• 39:33Greg Isenberg?

  That's important, even if you don't end up doing this, you know, even if you don't do, go on YouTube for any social product, like for any internet audience and for any just professional career stuff. So that's key.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Because you'll see sometimes people like really focusing on just what people want to watch, but if you're not good at it, you don't love it, like, you're not going to last very long doing it. And sometimes, you know, I, I have certain, certain things that I love that no one cares about, you know, like there's some things that are too niche or too focused. And also sometimes people think, especially if they're a personal brand, that their channel should just reflect them as a person. And for anyone that knows like basic probability, like if we say like, hey, you have an interest that 20% of the human population is interested in, which is ridiculous, but say, and then you have another interest that 20% are, and then another interest that 20% are, and you try to combine those all together on one channel. Like, the probability of finding a person that is

• 40:31Speaker 01

  interested in all those different things. Is well under zero percent. And that's kind of the step two here, which is laser focus on the niche or sub niche. Don't be a sushi restaurant serving burgers. And I'm sure you're familiar with Andrew Wilkinson. And I remember being on like a Zoom Q and A with him one time. And like, you just made a really good point of saying like, if you're a business, like, don't be the sushi restaurant that also serves burgers because you know that does that's not a good sushi restaurant. If you do everything, you're not really good at anything. And I think when it comes to YouTube, like, same is true. Don't be that channel that is like, making business content, but then also like posts a vlog of their golf at the weekend. And then when I get angry, they say, lots of people that like business also like golf. I'm like, well, you know, what 100%?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  80%? I don't think so. It's like 20%, 10%. Like, we're focusing on the wrong thing here. So laser focus on the niche. Don't be a sushi restaurant. And step three, this is a bit prescriptive, but I think it's really useful for people starting out. Find a way to make two videos every week at the beginning. And don't worry too much about ideation. Don't even worry about like, yeah, what you're making. Just do what calls to you. Pick your niche and say, hey, this would be fun to make. This would be fun to make. Just make videos. And if you do that for for four months, and you're posting two videos a week, you're going to be in a very different position when we get into the the next phase of of the plan. So yeah, I'll pause here for a second. See if there's any, any thoughts from you, Greg.

• 41:59Greg Isenberg?

  It's hard to make two videos every week.

• 42:03Greg Isenberg?

  It's really, really hard. It's not impossible. I do two to three pods a week, which

• 42:14Greg Isenberg?

  is really hard. Because I'm not a creator, so to speak, like, I'm, I'm running businesses. So like, finding the time to do it. But I think the key is, when you're going through this, at least, this list for yourself is, what would it look like so that I could actually make two videos per week? Like, what would need to exist? And, you know, would I need a full time editor? Would I need someone to help me research ideas? Would I need, like, what would that look like? What is the cost for that? And then what do I think the ROI could be? And actually doing a financial model for YouTube? Like, I don't think a lot of people do that.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  I don't think I've ever seen that.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Like even you saying it, I'm like, because I think I have a biased view because people that I typically work with are either creators that are all in on just being a creator. So they're not doing this as an extension to their business. Or they're Fortune 500 companies who are like,

• 43:17Greg Isenberg?

  Right.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  write the check, we don't care, like, we don't need to think about that.

• 43:21Greg Isenberg?

  I guess I think about it more like SEO. Like, when you think about SEO, you think about, okay, I'm going to spend $5,000 a month to create X amount of pieces of content. And then based on that, I'm going to get Y amount of visits. And then each visit is worth, you know, Z amount of cents. So I think that, and this is probably something that you can use ChatGPT to help you actually like, you know, pretend you're a financial model or modeler for Mr. Beast. You know, pretend like you're starting a new channel and you're starting from scratch and you have no help from anyone else. Maybe you have one Twitter account with 600 followers.

• 44:01Greg Isenberg?

  Assuming I create two videos per week, what do you think, you know, based on XYZ? And then you make, you get like a first version of a financial model.

• 44:13Greg Isenberg?

  And then from that, you can edit it.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think part of that is like, understanding that even with this, like, there is every real possibility that you could do this for 12 months and not see an ROI or not see like a kind of enough traction to justify it. So I think useful part of that as well is like looking at the beginning and saying like, I'm willing to make this bet. Let's say it's going to be like 30K for six months of runway because I'm going to have a personal manager. I'm going to have this person, that person. And to me, spending 30K on this to try for six months is worth the potential upside that I think this can bring me.

• 44:51Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I think this is like the broccoli kind of thing, which is like, I don't know what we're going to title this, this pod, but. Realistically, it's gonna take at least 12 months for you to see the ROI.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  So we have this, I have this like cohort based program, we just called the YouTube accelerator. And I'm not bringing it up to plug it because we're not actually taking applications right now. But the interesting thing is like, one of our like, things we look for is you have over a thousand subscribers. And you've posted over 50 videos before we let you into the program. And because I find that like, that is like the awkward phase, that's the kind of figuring it out phase. That's the kind of necessary like steps you have to put in before you're even primed for growth. And after that stage, like if someone has a strong niche, if they are doing the right things and they have the right strategy, like

• 45:56Speaker 01

  things can grow quite quickly. Things can snowball pretty quickly after that point. But yeah, it's a, you need to be willing to kind of look at this as like, I'm gonna eat shit on this for a long time before this might pay off.

• 46:11Greg Isenberg?

  All right, let's, let's keep going.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  We won't title it this, we won't title it that.

• 46:14Greg Isenberg?

  By the way, I'm gonna, I think what we should do is you should title this, this podcast.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Totally. I've titled, I've titled nearly every podcast I've ever been on and most of them have done well. So I'm totally down.

• 46:27Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. All right, let's keep going.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  All right. So let's say you figure that out, you have, and when I say make two videos a week, like it, I agree, it's really hard, especially if this is something that you're only able to dedicate a certain amount of time on. But at the start, to me, it really is about numbers and just getting stuff out there and just getting used to posting videos and not really worrying too much about ideation. So like, let's just say you're a channel that wants to talk about AI startups. Like at the beginning, like you're, maybe you're just filming a video on Loom, just walking through some thoughts. And you're just posting that video and there's not much edits. You're just trying to make a basic thumbnail. At the beginning, I'm not really worried about that.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  I just want to kind of put something out there to just get into that habit of making content. Versus like, you know, trying to refine something really well at the beginning. But let's say you do that, you do that for four months, you are about thirty two videos posted. Now we move into improvement phase. So we've kind of established ourselves as a channel. Really, at this point, we're posting frequently and we have a laser focus on what that niche is. And people often ask me like, how do I know if it's the right niche? How do I know if I should pivot? All these things to me at least are like the wrong kind of questions because if you did this exercise at the beginning, we know you're in a niche that people, there is an audience for, and we know you're good at it. We know that you love this niche. So the question isn't, or the, the solution isn't to pivot just because we haven't seen results.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  It's to keep focusing on this niche, you know? I see these people, maybe you see these people in the business world, Greg, which is like, they're just constantly jumping between projects or ideas or passions and they never actually really build anything of note because they don't wait long enough. It's like the, the fisherman who constantly moves his, his hook from the bottom of the ocean to a different spot every like two minutes and keeps missing the fish. So I think being focused on that niche you select and just committed to it is, is really important.

