Katie Zoo on running an army of accounts for Cluely

Our guest is Katie Zoo. I'm going to post her link again. Orin posted it in Slack earlier today. Katie's awesome. She's particularly focused on personal brand.

And then more recently has been part of the Cluey Rise on Social and all their viral efforts. If you're not familiar, this link I just posted might ring a bell. It's probably for us. And maybe, yeah, if you're not familiar, I'm happy for you.

But I don't know. She brings a couple perspectives. There's one, the personal brand one, and then this like absolute short form assault across an army of accounts, so on and so forth. So it's going to be a fun combo with her.

Somebody loves that unmute button. We still got people rolling in. If anybody's got any jokes for another minute here before we get started. That's the airport talking behind me. Oh, is that what that is?

That's why I keep just hitting it real quick for it. That's fair. I was like, I'm like, man, who the, who keeps tricking me? It's still not worse than when Warren was on the sailboat, whatever, and took the cut 30 and like a whole place in a meal order and does it.

It happens. It happens. Catamaran life, you know, dollars were coming in. all right dude's like i'll have some caviar dude four bats bro so we can jump into it yeah all right cool so this week week three this is the week we switch it up so first week we got our handle on kind of the basics second week obviously we've gotten some reps in now we're going to try some new formats that is the core goal for this week so what does that mean?

Everyone in their homework this week is going to try something that they have never tried before. So if you have never done a green screen video, you're going to give it a shot. You still haven't done a vlog. All of those, your homework is going to be to do one completely new thing and kind of get out of your comfort zone.

And then the other piece of your homework is going to be to do a carousel. I'm going to give a brief spiel on carousels here. We have tons of examples inside the actual coursework. So quickly sharing my screen. There's a bunch of different types of carousels.

This is probably not the best one to lead with. Let me pop in here. Here we go. So carousels in general, you want them to be 1080 by 1350 pixels or four by five ratio. If you do that on Instagram, that means that they can be shared in reels if you have music on them.

So you should always use this size. Don't make them square. Don't make them nine by 16. On TikTok, they can be larger, but you're going to want to just make these once, probably not twice.

So I would just do four by five because they will still look great on TikTok as well. Be careful when you go to post on TikTok, you select photos and not video with your, because otherwise it will make a slideshow.

We cover all that inside the coursework. But the idea is you're going to tell a story in a series of slides and it's the same principles as a video. So for instance, on this one, she's hooking.

I'm Diana. I'm making board football shirts, picture of her. Here's some of my work.

In the carousel, she does a showcase of her work. uh there's also basically things like basically preaching or saying hey here's a something we really want people to believe um so this is a example of a carousel is kind of giving some value has some light design on top of it so if you are a designer or have any design background carousels is a way to shine but much like you saw in that last carousel you don't have to be the homework that we encourage everyone to do is to make what we call a storytelling carousel that is when you take a moment in your life whether you started your business or before you got where you and you tell the story over time using photos in your camera roll.

So you will see people who are able to do this and they're able to compellingly tell things about their brand, basically with one line per slide telling about the story that they've gone under. This is a really compelling format. It works really well. And also you'll note that if you've done videos like this, you'll get another shot on goal with the carousel.

This is another kind of version of that, the unhinged things I did when I started X is a great format. I've had some people run that here in Cut30 as well. It'll just go through crazy stories from when they started their brand or just in their life when they moved to Spain, whatever it is.

You can also talk about news in your niche. There are lots of popular accounts that kind of curate news that goes on. And then same thing with kind of having a POV for that. So this is a travel account.

We'll kind of talk about an interesting thing in their niche, again, with one kind of key insight or fact per slide. but obviously caring a bit about the design and the look to tell a story.

So same principle as a video. You want your hook to hit. You will see the feedback that we give on these a lot. It's going to be, is the visual hot?

Is there an awesome thing that makes people want to scroll through the slides? And then how can you kind of tell a story with, again, like one line, maybe two or three lines max of text each and make something compelling? So this week, that is the homework is one new thing, one carousel, preferably a storytelling carousel.

We have a whole ton of examples that are inside the actual coursework in Kajabi. And with further ado, I will pass it to Alex, who's going to talk about the concept of the funnel, which is super important. Sweet, y'all. So as I pull this up, y'all can see this on my side? Yep, you're good.

Low head nod. Cool, cool, cool. Okay, so extremely important. I think this is something a lot of brands don't understand, right? Most, if you've built a brand, if you're building a brand, you know, predominantly everybody understands what a funnel is and mostly from an acquisition side.

But people don't understand really what it is from the content front. And it's very important to understand what it is and how it, why and how it matters on the content side. And so we're going to talk about a few things, testing and predominantly some pillars and how they fall into the funnel. And an analogy that I think will really help put it into perspective for you guys.