• 48:26Greg Isenberg?

  Any, like in terms of selecting the niche, I know we're selecting it using the triple Venn diagram, but are you, like, that, that feels very human to me. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's like, you kind of like, that's how I pick my niche with startup ideas. It's not like I was like, oh, there's like demand with startup ideas. It's just like, it was what interests me. Do you, do you have any tips for people with like how to jumpstart your ability to find your niche?

• 48:57Speaker 01

  If you do want to look at it at a more kind of data-backed rather than human focused method, one thing you can do is use a tool. And I'll give you two examples of tools. It's basically called YouTube outlier tools. I don't know if you've seen them, but one example would be oneoften.com. Another example would be ViewStats. And you can use these tools, you can go on to. Basically their own search on their own website, search a topic. Let's see, you search like startup business and it will rank and filter videos by outlier score. So basically, how much more views did this video get than the average for that channel?

• 49:42Speaker 01

  By doing that, you can then get a really nice like insight into like what content is outperforming in certain niches. So I'm using the business example, let's actually flip it and say, what if it's like personal development? So to say, hey, I'm starting a channel and my niche is personal development. Too broad. If we type in personal development or we search personal development content through one of these tools and we notice that content built around this certain shelf of self-improvement, let's call it like breath work or something, is outperforming the average by quite a bit right now. That could be a good sub niche to start in, like focus on just breathing, breath work, breath works, healing properties, whatever it might be, to be the focus for your channel.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  So that's one thing you can do that's a bit more technical than just human based, which is like, try to see where the outliers are within a sub niche.

• 50:31Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  And what you'll find is there's always trends, like what's fascinating to me is I remember it being in like, like studying self-development content in 2016 and cold showers and getting up at 5am was really popular. It was just going crazy, like people would make like cold showers are changing my life, getting up at 5am is changing my life. And then everyone started doing it and then, you know, it kind of died down as an interest profile and then it kind of resurfaces again, reemerges again. And it's like, if you want to find in your niche what's working right now, it's like, look for what the outliers are right now in the niche.

• 51:07Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, and sometimes you're like, you're in the eye of the hurricane of the niche. So you know exactly what, what a particular niche or community is feeling at the moment, which allows you to create really well. But sometimes, and, and people let me know if you want me to create a separate video or podcast around using some of these tools and to come up with ideas. Cause I, I, I do find that that's helpful too, like using view stats and some of these tools.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Totally. I think the key thing is, is if you use those tools to pick your niche, then you almost like have to stop looking at them because it's very easy to be like, okay, I'm gonna focus on cold showers to start. Oh no, now I'm seeing this thing, you know, I'm seeing this other sub niche is working and yeah, you get this spinning wheels sensation where you're just constantly going between things. But yeah, let's say you've gone through that journey, you're in this, what I call improvement phase, month five to eight, posted thirty-two videos, roughly speaking. So you have some volume under your belt, you know your niche, everything feels like, okay, I'm kind of understanding. And at this point, I'm not even looking at results. I don't really care too much about that right now when

• 52:22Speaker 01

  we get to this point. It's just about, we've picked it, we're doing it. So step four to me in this plan is start coming up with a hundred ideas per week. Now, a lot of the recommendations you're gonna see here are like, things that require a lot of effort and time. So we always have to consider the fact that, you know, people here are running their own businesses, doing their own things as well. But I would argue that people see this number of a hundred ideas and just get too intimidated by it. I can sit down and with a channel and come up with a hundred ideas in an hour, together. Just think about it, it's just like, what is it, one point four per minute or something? Like, you can write ideas down pretty quickly. I'll walk through like

• 53:06Speaker 01

  my process for ideation a little bit later in this, in this podcast, but that's not as hard as it seems. But if you're looking for like, what is the difference between big creators and small creators? I feel small creators who are not growing, put too much emphasis on like, I'm gonna make this video and then committing to that video, sunk cost fallacy, just make it happen, put out the video. And they don't really have a process for like, was this the best idea I could have made? Did I come up with enough volume to really see if that is a good idea? So I really recommend people start investing into ideation at this stage, not in the first stage, because at that stage, we just want to start making content. But at this point, a hundred ideas per week, I think is a really good place to be. When I worked with Mr. Beast, for example, like,

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I know that is like a crazy, you know, top of the line example of YouTube strategy, but like, Ideas that would literally be considered like the the lifeblood of that company, like video ideas, and you'd have spreadsheets with twenty, thirty thousand video ideas in them. And you'd have people, individual people, whose each person was brainstorming, you know, hundred ideas a day, just like consistently. It was kind of like an idea farm. And you don't have to do that, but yeah.

• 54:19Greg Isenberg?

  Were they using tools, or it's more like they're drinking Red Bull and coming up with ideas?

• 54:24Speaker 01

  Drinking Red Bull will come up ideas. Definitely like the tools, like I mentioned, the one on tens, the view stats, even just like using YouTube yourself and, you know, searching for popular videos. But a lot of it is just like spamming ideas, honestly. And I really do think about it as like, something I'll talk about a little bit later, I read it, I believe, in a book about Steve Jobs, but his idea of like one hundred ten one, when they were thinking of like innovations and ideas inside of Apple, just like realizing that some of it is just like volume. Like if you get enough volume, you put it into an effective filtering system, your quality is going to improve. And I think that's very true for ideation. And then my point here is like, try to start brainstorming around

• 55:09Speaker 01

  outliers. So at the beginning, I do think it's very useful to focus most of your attention on, okay, we've established a channel, now we're in the proven phase, what is really working in the niche? Let's make a list of all the things that are working in the niche, using tools like we've mentioned. And then for each one of those ideas, let's brainstorm four or five ways we could change, adapt, twist this idea into something new for ourselves. And one of my favorite things to do is look at my niche and then find what I would describe as like kind of niches that are vertical to it, are very similar to the niche, but not the niche. So for example, if you are a fishing channel, let's say, what is something

• 55:51Speaker 01

  that's like fishing in many ways, but is not fishing? To me, something that's like fishing, but is not fishing is golf. Bear with me. The reason why I would say that is golf is enjoyed by a similar demographic of people to fishing, generally speaking in the USA. It is very equipment focused, so it's gear heavy, like golf clubs, fishing rods, tackle. Those things are very kind of similar. It's an outdoor pursuit. So when I look at the niche and if I say I'm a fishing channel, I might study other fishing channels, but also golf channels and say, well, if something worked really well in golf, it's not a world apart from fishing. So is there ways to adapt it? So if we see there's a big outlier where someone played a whole round of golf with a wooden golf

• 56:32Speaker 01

  set, which I saw was a huge outlier for someone, maybe in the niche of fishing, that's I fished a lake with wooden fishing rods, something like that. That's kind of top of my head. I'm sure there's better examples out there, but I like to not only look at my niche, but also kind of similar niches and try to adapt into to what I'm doing. And I think that's like a great place to start is just to really brainstorm outliers like that.