So one of the first things that I want to talk about is it's very important to look at the metrics within your content. So don't look at don't publish a piece of content, look at it and just be like, oh, it flopped because it didn't get a million views or flopped because it didn't get 100,000 views. If you've posted a piece of content, right, or you posted 30 pieces of content and one of those pieces of content has 5000 views and everything else has 1000 views.

you should be looking at the metrics religiously of why that piece of content is 5,000 views in correlation to why everything else has 1,000 views, right? And there's some that aren't specifically on here, like KPIs more so like, you know, average watch time, three second view rate, et cetera, that are extremely, extremely important.

But it is imperative to be paying attention to all the metrics with your content. If Instagram is showing you different KPIs and metrics, like you should be paying attention to them they're showing you to or they're showing you those and giving you access to those for a specific reason and the reason i bring that up is you know as we go into this week where you're going to be testing different formats and you'll be testing different content etc you want to be looking at this and seeing why something works why something doesn't work when something shows a little bit of of traction when it shows a little bit of promise double down and like if if you have a very high three second view rate but your average watch time isn't very high, okay, there's something to fix there. Like, hey, I had a great hook, but then my storytelling fell off, right? Like, you should be paying attention to these elements anytime you create a piece of content.

And the reason for that is some small changes to your content can make a drastic, drastic difference. If you see these three pieces of content, these are three, essentially, like the same overarching idea, just altered and iterated on to finally get one to get 300,000 views.

And so the goal of this is as you continue to make a lot more content, if you are looking at those metrics and you're paying attention to them and you are measuring them, I think Oren put something out today on LinkedIn or Twitter or something about how he looks at the analytics on his content, you should be doing that and then being able to see like, okay, you're going to see the common denominators of, hey, what has potential to be a very good piece of content.

I use this example because this is one of the eye openers for me. And there's this rule by the legendary Colin Landforce called the 3% rule where you, it's really Virgil Abloh, but where you essentially can change and alter something by 3% to make it novel.

If you look at these three variations of this piece of content, they roughly all look the same, but there are little iterations made to each one that essentially got it to eventually perform well. So first one, secret to landing pages that don't convert.

Okay. At the time, I probably had 2,000 to 3,000 followers, so I didn't really have a large audience. And with this piece of content, if you really break it down, it's way too specific.

I didn't generalize the information you're going to get. I'm talking to a very, very specific type of individual, a growth marketer, somebody that works in CRO. I could probably say that acronym.

If you don't know, that's the problem with this piece of content. okay so but when i looked at the metrics when i looked at the the ratio between likes and shares and likes and saves etc it was it was very good i'm like okay like there's something here people are finding this valuable they're sharing it they're saving it but it still didn't perform that well so i was like okay how can i generalize it a bit so i went more into like true classic story and i weaved in some educational elements and again like it was it performed a bit better right uh 1400 or 1500 roughly more views but the metrics i look at them again and i'm like okay like in comparison to what i usually get on this content it's performing good but it's not performing great i want i want it to perform i want it to perform great and i think i'd also had like a twitter thread or maybe something relevant to true classic perform well on twitter so i'm like okay like people definitely find this interesting i just need to package it right and so that then the third iteration was, okay, how can I make this as general, but as specific as possible?

So True Classics $150 million marketing playbook allowed me to do so because it gave you, it was clear, it gave you context, and also created a curiosity gap. And so all I did here was really look at metrics and then figure out how can I make this more top of funnel?

Because if you look at the first one, it's more bottom of the funnel. If, you know, if I'm talking about from an information perspective, something that is much, much more specific to my audience.

This can be bottom of the funnel because it's very niche to a select group of individuals who, like if I went on LinkedIn today and I put like landing pages or CRO, like the, it'd be a very, very small group of people in comparison to like, if I went on LinkedIn and I put marketing, right, it would then show a, you know, probably millions of people that are quote unquote in marketing. And so as we talk about content, as we talk about the funnel, it's imperative to think about your content through this same lens. Am I making this content so specific that it's never going to crack through my followers?

And if you're in a place where you want to grow, then you have to be thinking about how you can create content that's more general for people within your category. And so let's start understanding what the content funnel is. And so I actually want to start with an analogy, right?

So if you look at the content funnel here, there's reach, such as create value, affinity, and you could think about that as top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of the funnel content.

But I want to give you an analogy to really put it into perspective. So let's imagine the content funnel as someone fishing or trying to catch fish, right? If I'm trying to catch as many fish as possible, I'm not going to Bass Pro Shop and buying a rod and reel. If I'm like, hey, I have to buy or catch 100 fish today, that's the last thing I'm doing, right?