• 56:55Greg Isenberg?

  Side note, startup idea, someone needs to build an agent that does that for people. That basically you put in your niche and then based on a bunch of sub niches, it brings you formats and content that are, you should look at to help get you to come up with ideas.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's actually, I mean, that could be a whole nother pub, but like, I feel like there's a lot of open space for these kind of tools in the YouTube industry. Like something I'm always like trying to figure out as well is overlap, audience overlap. How I've traditionally done that is I used to use a tool that was called subreddit overlap. So I would look at subreddits and see what subreddits had overlap with each other to try to understand connecting points between niches. With YouTube is quite difficult to like see on the outside, what is the overlap between these two channels? And so that could be something interesting for you to explore as well.

• 57:53Greg Isenberg?

  Hundred percent. Let's keep going.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  All right. Step five, start making three thumbnails per video and just do it. Everyone has ABC testing, so YouTube gives everyone ABC testing. It allows you to upload three thumbnails every time you upload. It's kind of controversial. Some people like, don't like it. Some people do like it. I use it with most of my clients and find it as effective and increases the average user we're getting for videos when we try it. But even regardless of ABC testing. Thumbnails are so important. They're kind of like the 20% of, you know, a video that gets 80% of the result in some ways. And yet, people still like spend 20 hours, 30 hours on a video and then they spend 20 minutes on a thumbnail.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Uh, which is crazy. And to use an extreme example, Red Bull are like one of our biggest, um, corporate clients. I was speaking to like two or 300 Red Bull producers. I looked at a video and I, I kind of broke down the video. I was like, okay. There were 50 people involved in this video. It was filmed over all these weeks. It involved this much risk, this much experimentation, all this stuff. And then, you know, I mentioned the budget, which I can't mention on the video, but you can imagine big ass budget for this video. Then I was like, how long did we spend on the thumbnail? And someone was like, uh, we made it like 20 minutes before upload. And I was like, if the thumbnail can lead to so much of a difference in performance, it can literally be like 50 or 60% of what makes a video effective on YouTube.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  And we're spending so much time, like hundreds, maybe thousands of total hours of employees working on this video. And then we spent 20 minutes on the thumbnail. It's just, it doesn't make sense. So while you're making videos, try to get to a place where you're making two or three thumbnail options per video. And I'm going to hit you with this, Greg. Do you do that right now for your channel?

• 59:39Greg Isenberg?

  So I do do it. I do three thumbnails and then we do two to three backup thumbnails.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Great.

• 59:46Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. And I noticed like I, just the other day I got a comment being like, bro, stop changing your thumbnails, you know? And I, I do hate to see that. Um, like people, it might not be a great experience for people who might not see a video when it first comes out and be like, oh, I don't have time for this right now. I'll get to it later. And then they, they have issues finding it, but guys, I'm, I'm trying to get the, I'm trying to get the videos to be seen here. You know, you know what I mean? Try to get that comment section going. So I do do it and, and have noticed it helps.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Totally, totally. I would say stuff like that is definitely on the fringe, like people complaining about that kind of thing. Because at least generally, like for one, if someone has seen a video, sometimes people have this concern, but if someone has seen a video and watched a video, they're not going to get recommended again just because the thumbnail is different. So it's one thing. And then also usually YouTube A B testing will select one thumbnail and show that to a user and then not change it for the same user as much as people think they do. But it can definitely happen. So it's interesting that you got that comment.

• 1:00:58Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, maybe it was like, it sounds like it was, that was actually the first time I ever got it. So I didn't even know that was a thing. But yeah, maybe, maybe he was like on his phone and then he came home and yeah, so you're right. Do this, you know, and then what do you recommend for tools in order to create thumbnails? Like is Canva okay? Or what do you, what do you say?

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Canva is like the, the very fundamental thing or platform you can use or tool you can use. If you just want to make something that's like decent.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  If you want to make something good, like Photoshop is what I use and what I've always used for, for my thumbnails. And I think you can get to a point where you can make good thumbnails in maybe five or six hours of Photoshop learning. So like a Sunday.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Because, and this is a point I have later, actually, which is that the, the correlation between being really good at graphic design and really good at thumbnails is actually pretty weak. I've tried to work with some of the best graphic designers in the world and I've not been successful with making them great at thumbnails. I find some random kid on Twitter who's like just looking at thumbnails all day and making thumbnails. He might not have, actually have very good Photoshop skills. And if I showed the PSD file that he used in Photoshop and sent it to a graphic designer, they would say this is a war crime. But he is able to make thumbnails that people click on because he understands the psychology of a thumbnail more than just the execution.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  So I'd say Canva is fine. Learn some basic Photoshop and people always ask about like AI thumbnail tools.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  I find that AI can be good for like the base of the image you use, but you still have to bring it into Canva or Photoshop to like get it there. But using AI and thumbnails is not against YouTube's terms, contrary to popular belief, and a lot of people do it, and they're quite effective with it. But yeah, those would be the main tools, I think Photoshop, Canva. Also thumbnail designers, like you can hire like a pretty cheap thumbnail designer, like thumbnail design rates vary a lot. Like I pay five or $600 for thumbnails with like our biggest clients, potentially, but there's definitely like a market for people that make thumbnails for like $50 to $100.

• 1:03:19Greg Isenberg?

  But where do I find those people?

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  I'm glad you asked. YTjobs.co, my own company, the world's biggest recruitment website for YouTube channels. Yeah. Well, I pulled it up.

• 1:03:31Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, pull it up.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  So yeah, I co-own this company. And we have, if I just go to talent here, I'm not even signed in, which is funny. But yeah, we literally have, I believe, 40,000 video editors, thumbnail designers, YouTube strategists, creative directors. We basically have like the entire YouTube workforce. Reg is on the site, and you can post a job, and people can apply. You can filter by thumbnail designer. You can see all these thumbnail designers we have. Some of these, excuse me, some of these thumbnail designers are going to charge a lot. Some of them are newer. Someone like Brittany, Brittany works with me. You can see some of the thumbnails she's worked

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  on, Red Bull, Jesser, 22 million subscribers, all these different people, and has reviews, everything there. So obviously a bit of a plug, but it's a good platform to use. And I'll see if you did want to link it, I'll see if I could get like a discount code for your audience.

• 1:04:32Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. I mean, I would, I will use this, you know what I'm saying? You know, so it's like, I don't like plugs when they're just plugs, but when it's going to help people and save them time and money, that's. You know, it's my duty to to go and and and show people these things. So yeah, this looks great.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Uh, but yeah, step six, this is where it depends on the channel, depends on the kind of content you're making. But I think this is a good place to actually switch from two videos every week to one video a week. And again, it depends on the channel. Some channels like it works while having a good like volume of content. But I would say for most channels that I'm starting from scratch or I'm working on that are small. I like to get to us, get us to a place where we're able to make decent videos. And then switch to one and really try to focus on improving the quality of those individual videos. And so that would be the step six is switching to one video a week and starting to actually put more emphasis into it to making a great video.

• 1:05:37Greg Isenberg?

  Right. So I think the the prompt there for people is if I doubled my effort here, what would that look like? And how would that affect the the product, which is the video?

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  These things also go in like really interesting flows where I feel 10 years ago on YouTube. And for people that remember YouTube 10 years ago, it was daily vlogging. It was Casey and I stopped posting a video every day. It was Logan Paul and Jake Paul doing their like daily vlog, uh, getting in trouble. Then we went into this period of like the Mr. Beastification of YouTube in some ways. And YouTubers starting to realize that quality was like highly rewarded. And that goes to extremes on the other side where like I have encountered creators that get five or six million views a video and they post once a year. For anyone interested, type in James Janney on YouTube. He's a creator friend of mine from London.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  He posts a video probably twice a year and has a full business, does really well, has people working for him. But he just makes really, really high quality documentaries and he's able to sustain himself from just one or two videos a year.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  So yeah, I think one a week is a good medium place though, because like when people learn that information, what's funny about that is like, let's be honest, like if James, my friend in London, was able to post a great documentary every month, he'd make way more money and would be way more successful. I think he would admit that as well. And a funny conversation I had with Jimmy, Mr. Beast, when I first was talking to him six or seven years ago was like, hey, like, I think it's really smart that you like focus on scarcity and you focus on like, like keeping things like scarce for the viewers so that when they see your videos, it's a real special thing. And he was like, you idiot, like, I would post, if I could make a banger every two days, I would post every two days.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  So he was like, it's just that it takes longer to make a banger. Like, he's like, if I could press a button and bang, bang, banger comes out, like, I'd make one every day. So I think one a week is a great place to be at if you've already kind of established yourself as a channel. So moving on to the last stage of the first 12 months. So this is where we're kind of looking at, hey, we've posted like around 48 videos, we were close to that 50 video mark, which I think is really important to get to as a channel. At this point, I really want you to start honing in on the top 10% of videos. I know it seems very simplistic, but what are those top 10%? When you look at all the videos we've posted, we've posted only 50 videos at this point. What are the top 10 performers? What are the top 10% performers?

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  The top five videos, I suppose, that are doing the best on the channel? And can we do more of those?

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  I've been, I've been introduced as a genius of YouTube strategy by people. And while I appreciate that, so much of it is like, hey, this did well, let's do it again. And obviously, there's a lot more to it than just that, but so much of my career has been built on like actually telling people they can make the same video again or repeat the content again. And even if, I don't know if anyone in your audience is familiar with my own channel, but on my channel, when I used to post videos on that channel, I literally just did the same video again and again and again with just different creators as the subject material. So find ways to really kind of build formats out of your videos that are working well. And if you're looking at that first sort of nine months as like, okay, start, I'm just making

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  whatever, then I'm starting to put more focus on ideation, I'm making more and more videos. This is the point where we start to be a bit more strategic and look for like the right opportunities. An example or like a metaphor people use that I think is really useful is like, there's the machine gun approach, and then there's the sniper approach. The machine gun approach is kind of just like spraying bullets at the wall, seeing what hits. The sniper is just zoning in, looking at your distance, picking your target and shooting. And I think the more you do YouTube, the more you become a sniper versus a machine gun in terms of how you approach things. So really try to focus on those top 10%. And this one I would encourage even for people that purely look at YouTube as like a kind

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  of marketing channel, I still think it's great to just carve out time to really study YouTube, study trends, outliers, what other people are doing. I like to have this, I have this for all my employees, I have this for myself, I have this for my clients. I just say, hey, try to carve out four hours a week where you're studying YouTube and you're actually just going through and looking at content. One thing I do that's I think a bit of a hack for this is in YouTube, I create different playlists. So I'll create these playlists and the playlist's title will be something like outlier video, or great thumbnail, or great tile, or great intro. And every time I watch a piece of content, because most of us watching this here is,

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  we'll be watching, you know, quite a bit of YouTube per week. Every time I'm watching YouTube and I see something interesting, I put it in one of those playlists. And then I have time scheduled in my calendar to go through those playlists and just sort of write down and break down what I think worked about that and what did well. So I think for anyone that is really serious about becoming a YouTube creator or using this as like a major channel for their business, really like understanding and learning that game is so crucial. Or hiring people that will do this for you and save you that time.

• 1:11:09Greg Isenberg?

  This is kind of like, you know, we talked about on the channel before, the idea of a swipe file. So this is kind of like a swipe file for YouTube. So a place where,

• 1:11:21Greg Isenberg?

  you know, you've curated what you think are the most interesting

• 1:11:27Greg Isenberg?

  videos. I think, of course, titles and thumbnails is one thing. But for me, I think what, yeah, that's really important. But equally as important is the formats and just trying to stay ahead of the formats because they're always changing.

• 1:11:42Greg Isenberg?

  And they get like a format could work, work, work, work, work. And then all of a sudden not work. So this is step eight is

• 1:11:55Greg Isenberg?

  you kind of have to do it if you want to win.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  And something I think about this on it as well is like, I find a lot of it is about documenting, databasing, studying swipe file. I totally agree with that. But also some of it is just like training your brain. Because I did this in my bedroom in Ireland for like 10 years, just every day, just studying YouTube and going through and like studying things that worked. And two weeks ago, we're making a thumbnail with a client. And I just sort of say, what about we try, like, what if we try this? Like, we create a sign in the thumbnail that looks like this and whatnot. And my team who were on the call were like, yeah, let's do that. We did it with the client. The video did really well.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  And I tried to reverse engineer how I came up with that specific thing to add to the thumbnail. Because I think it made a real difference in this thumbnail, putting this this specific component in. And as far as I could sort of trace back, it was from like studying a video six years ago that had a similar element in it. And maybe I'm inefficient, so I don't know this. But like, I think some of it is like, Databasing is really useful, but also just training your mind to like see enough content and understand the content where it becomes second nature to you, where you know, I can just think of these things on the spot because I've trained my mind and maybe there will be, and this is something I'd love to talk about is like an agent or something that can like say, oh, you're working on this thumbnail, like here is 20 examples of thumbnails that

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  were on similar themes that performed well in the last, you know, six years or something. Like that could be interesting, but definitely like focusing YouTube, studying YouTube for some time each week is huge.