I would not succeed. Instead, I would try to go commercial fishing or I'd hire commercial fishermen, right? Their entire goal is volume of fish, right?

And so when you think about it through that lens, it's like, okay, they're able to use a thousand foot net by 40 feet and their entire goal is volume. And so you have to think about your content through that same lens. What content can I use to catch as many fish as possible within my category or within like my essentially ecosystem as possible?

That is top of funnel content. That is Colin talking about golf factories. That is Orin talking about product first brand. For me, that's good content versus bad content. These are much more generalized concepts and ideas that have the potential to talk to a large, large group of individuals, but that is still relating or can relate back to the other topics that I really, really focus and dive in on.

and so then middle of funnel is a little bit more specific right and so if you've ever been fishing there's that there's a cast net a cast net is you could get a 12 foot cast and you get seven foot cast net and so cat like in this case it's a bit more specific but you can still catch a pool of fish right like depending on where you cast and what type of fish you're catching like you could still catch sorry a school a school of fish and so middle funnel is that same lens it's it's that same idea of getting a little bit more specific, right, within my category. And you could be, this could be product education, or sorry, category education, brand education, and those elements, right? So it's still a little bit more specific, but it's not completely generalized. And then bottom of the funnel, this is that rod and reel combo, right?

Like this is fishing at a specific spot with specific bait at a specific time for specific fish. Like it is much, much more specific and selective. And so understanding that you should understand, Hey, based on my, what my goals are now, if I'm launching a brand and I need to get this brand in front of as many people as possible, I should not be focused on fishing with a rod and reel. I need to be developing my, my, I need to become a commercial fisherman is what the hell I need to do. Right. Like that's how you need to be thinking about this and you're thinking about content and understanding content or else you're going to be, Hey, why isn't this working?

And it's like well like all you're doing is making product content well all you're doing is really making ads and you're not being able to expand or uh or cast a wide net because you're not creating content that gives you the ability to cast a wide net and so um when i want to break down something that that we did and how we approached this when i was a cmo at this place called the collective it was kind of like a mix of equinox and soho house and um this was 2022 and like we approached all of our content through the lens of a content funnel.

And so we, in this, this content funnel was developed on, based on what our goals were at the time. At the time we had a location that was opening in, I think it was like five or six months. And so this was our approach really like five months out, four months out, which was, Hey, we need to get as many net new eyeballs on the brand.

And we need to eventually then funnel those people to, Hey, we have a new location opening. Therefore, we need to have more people in our ecosystem and we could funnel down. Right. And so we created all of these different series that were for different parts of the funnel.

And most of the volume at the time was associated with our top of funnel content. Because again, like the goal was to get as many eyeballs as possible. And so we had three series. The first one was a win the day series. This was, you know, we had one founder who had or who has a larger following.

And so we created a series around him that was more so on the inspirational side. Okay. This was called Win the Day. We promoted this, or sorry, we created this and published it every single Monday. And then the second one that you see in the middle, there was a lot of athletes, creators, entrepreneurs, founders, et cetera, that trained at this facility or worked at this facility. And so we created a series called Cold Heart Truth.

We got those individuals every week and we put them in a cold plunge, ask them rapid fire questions around like their category, around brand building, et cetera.

Okay, that was our second series. Then our third series was more so on like the docu-style, following different founders or athletes on kind of like what they were doing, what they were building, what they were trying to achieve.

That was all of our top of funnel content. And so we were producing anywhere from like three to four pieces of top of funnel content every single week. Anytime we publish these, I mean, you could look at like the numbers on there.

We were getting hundreds of thousands of views and growing our, our, essentially our ecosystem, our following. Now, another key element of top of funnel content that we talk about often is, you know, you could also think about like, why do I just need eyeballs?

Like I need to get people to follow me. I need to get people to buy my product, et cetera. The reason it's important is if I consume the, like the win the day series here, if I consume that and I like it, I save it, I share it.

I but I don't follow now I also know I'm going to start getting my that content the content from the collective on my feed again it's going to be in my explore feed it's going to be in my reels tab right it's going to start showing up on my feed often because it says it's basically just giving information to the algorithms to say hey like you like content from this brand you like this type of content I will give you more of it and see if you like to see it or if you want more of it or if you want to follow, et cetera. Right.

So if you consume when the day, you might then consume the podcast down there. You might consume, or you might get hit with, sorry, the podcast down there or the, um, the, like the, the services, et cetera.

And so that is how you, and why it's also very important to create top of funnel content. Then at the middle of the funnel content, we focused a lot more on, uh, brand education and product education. We wanted to, to use it almost to target the type of people that would perform there. So we had like the podcast setup that we, that we created, that we filmed episodes in that were again, a little bit more general, but still a little bit more specific to the type of individual.

And then things centered around services, but why a lot of our core members like needed those things and like how they're beneficial to working better or performing better as a founder, et cetera. Right. So not ultra specific as to trying to push the thing, but why you need the thing to be able to do better work, to be a better founder, leader, et cetera, right? That was our middle of the funnel content. And the bottom of the funnel content was really centered around like this journey of building the next location and then getting people to sign up.

This is how we approached our content. And the key was it started off as like 70, 25, like 5% when we looked at the volume of content that we created over a month relative to top of funnel, middle funnel, and bottom funnel. It was like something in that range.

And then as we got closer to a launch and as your goals change and as you need to, for example, drive more action, the goal is to leverage the top of funnel to make the bottom of your funnel even bigger and bigger with more people so that when you transition from a time of growth to then a time of like, hey, I need to drive action. I need to drive sales. I need to drive leads, et cetera.

The bottom of the funnel is filled up to the point where when you create your bottom the funnel content people care and people there's enough people that it's meaningful and so that is another key thing here is like most of the majority of people here and the majority of people going through this 30 days they need to be you guys need to be focused on top of funnel content you don't need to be spending a lot of your time on bottom of funnel content and probably not even middle of funnel content you need to start getting eyeballs and getting people to care about your content or getting people to even know you and your content and your brand and that is going to be done top of funnel by focusing on top of funnel. And then that's also why we're going to have you testing a lot of different formats so that you can figure out the top of funnel things that you need to be creating to be able to do so.

So again, I'll leave you with it's imperative to understand how to approach this and then how to shift it based on your goals. If you're trying to grow and you're trying to get people to care about you, spend most of your time top of funnel.

When you need people to take action to purchase something, but you've spent the last two months, three months focusing top of funnel, then start producing your bottom of funnel content. All right. I know there's a couple of questions around this. I want to kind of meld that into our conversation with Katie in just a moment here.

But we're going to cover homework real quick so that we can blow through to the end of this thing and not cut off our conversation with her. So real quick on the homework front, this aligns exactly. Can you all see my screen? Yes. So align with what Orin covered to begin with.

Your homework this week, besides making more videos, is to try two completely new formats. We want one of them to be that origin story carousel example, right? There's references for if you're a personal brand, if you're a brand, if you're a local business, all kinds of examples in there for you to choose from.

and then another one that again is completely off the wall i think uh something i want to really harp on here is like if you are the refined e-com brand who would never in a million years do like a green screen with the founder like do that this week we always have somebody we always have several people break out doing content that they hand to god would have never uh never seen themselves doing and as alex has mentioned looking at your whole mix and your whole funnel um you will often find a new piece of that puzzle in some content that you had never thought about before.

Some obvious places to take this are process documentation, day in the life stuff, intention yaps. So like why we're doing this, what I'm doing, why I'm here.

And like we said, getting out of the comfort zone, doing something that you're not used to or you don't like, as if you haven't already been doing that these last couple of weeks is the key.

And then the final thing here is just going to be to prepare for the seven day sprint. When we meet here next week, we are going to be going into the last week. And our mandate for the last week is video a day every day for those seven days. And the biggest success stories that come out of this, including Hans with 650,000 followers or whatever, is that seven day streak starting in our last week and then stretching out in the future.

I think in Hans' case, it was eight or 10 months. There are cases where it still has not stopped. And next week is a big one. So without further ado, I think I saw Katie join a few minutes ago.

Katie, are you here with us? Yes, I am. Amazing. Guys, I'm dropping a link to Katie's Instagram in the chat. And I would love for you to just give us an intro, Katie.

Yeah. Hello, everyone. It's so great to be here. My name's Katie.

I am a content strategist and also I work in marketing at a startup called Cluey. So I have a lot of different perspectives as one, a content creator myself. I make my own content mostly like yapping, talking to the camera style content that's like educational.

So like if you're looking to be like more of like a thought leader, like that's the type of content I'd make. Two, I work with people on their brands.

specifically like personal brands and building out like your story and your personality. And then three, from a company standpoint, I do a lot of like organic marketing, building like UGC programs and influencers and like stuff like that. Amazing.

So I selfishly want to talk about what you're doing at Cluey, but I feel like for a lot of folks in here, the personal brand stuff is a good place to start. So I would like to start there knowing that we're going to get there just to set the stage for you. Can you, like, I found your content, I think a couple of years ago now, and I think the strength of it is just how candid and I hate the word authentic, I guess, but it's a good one in this case.