• 1:13:42Greg Isenberg?

  And the last, is the last step?

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  Yep. Step nine, continue to post weekly, make each video that a little bit better, improve one little thing each time, one percent improvements. So this is your first 12 months. Like I'd love for you to end the first 12 months with this just philosophy where we're going to continue to post weekly. We're going to try and make each video a little bit better. You know, that classic one percent each time, like little marginal gains in each video. But if you're doing that with every video and you're posting weekly, like you make quite a lot of progress. So this will be the last step of the first 12 months. And then there's a lot of unanswered questions which we can, we can jump into in some of the next pages.

• 1:14:20Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. I think, I forgot the name of the creator, but I saw a creator do this where he kept a Google sheet of every improvement he made on each YouTube video he did. So I think that could be really cool. I kind of want to do that. Whereas like, because otherwise you forget and you're not as conscious about it. So I think, you know, creating a Google sheet could be cool.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  One thing we do with clients is once per month, we do like a learning, a learnings report. So let's just say we're working with Red Bull, like we go through and like break down the learnings of the videos posted. And those learnings are a mixture of like looking at how well the video performed, looking at retention curves. So for anyone that doesn't know, YouTube gives you a retention curve that shows exactly where you lose people, where you like gain people, where they, they hold on your videos. So if you're like looking at that, studying that for each video, then each time hypothetically, you're equipped with more information about what works and what doesn't work. So yeah, we do that for every, every video. I've probably looked at 10,000 retention curves in my

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  life, probably more. And it just gives you a great insight into what holds attention and what loses attention. And some things would surprise you, like even, this is just a bit of a side note, but a few years ago, I was looking at a retention curve with a creator and he was like, for the life of me, I can't understand why 10 minutes into the video, this was a 20 minute video. So 10 minutes in, I lost 5% of viewers, like 5% of people left. And for his video with how many views he was getting, that was like, maybe 50,000 people clicking off the video at that point. And he was like, I don't understand it. And I watched the video. And on the surface, there was nothing in it. Like, he didn't like, do a bad edit. He didn't like bring in something really boring. But what he did was he used language that made it feel like the video was ending. So he said,

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  at the end of the day, the reason America pulled out from Afghanistan, because I think that was like the topic for the video. He said, at the end of the day, and viewers heard that, and they were like, oh, the video's over, goodbye. And then when I brought up that point, he's like, that can't be right, because they have like the progress bar. So they would have known that wasn't the end. I'm like, dude, have you seen someone watching YouTube? They're like one swipe away from changing content all the time. Like, you're hanging by a thread the entire time. So if you give someone this indication that the video might be closing to an end. So like, another language like this is like, you know, nevertheless, like, I hate that word, because that like makes people think it's like a summary of the video and it's going to end. So like, to recap, another thing I hate,

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  like, whenever someone does that, I just like, feel like getting sick. So little things like that you notice from studying retention curves, and these are the little improvements where you're like, okay, well, 5% of people left at that point in the video. It might seem like a small amount, but that's 50,000 people. YouTube is about marginal gains. It's also about marginal gains over competitors. So two videos being side by side by each other, if one video loses 5% at the 10 minute mark, and that's 5% of people that are not going to watch the next 10 minutes of content, you compare that against a competitor who holds that, that 5%, you, it might be the difference in the video getting one minute views and three minute views. You know, that sounds ridiculous, and that's really kind of stretching, but like, these things really add up. So these small improvements can make a big difference to video performance.

• 1:17:36Greg Isenberg?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Awesome. So if there's time, we can jump into next here, which is just a real quick cheat cheat on ideas. So I've mentioned how important ideas are a lot on this podcast so far. So I just want to really quickly run through like basically how I think about it. So this is like my diagram for sort of explaining how I think about ideation for YouTube. First of all, you have zero ideas at this point. You're just trying to understand like your strategy for your channel. So a lot of that is what's my niche, but also some of these frameworks which I'm gonna touch on in a second. Then you brainstorm 100 plus ideas, whether that's in a week, a month, but just brainstorm 100 plus ideas ideally in a week. Then you apply elimination criteria. It's

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  a classic funnel. You're eliminating at this point. Then you're left with, let's say 10 strong ideas, and then you further develop one. So sort of 0, 100, 10, 1, that is the framework I've used for most of the channels that we work with. And the keys really are brainstorming enough, and then having like a strict criteria for what actually becomes a video on your channel to eliminate and whittle down those ideas to be left with the 10 best, and then selecting the best out of those 10 you think is the best to go forward with. Two frameworks that I find are really useful for this. First one is CCN fit. So what I notice, and this actually leads a little bit into your point earlier about like niches, sub niches, and then like what are broad

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  videos in a niche versus like core videos in a niche. But generally, when I'm ideating for a channel, like I always want videos to have CCN fit. I want them to be appealing to the core, casual, and new. It's very simple in theory, but like a lot of things on this call, simple in theory, but execution is hard, because what I find is oftentimes people make videos that are too core focused. Maybe the video we talked about earlier, the marketing plan for 2025, it's too core. People cared about it, but only like a real small part of the core cared about it. Then other times, people make videos that are too new viewer focused, and they alienate the core. They go too far outside of the core. They're trying to do something too different. And I always like to sort of look at my videos and say, does this have CCN fit? Like, does this

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  hit my core casual new viewer on my channel? So I always like to say, does my like fan favorite viewer who watches everything I do, are they gonna like it? And does this viewer who I have never heard before, never watched my content before, are they gonna be able to enjoy and consume this content as well? So I think that's a really important framework to think about. And then I would say this is arguably the most important to understand on YouTube. And it's where almost everyone goes wrong, in my opinion, which is I like to build channels where each video I look at it and say, does this have 80% plus? And I should actually add like a plus there because videos can have higher than that. Audience overlap. So I don't want to make two videos like everyone thinks, okay, I understand the niche thing. I should be in a niche.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  I should be a sushi restaurant that doesn't serve burgers, whatever. But then they still make content that jumps around too much between different things. They jumped around too much between different topics. Like maybe it's you're a business channel, but you're covering videos that focus on like startups. And then you make videos that focus on like cash flow businesses that do 10 million a year that are already existing and you don't make that interest into the startup audience or whatever. So I always like to look at the content and say 80% plus overlap. We have to look at our videos and say, people that watch this video, 80% plus of those people could watch this video, could watch this video, could watch this video, could watch this video and look at it like a catalog in that sense.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  And yeah, I find a lot of people just don't really grasp that as a, as a concept, which is really interesting.