Can you just tell us about your general content approach, like with yours in particular, and I see your new vlogs you're doing on Instagram as well. It seems like you're in your next wave of all this. Tell us what you're doing personally and how you're approaching personal brand.

Yeah, totally. So I think my approach has always been to do the easiest thing. I think there's different types of creators.

And so if this doesn't resonate with you, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do what is resonating with you. But for me, I kind of think of my content as like my journal or my like dump of ideas and thoughts.

That's what I care about. I care about like ideas and thoughts. Like I'm passionate about content creation. I'm passionate about marketing. So I like to talk about those things.

But what I don't see my content as is like a documentation of my life per se, as much as it is about ideas and thoughts. So with that, the way that I've kind of created content is very unstructured. um I don't really script my videos I don't really plan out like huge marketing campaigns around my content or anything I just focus on talking about the things that I like talking about in a way that other people can resonate with I think that's the key is like I have just built a skill to be able to talk to you about something that I'm interested in in a way that makes it feel like you're interested in it too and that's pretty much like my content strategy so yeah I can elaborate if if you have follow-ups I would I would love to just take like especially going from a like what I'm thinking about or what's interesting or what's happening with me standpoint how do you like take something fairly raw there and go like okay what the hell is the hook gonna be though or how am I gonna do that and like bring somebody along for that yeah great question so I think like from my experience I'm not the type to script there are some people that are really good at it and they can come up with a great great hook um but I find that if I actually overthink the hook too much then I like the video no longer feels authentic and genuine anymore and I kind of loot like every time I focus too hard on that, I actually don't do well with the content as much as I do when I optimize for like true energy and curiosity within the video.

So what I would say there is like, I prioritize actually like the energy I have while I'm filming and when I choose to film something, Like, for example, like I really think that ideas have a shelf life and there's a difference between saying something on the camera the moment you just thought of it versus putting it in your like to do list, waiting until your scheduled time and then talking about it five days later when you don't actually have that passion for that thing anymore.

so I kind of use like the energy of like when I thought of something and just like go off from there and then what I end up doing this is weird I don't do this as much anymore but when I first started making the content like a lot of the times I would ramble and then I would watch the video and just and typically if I cut out the first sentence the second sentence was a pretty good hook like that just works where it was like the first sentence when you naturally talk just like sets you up the second sentence is where things get interesting and so i would just cut the first sentence usually that's that's an interesting observation we had somebody last week i think we were talking about like like tactics for like actually kind of getting in the zone or or bringing energy i pointed out that i will if i'm like feeling dead i will literally like kind of smack myself around or do like a big bellowing laugh just like fill my lungs and like like get blood flowing and stuff. Do you have any like literal tactics to kind of get your energy right if it's not by default?

I think like there's two strategies, like a long term and a short term. So in the short term, if you need to film right now, like tonight, you need to film something. There are often times where I will spend like two hours trying to film and I can't get anything out.

The best way that I've found to just get something out is to truly take off all your walls and make a that you don't even plan on posting that is like genuinely like a diary of your thoughts like i'll make a video that's like so like here's what i'm thinking about right now like blah blah blah blah and it reminds me that it's like not actually that hard to talk to the camera and then from there i'm able to say what i wanted to say better the long-term method though is to like talk to like so make your environment, create your environment in a way where you are already talking about the things that you want to talk about.

So for me, like doing these like appearances and cut 30 or coaching a client that specifically is starting out in content. Like whenever I talk to people like that, that's actually when I get the most of my ideas and energy.

Exactly. And then, so like, like for example, right after this call, it would make a lot of sense for me to film because I'm already in that headspace katie do you have a process for taking essentially capturing your ideas throughout your day-to-day that's something i like i honestly am not good with where if i actually sit down and i think about like how many conversations i have day-to-day with ex-founders or whatnot like there's so many ideas in there that never see the light of day and i just don't think i do a good job of prioritizing that as like something that I should pull from versus thinking, oh, I got to think of like this.

I need to sit down and think of ideas and go through X, Y, Z thing. How do you approach that? And I like to start putting some ideas down.

That's a great question. I'm definitely not perfect at that because I totally resonate with everything you just said. But when I look back at my best moments or the times that I have felt the most inflow, like producing a good video every single day it's truly been because I have a notebook with me at all times like I think there's something so like uncommitting non-committal about like a piece of paper that you can just flip to the next page if you don't like that idea versus like you know if you have like a notion system like a notes app system or anything digital like it feels like whatever you make needs to then therefore be executed.

But actually like on this like notebook that I had, this might be just like weird of me, but like I would always start the page with the word video idea colon and then I would say my ideas. And that way it like put me in the right frame of like, oh, if I want to scratch it, like I can just scratch it. It's just a video idea.

But I would like sometimes I would just have video idea and then like the sentence or like the main thought that I had and then maybe later on I'll like go back and look at that and it'll trigger something in me and then I'll just like ramble all my thoughts in like a completely non-structured way and then I'll just film by looking at that page without actually like I don't spend too much time actually figuring out the exact way I'm gonna say it the max I'll do is probably do like bullet points or numbers like let's say the concept is like I came up with this concept then I'll and I have like a few points I want to make then I'll do like one two three four and I might end up saying them out of order but it's just like to get your thoughts out because like truly I think there's like no amount of like content optimization you can do without just like actual substance in your videos like you need to actually talk about something interesting or like have a good idea and I think that's like what I prioritize when i was at the the hustle this was i don't know five years ago there was a writer zachary crockett i think was his name where he like wrote this sunday special right it was like this long long form piece that he would do and he said that was the the trick that he did like and that like really gave him the best ideas was he would have this little pocketbook with him and he would just like sit around and like he would pull inspo from the most boring and mundane things and then do deep dives on those so like he would look at a stop sign be like who invented the stop sign why was it why was it invented and like jot down that that as an idea and go down a rabbit hole later and be like okay like maybe that's not the one but then he did that for everything throughout the day and all of a sudden he would find like all these interesting ideas what is your process for then filtering like because if i do that and i i'm gonna try it tomorrow like you're gonna put down probably 20 ideas 25 ideas and realistically like maybe you're gonna film three, five, whatever.

How do you then filter them? I would say like, I actually don't put that many ideas. I kind of, and this is why I feel like my environment matters is like, I wait for the good ones to come and I put those down. I don't just write things just to write things. Like I don't have a daily quota of like, I need to write five things.

I think sometimes, honestly, like, I think one thing that I just wish every creator or like someone starting out can realize is like you can totally have completely unique opinions like yes there are other people that have the same opinions as you but you can say them in ways that other people can't based on like your own experiences based on the company that you have or based on like where you grew up and stuff like that um so like I like an example from like literally when I first started I had like 10,000 followers maybe.

And there was this one like idea, like this concept about virality that was just ruminating in my head for so long. And I would always try to make a video about it. And I just like couldn't get it out the way that I wanted to. And I probably had thought about it for like three months at that point until finally one day I like spoke to a client and I shared it with her without any script, obviously.

It was a conversation. And after sharing it with her, it all clicked. And I was like, oh, that's the way that I wanted to talk about it. And so from there, that's when I grabbed my notebook. I wrote down all the points that I said.

And then later that day, I filmed that same video. And then that video actually took me from a certain follower count to another large amount. It was one just really good idea that I had been ruminating over. So for you and whatever industry you're in, I'm sure you have specific theses or concepts that are ruminating or things that you've just learned throughout your experiences.

What you need to do is figure out how to articulate them in a specific way. But if you popularize those, you become the industry leader for that concept. Somebody was asking about this in Slack, I think this morning.

I can't remember who. But like my concise answer to what you guys were just saying is like, get back to work, right? Like get back on the client calls and like the thing you're harping onto the client and thing you're like, why didn't you do this to the client is like, that's the, that's probably the next video or it might be.

Yeah. Okay. I want to, there's definitely some interest in the chat here about Cluey. Let's get into it.

And please y'all throw, throw questions in Cluey or not into the chat as we go and we'll make sure to hit on can you give for those who like have no idea what we're talking about and i guess haven't been on the internet or at least on x what is what is cluey what do you do there and then we can get into the attack that is underway on the algorithm yeah yeah so cluey is a tech startup that started like earlier like in january ish january to february um we are like a vc basically like there was just a controversial start to the um to the startup based on like these two college dropouts from columbia who like built a cheating tool um and the slogan for the like tool was basically cheat on everything and it just kind of blew up as this story of like these like ruckus 21 year olds like building this thing and then they raised a bunch of money from A16Z and hired a bunch of marketing people like me to blow them up and do a bunch of marketing stunts. For example, we spent like $300,000 on a huge plot of Times Square billboards, and we did not do any designing for the billboard. It was just like, hi, I'm Roy.

This was expensive. Buy my product or something. It's just very like unconventional marketing yeah um that are like a little controversial a little bit like oh what are these guys doing um and then like the actual tech product is basically like a note taker so like i see all of you guys like with the fathoms and the fireflies here it's basically a replacement version of those note takers that doesn't actually join your meetings it just takes it within your own computer um and it also gives you like live ai assistant during a call so like for example i could call my trigger my clue right now and ask it like what should i say next based on the questions that are being asked me right now but yeah that's pretty much clue my specific role is i've built out like um this huge ugc program so i have like 100 creators under me all with like cluely accounts and they're all creating organic videos promoting the product.