• 1:21:20Greg Isenberg?

  That's what I'm talking about, man.

• 1:21:23Greg Isenberg?

  I feel like I'm not doing enough ideas. I'm looking at this, I'm like, I, I, I'm like, I'm the idea guy and I'm not doing enough ideas, you know? Like, I feel like you do really, what I'm learning from you just taking me through this is you have to force your, you have to, you know, force yourself is the wrong word. Maybe add systems so that you're, you're really putting out the ideas. It's, it does feel like a volume game.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, like this to me is scheduled time. It's, I think so many people just do ideation where they do like shower thought ideation, which is like, I'm going for a walk, I'm in the shower, I think of an idea, write it down in my notes app. And that's something, but I like to schedule idea time. And I also like to use other people a lot for this as well, where I remember like working for a channel at one point and I would like send them like three outliers or send this, sorry, not them, but this college kid that went to the college I used to go to, three ideas. And then I would be like, these three ideas work for us. Brainstorm 50 ideas similar to this.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  For each of these ideas, he'd come back with 150 ideas, I'd pay him $40. I would look at the ideas, I would go through and they'd be mainly dog shit. But there'll be some in there that jump out, there'll be something in there that sort of has like a kernel or something I can, I can work with. So I like to do this myself, but I also like to bring in other people for this. And I've worked with big creators before to have like a Discord channel. We're in the Discord channel or the Slack channel, whatever it might be, if it's a community thing, school, circle, whatever you're using for community, you have a channel where people like contribute their own ideas as well. And it's almost like, how do we just have this huge funnel that's capturing ideas from everywhere? So I want the shower thoughts, I want the walk in the park and I think of an idea, I want those.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  I also want the scheduled idea time, I want the idea, if I have a producer, an assistant producer has joined one of our teams that we work with, who has never done YouTube before and just is like, hey, I just hold the camera. I'm like, I still want you to come up with ideas and see what happens. Cause I'm a big believer that like, anyone can come up with like an interesting idea for, for YouTube video. And so there's sometimes a benefit in someone that's outside of your, your worlds as well.

• 1:23:36Greg Isenberg?

  I was thinking of putting on my website, gregisenberg.com, a little suggestion box, like a content suggestion box, where people can actually just give me suggestions on what they want to hear. So I'm going to try to do that and I think that getting the communities, what they want to hear about is just like, no brainer.

• 1:24:06Greg Isenberg?

  So.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  If you apply your criteria filter though, because the classic, like if I had asked people in 1910, you know, what they wanted, they'd say a faster horse instead of a car. So if you have, that's why the system of having the elimination criteria is so essential, because I've found the flip side where like people listen to their audience too much. And the audience were nearly always saying more of this, it's something you've already done, you know, or like, they'll just say, well, you should do something like this again. And you know, that might be a good idea, but maybe there's something else that exists out there.

• 1:24:39Greg Isenberg?

  A hundred, a hundred percent. And, and sometimes you actually get community feedback and you're like, oh no, not at, I don't want to do that. Like, I want to do the opposite of that. And it just like clears your mind. But either way, if it's good feedback or bad feedback, you're still really, it does help sharpen, sharpen the ideas.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Thousand percent. To me, there's like three main sources of ideas for YouTube channels. So external sources, this is basically like outlier, outlier theory, outlier ideation, which is looking at other channels. And we've talked about this throughout this podcast, but using tools like Viewstats, one of 10, even just looking at YouTube yourself, seeing what's working. There's so many levels this can go to. Like another thing I've done in the past is create a dummy YouTube account and then only watch my channel on that YouTube account and then see what videos I get recommended because YouTube's algorithm can serve you videos you might not have seen otherwise. Because let's say I'm a channel that just does startup ideas. You still

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  probably watch other things in your watch history that aren't just startup ideas. And that's going to pollute your recommendation feed to a certain extent because it's tailored to you. But if you create a channel that just watches your channel, you're kind of getting your viewers like archetype and seeing what they, they might be watching in other ways. So external ideation, internal ideation, that's like looking at our own channel, what's worked for us, what's doing well for us on the channel, what's getting views on the channel right now. Can we brainstorm more ways of doing ideas around that? And then innovation is, you know, the classic kind of like blue ocean, sit down, like what could be cool? Like, no, I'm a big believer that nothing is ever completely original. There's always going to be some way that got impacted or molded by something else.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  But more so, you're not looking at a video for inspiration. You're kind of like just sitting down. Maybe you're looking at like a show or something or a movie and you're like, oh, that could be cool to do a YouTube video on or whatnot. But if you're using those three sources, and maybe it's like 40, 40, 20, like 40 ideas coming from external, 40 from internal, 20 from innovation, something like that, you can mix and match those ratios. But if your brainstorming a large volume, 110, 1, you're just going to be in a much better place as a channel. The crucial step here as part of this process is your elimination criteria. To me, that's like four or five things that you sit down and decide a video needs to have to get to the next level, to get to the point where you're even choosing.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Like when I have these 100, 200, whatever, 1,000 ideas in a spreadsheet, they're not even at the point of choosing. They're just at the point of, okay, you're ready to go into the elimination criteria. To me, the elimination criteria, four or five points. I'll give you some examples of like what we do with clients. So one thing I would always put in the elimination criteria is can I think of a good title thumbnail for this? It annoys me when people say, I've got this great idea, but I can't title thumbnail it. I would always say, well, you don't have a great idea then. Like, that's not a great idea for YouTube if you can't title thumbnail it. Unless you just can't think of one, there is one out there. But if you can't realistically in your head, find a way to package it, it's not a good YouTube video. So that could be one and you'd be amazed. You might have 200 videos in a spreadsheet. You apply that filter of like, could we actually come up with a good title thumbnail?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Suddenly you have 40 and you're like, oh, okay, I've got rid of a lot. And another filter is the view target filter, which I really like, which is a bit of gut, but is like, hey, like realistically, could this video get X views? So for me on my channel, when I made my own videos, it was can this video get 1 million views? And if you look at my channel, the average is around 1 million. A lot of videos didn't get 1 million, but I always tried to make videos that I thought, if everything went well, this video could get 1 million views. For other channels, that might be 10K, 5K, 20K. For you, maybe it's less about views and more about can this get X amount of positive comments or whatever it might be, but some sort of like aspirational target. Cause it's amazing how many times we justify a video.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  But then if we put it through that filter of saying, let's be real here, like could this get this viewership? It's too much of a just a, I'm not sure, you know? You're never going to be guaranteed, but like as an example, I made a video on my channel where I covered Graham Stephan, who's a finance YouTuber. I broke my rule because Graham Stephan on his own channel was doing 300K views per video. So me making a video brainstorming how Graham Stephan grew his channel is probably not going to get 1 million views a video. So that's a case of like, you can kind of use some basic logic to be like, hmm, it's probably not going to get my view target. So I think those are two examples. Other examples might be like, more kind of like holistic, like, does this excite us? Is it feasible? Like, is it physically feasible?