Tell us more. We definitely have some brand folks in here and I think a couple of software folks as well. I guess give us the lay land on what you're doing there. You said 100 plus accounts.

They're like all individual personal accounts, but they're like Cluey owned or Cluey affiliated or what's the setup? Yeah, basically.

So like they don't say Cluey in the handle or anything, but it'll be like Sarah's spam account or John Hacks Life, like Life Hacks or something like that. So it's a very like unassuming username. And then they post typically once a day up to like three times a day. And each video demos clearly in some way.

They're not just demo videos. was like there's some virality infused in there and like there's some like skits or storytelling um but every account is like clearly owned and directly promoting the product how tightly walk me through the the process katie because i'm guessing like to get to you know x amount of creators you're not just going to start with that many and like not do any testing around different ideas different formats and kind of see what what pops what doesn't and then scaling it so like walk us through the process on how you started testing different ideas with these creators and then once you probably found something that worked like what was it that worked and then how were you like okay now we need to scale this before probably other brands other competitors start seeing it yeah so I would say like um we started with like 15 to 20 creators they were all like um college age kind of people that were just like already like they had already heard about clearly they wanted to work here.

They understand virality a bit more just because they're chronically online. And I'd say like the first bottleneck or like the main thing that you want to focus on, if you're, I don't know how many people in here are like looking to build a program like this, but I think this applies to like your own content as well.

Like the main thing you want to focus on is like finding a viral format so by this point now that I've been running this for like half a year and we have hundreds of creators the goal is to find a lot of viral formats but you start with one and this actually applies a lot to personal branding as well like you need to find one format that when repeated over and over again is more likely to go viral than not and so for us like we just had these 10 creators we were just testing a bunch of ideas with them we actually just pulled a lot of viral formats from other uh companies ugc programs and gave those formats to them and just said hey copy these pretty much word for word um but infuse our product instead of theirs um and then like we had a bounty one day we were just like hey first person to get a million followers or a million views gets like 500 bucks and literally the next day someone found a um a format that worked.

It's like a skit format where basically somebody is like showing themselves using our product in like a funny way. It looks like a Snapchat video. It's just like a very short like skit stunt video.

But once we found that one format, we ended up having all of our creators recreate that format and a bunch of them did well with that. And then from there, we just kept looking for more formats so i'd say formats like the viral formats are like a very important key piece to this is that basically a continuing process of like like especially like with the bounty system of like try things find the winners brief brief the army on those winning videos to get another 100 of them out there and then and then kind of like wear that out and move on to the next one maybe where that out isn't the right word but like no pretty much yeah um like we have had some formats that just like basically get used until they're worn out um i'd say like if i were to start things again um i would definitely not just focus on virality um like i think when we started it was all about viral formats and i think it was great because it gave our creators a lot of early wins in which like they could actually like grow their audience and like make some good money from it but um over time our focus has just been from finding viral viral viral formats to now like converting formats that can also go viral um or at least do better than an average like video i want to hit a couple questions here from the chat like darwin's you ever worry the creator will change a password on you and run with the account um or yeah so we don't actually like like we don't manage the accounts at all we have them make it it's their password if someone quits we honestly don't really like go and retrieve the account unless we really want it so we don't actually care about owning the account that much because like we also have our own main clearly channels that we post on with our own like um content team but i'd say like we in the contract it is specified that they, that we own the account.

And the main reason for that is just to protect from them selling the account to another brand. So that's the only thing we were worried about. We don't actually need their password or anything like that. I mean, if we haven't already, I mean, I think we've covered it, but if we haven't beaten it to death, especially on TikTok, like the juices is in the algo, right?

Like whether the account has 300 followers or 3000 followers or 300,000 is like increasingly less important. Luke asks, is the idea to use the content for Spark ads or partnership ads? That's kind of a related question. We have tried to sometimes. I think it's something we're open to.

But actually, the thing that we've found, at least, is our UGC videos require more context at the beginning of the video that leads it to go viral. And because of that, when we run them as ads, they're not directly as converting as just like making a good ad that like is only talking about the product. Like UGC videos kind of like integrate the product in a way that feels organic. So we don't do that too much.

We do use some of our UGC creators to make paid ads as like a separate thing. But we haven't run too many of our UGC videos as ads. Something I think is super interesting for you to dive into as well is just bounties. I'm pretty sure you've probably done like competitions as well, like 30 day competitions or something.

Can you break both of those down? Cause I think that's a, that's a newer thing this year. I would say that, that more brands are kind of testing and, and trying out for retail, et cetera.