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Like, you know, I did a BMX trick shot on the moon. It's a viral idea, but it's not feasible. So can we actually do this video? Is it something that excites us? Maybe have some other things in there. But basically, four or five points that you can use to whittle down an idea to make a great idea for your child. And I think it's really important. And then some things that I think make a great idea. So easy to convey in title thumbnail. Like I said, if you can't convey in a title thumbnail, it's not necessarily a great idea. Has some form of uniqueness, superlative, like, so often when people are pitching ideas to us, I'm sort of like, okay, like, we're gonna do a facility of like, an interesting, let's say we're doing it, we're a wildlife channel and we're going to like, tour a zoo.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  I'm always looking and saying like, is it the world's best zoo? Is it the world's biggest zoo? Is it the world's most expensive zoo? Is there something unique about this zoo that we can title the video around? Because otherwise, you know, what's, what's unique about the video? If you look at the most viral videos on YouTube, they always have something that's a bit unique or different, or they use a superlative, like, you know, can you bend the world's strongest bar? It's not, can you bend the strong bar? It's, can you bend the world's strongest bar as a strength challenge? So always looking for superlatives, I think is really important. And something to think about really heavily is like, does it play on a competitive advantage I have? So with channels, I always like to identify what are your competitive advantages? Like, what are the things that you can make

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  content on that other people can't? That could be a competitive advantage from knowledge and experience. Like, hey, like, I'm a multimillionaire, so obviously I can teach people about building businesses or personal finance, or maybe it's I have specific access to something that other people don't like, you know, a great example is we work with a basketball creator, Jessor. And when we're brainstorming, I'm looking and saying, can we play on competitive advantage? Because his competitive advantage is he knows players and he has access to the the NBA like they give him access to games. So just a random creator can't really do that. Like you can't come up with an idea and saying, I got to gift LeBron James shoes, which is an idea we did that did 10 million views.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Because you don't have access to LeBron James, whereas we do. So like playing on competitive advantages, I think is is great. And that doesn't have to always be things that are impossible to get. It doesn't have to be just money. It could be like you have specific expertise or knowledge on something that other people don't. And and kind of on the same CCN fit idea, not too narrow, but also not too broad. We don't want something that's so broad and like could be anything. We also don't want something that's so specific and niche that it's only a target appealing to like a certain percentage of the audience.

• 1:31:59Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Yeah, I know.

• 1:32:03Greg Isenberg?

  I'm happy you said that. The unfair advantage doesn't necessarily need to mean you're like super powerful, wealthy, crushing it. I I do think that anyone could have. You know, some form of that. It's just about packaging it in a way that. That is your unfair advantage.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And then moving on quickly to just some things on packaging. It's a bit of a packaging cheat sheet. So again, packaging title thumbnail. This is like interesting with our discussion earlier, which is the the kind of like. The line between boring and misleading, which is where I feel like all title thumbnails on YouTube fall on. You're gonna be somewhere between being boring, not interesting, which is potentially what you had. With the example of like the broccoli, the vegetables example. Misleading, that to me is when you're putting something in the video that is or in the thumbnail and you're creating expectation that's just not delivered on at all. And I think people are sometimes too afraid to be on this side.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  But again, if we just look at the game, the game is the game. You look at the biggest creators on the platform. They almost exaggerate.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  And mislead a little bit, but then they deliver something so good that you don't even know about it. You don't even think about it. So as in a great example of this, actually, we did a video with Noah Kagan, which was asking millionaires how to make a million dollars knocking on doors. We kind of like made, we're one of the channels that made that format really popular. And in the video, we didn't have a good thumbnail. So Noah, if I remember correctly, like had a friend, this girl, we just shot the thumbnail with like Noah, like facing this girl who wasn't even in the video. She wasn't in the video. It was just a random girl that was in the thumbnail. That's the person we used for the thumbnail. The video got four or five million views.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  I didn't notice a single comment saying that person wasn't in the thumbnail because I think the average viewer on YouTube looks at a thumbnail for a split second and goes, is this interesting or is this not interesting? Most of us creators, we overanalyze it too much. We think about all the details. We want to be like careful not to click pay, which is good. It comes from a good place, but the average viewer is like, wait, Mr. Beast Gold Jet, click. Start watching the video and it's like, uh, you watched a video, you finished a video and you can't even remember what the thumbnail was. In fact, if we actually think about it at this point of this podcast, I don't know how much this is going to be edited down by, but let's say we're at like the, the one hour 20 mark of this podcast or whatever. If we sort of ask people, what was the thumbnail for this video?

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  I guarantee you very few people are going to remember what was said in the thumbnail.

• 1:34:51Greg Isenberg?

  Maybe we should replace, instead of having Patty as the thumbnail, we'll just put a girl and see if anyone like Patty, like P A T T Y, you know?

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01Greg Isenberg?

  And, and just like put, we'll use AI to make, uh, long hair.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Greg Isenberg?

  And, and, and who knows?

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 1:35:11Greg Isenberg?

  Who knows?

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Who knows? But yeah, exaggeration, it's a standard on the platform. I think misleading someone is the wrong way to view it, but exaggerating the truth a little bit, it's just a game. Make three thumbnails per video. Still not enough people do this like ever. I feel like everyone who listens to people like me talk about YouTube like hear this, but they don't do it or they find ways to cheat, which is like, I'll make three thumbnails per video. Don't you worry, Patty, but the thumbnail is like the same thumbnail with just different text. I'm like, that's not three different thumbnails. That's just the same thumbnail with slightly different text. Like I'm talking about three different concepts.

• 1:35:44Greg Isenberg?

  The thumbnail is the equivalent of the dentist asking if you floss twice a day.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Greg Isenberg?

  And it's like, you tell them, yeah, of course I floss twice a day. And then you see the look on the dentist's face and like she's, she's like, there's no way this guy is flossing twice a day. I I've seen, I've seen this guy's teeth. You know, I've seen those gums, you know, maybe you're flossing three times a week on a good week.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Greg Isenberg?

  That's thumbnails.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  I love that analogy. That's totally true. And learn basic Photoshop, study Outwire thumbnails. And being good at graphic design does not equal good at thumbnails. So again, people sort of like, I don't have time to master graphic design, but it's like, it's more about looking at what's working on YouTube and just learning how to replicate it rather than like, you know, learning all this advanced Photoshop work. And, and yeah, like, like we said earlier, there definitely is like a market for thumbnail designers and out there. And there's a lot of designers at different price points that people could, could bring in. And it's one of those things where like, again, people like will spend money on editors and spend money on like production and all this sort of stuff, but

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  thumbnails is kind of an underutilized use of, of money, resources, time when it comes to YouTube.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  And when it comes to great packaging, some things I think about, um, titles, keep them under 60 seconds. Use like easy language, like easy to understand language. See if you can use like superlatives or like things in your title that make it unique and different to other videos on YouTube. Something I always think about, even if you are a search based channel, is to focus on human interest in the algorithm. So without naming names of tools, there's been tools in the past that have been like, hey, like, we'll help you optimize your title for search engine. And then I look at the titles people write with these tools and it's like,

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  iPhone 12 review 2025. Check out this iPhone 12. It's like, it's not even real. Like, I don't know what you're saying. So I always like to focus on writing a title for a human. Like with some clients, I'll literally say like, what would a, like, what would a, an Uber driver describe this thing as? Like, could that be our title? Or like, how could you put it in the most simple language possible? So focus on the human, not an algorithm. If you do focus on search, like you can still incorporate key terms, like your, your keywords in your title while not making it like a gobbledygook of different things. I think that's a really important to understand. Example I use here, which I'll just make a bit bigger for everyone. And so this is with two Austin-based creators, Ryan Train and Haley Pam.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  And if you look at their title, it's X dancer trains like a marathon runner. And it seems simple, right? It's very simple, easy to read. And if you run it through like a readability score, it gets a grade A. It basically says, hey, like seven, eight-year-olds can read this. And this, to find that it's like I have a hundred percent reach with this specific readability score, you can just type in readability score to like find these tools. And just for fun, I was like, well, what if you like tiled it more accurate to what the video was? And it was like, X contemporary dancer trains like a D1 athlete. If you change that video title to that, suddenly it gets a grade E, it has thirty-three percent reach. And, and you know, I think I would actually

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  say, which is really interesting as well, is like, if you're trying to build a global audience and you are American, sometimes things that are very like obvious and feel like everyone knows that to you might not be to other parts of the world, which is still a huge market. So, for example, D1 athlete. I don't, until I moved to America, I didn't necessarily know what a D1 athlete meant. You know, we just call them like a college athlete in Ireland. Like, I'd never heard of that. Or like, someone's like, talking about goodwill. I'm like, I've never heard of goodwill. I don't know what goodwill is. Like, now I do, but I didn't know before. So just putting yourself through that lens and saying, is this universal? Can like a seven-year-old read this tile? I would even argue for like a channel which has like a a much older demographic, like your channel, I'm sure has a much older demographic than something like this.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Still think it's useful to be able to like put things into really simple English and just make things like consumable for the, for the viewer.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Thumbnails, always keep them clear, bright, should be easy to see what's going on in the thumbnail. I think there's like an interesting thing, which is like this idea of like a glance test. And you can actually do this yourself. You can create like a, just open up a Google slide, put your thumbnail on one of the slides. Put the second slide as just a white screen and then just use your arrows and just quickly click between them. And give yourself like a second to just look at the thumbnail and say, can I process this thumbnail and this title in a second? We, as creators, are making thumbnails in Canva, Photoshop, we're obsessing over all these details. Your viewer looks at them for split seconds and people sometimes deny that. I'm like, look at your own viewership behavior.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Look at how you consume YouTube. Like, when I'm looking through YouTube, I'm just like, oh, interesting, click. It doesn't, I'm not looking at going like, let me read everything, let me look at every detail. So, keep it really simple. Make sure it passes the glance test. That's a really important one. Shouldn't be text heavy. And I try to limit text. It's interesting, different cultures are different here. So for example, I've noticed in Asian markets. So like Singapore, different countries like that, they use more text than English speaking markets and Spanish speaking markets. But in general, for a thumbnail, it should be about four or five words should be your cutoff point for how much words you put in the thumbnail.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  And ideally less. Sometimes people just put way too much text in there. You're like, you have a title and you have all this text in your thumbnail. It's too much for someone to read in a glance. And the one other thing I would share with your audience, which I think is really useful, is the three focus area rule. Which basically for a thumbnail, there shouldn't be more than three things the viewer has to focus on. That's the cutoff point. There should be either only one, two, or three things to focus on. So maybe that's like a face, a piece of text, and the thing that's being held up to the camera. You know, whatever that might be. What you'll see is people try to jam so much stuff in. They have like someone here, they have text here, they have a logo here, they have this thing here. And it's like too many things to focus on at once. So the best thumbnails are very simple and just keep you focused on the main areas.

• 1:42:11Speaker 01

  An example of this, like with a client, it's like. This is one we did with a personal finance client we work with. Super simple background, you know, four words, you've been lied to, which is outlier text that we saw this performing really well on another thumbnail that got like 10 million views for a very small channel. You've been lied to. That video was about the dodo's extinction. So the bird and how it went extinct. You've been lied to. I was like, let's take it for this thumbnail. You've been lied to about housing. So you've been lied to in text there, house on fire. Rami, his expression kind of matching what the video is. It sounds like an obvious thing, but you'd be amazed at how many people cover like serious topics and they're just like smiling in the thumbnail. It's like weird. And title is like simple to understand, but has like an interesting proof point.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  Multimillionaire, interesting contradiction, like why don't you own a house as a multimillionaire? So all these details add together and also notice three focus areas, face, text, house. You're not having to look at a million things. Super easy thumbnail. And that was the first video we posted with him and it did 2 million views.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  So yeah, that's a bit of a cheat sheet on on thumbnails and titles as well.

• 1:43:18Greg Isenberg?

  A bit, a bit of a cheat sheet. That's an understatement. Thank you. Dude, you've been really generous with your time and knowledge. Thank you so much. For people who made it to the end, where could, where could they get to know Patty more?

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  I think X is the place and Patty G96. I tweet a lot there. I'm always looking at what Greg's doing and thinking how I can adapt it to the YouTube side of Twitter. So that's the best place. And I think you've got a really interesting audience. And if anyone does have like startup ideas, they want to run by me or anything around this space. Like I think there's so much room to build in this industry. And I think the issue is a lot of people just build the wrong things. They try to solve the wrong problem for creators. So it's been a pleasure. I really, it flew by. I didn't realize we were here for nearly two hours.

• 1:44:09Greg Isenberg?

  I was looking outside and I noticed that when we started recording, it was light and now it's dark. So

• 1:44:17Greg Isenberg?

  it's good. I think people. You know, in 90 minutes or so, people can actually go through this and really have a good primer around and plan to actually go and execute their YouTube channel. I think that YouTube is criminally underrated for entrepreneurs. I think we all go to, a lot of us go to like X and LinkedIn and places like that. But I'm happy you shared the gospel and Patty, I'll see you on X.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Totally. 100%. Pleasure.

• 1:44:51Greg Isenberg?

  Later.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Take care.