Like hosting these 30 day competitions for, for UGC creators. And then also like when there's down moments in that competition, like having random bounties, like, Hey, $500 for, like you said, like a million views and et cetera. And like, you can do that.

and like you said, probably get a video that gets a million views and have a fucking under $1 CPM. So can you break down both aspects? Yeah. So I would say like at the beginning, we were more likely to throw random prizes at people.

We would occasionally like fly some of our creators to the office to like work more closely with them. And we would say, you know, like, hey, if you guys as a group hit a certain amount of videos or a certain amount of views, like we will all buy hoodies or like something fun. Right. But I'd say now we do that less often because we have enough systems that like my goal as the person that created this program is I want every creator that joins this program to be set up for success so much that like they're bound to succeed is my goal.

And that means that sometimes, you know, there are some people that aren't the right fit but like for someone that like has decent talent and decent like ability to talk to the camera I want them to be able to succeed no matter what so I don't actually need like huge $500 bonuses anymore because they're making enough from just making the good UGC videos however with bounties I've been using bounties as a tool to like incentivize specific creatives to be tested.

So like there's obviously like because they're so incentivized by high viewership there's obviously a lot of like more entertainment style videos or videos that are less like serious that go viral and all of these creators just want to recreate what's already done well so they're less likely to try new things. So I use bounties as a way to like try new things. Right now I have that's like hey talk about clearly in the context of corporate america as a note taker for your meetings in corporate america and that is the bounty and for everyone that does that bounty and hit hit some success with it i'll pay them an extra like 50 or something and then out of that you'll find like a video that you can brief that like makes that direction like actually yes when win at a higher rate yeah like the goal of doing that is to find those people that win and um well for one it's like to change their behavior to like be more willing to make those videos but also like all the videos that do succeed to then distribute them to everyone and say hey these videos are good you should recreate them are you are you doing that with a small subset of the ugc creators um the bounty is available to like any of our creators but we do have i would say like there are certain creators that have the right skill of like yeah demoing the product well and they are the ones that tend to create the scripts that everyone else uses that's something i don't think people think about enough with ugc creators is just bucketing them based on skill sets like some people are very good at demo and some of them are very good doing like interview style right or whatever day in the life like they're you can bucket them based on their skill sets and then you know create specific briefs for those types of segments um yeah there's a good question in here can you break down the one click onboarding process for so many uh creators or just how you onboard all of these creators yeah um so i use this platform called honeybook it's actually like a platform for freelancers and stuff so um it's definitely not like really built for as like the amount of onboarding that I do um but essentially I use HoneyBook to like have a file that like one big multi-page file within that file there's a contract there's um instructions on how to create their new accounts there's links to our discord links to all of our like you know main information that they need and all we have to do is send them that file and then they're like completely onboard it from like step one to step 10.

I want to hit Sean's question here relating to funnel. Do these videos convert into sales and signups or is it all top funnel? I guess my add-on to that is like when you are briefing or like do you have weeks or months or whatever where the goal is top of funnel versus the goal is sign up etc?

Yeah so I would say like when we first started the program we were kind of happy with everything because we just wanted more eyes seeing the product being used. So at this point, we have like 500 million views within the program. That's 500 million eyeballs on Cluley's product being used.

Now, though, I would say our focus is definitely shifting from just kind of being okay with anything, being okay with Top of Funnel to like, okay, we want all of our dollars spent to be justified by sales.

So we do have like small indications that they've converted, but we never had like a really good attribution system because it's like the product, our product is a desktop app that you download on your computer and all the UGC is on your phone.

So it's hard to like really say for sure, like how many sales came from UGC, but we are building out more affiliate-based ways to do it with coupon codes, link tracking, et cetera.

And I think there's definitely a bucket of the UGC videos that do convert. It's like the Wild Wild West before TikTok shop. They got to do TikTok app or something. I feel like enough people are pumping apps on TikTok that they should figure out something around that.

I want to come back to Mary's question, which I think we kind of touched on, was really like, how do you, what's your process for finding a viral format? And I want to kind of sidestep that outside of like what we talked about so far, specifically like if you're having a dry week, like videos aren't hitting and it's like, Katie, we need to, we need some bangers.

Like what, like how do you go and just like dig in and start looking and find what's hot and find what's happening yeah it's so interesting because like i've done this cut 30 thing like multiple times and i feel like this one will be very different from like the ones i did before i joined clearly in terms of my philosophy so like good i would say is like as a personal brand i prioritize my own ideas and like i kind of want to protect like all of my content to reflect my values and like the things that I enjoy talking about and stuff like that.

From a company UGC standpoint, though, it can heavily be about the research you do from like what is already viral out there.

So, for example, like with let's say right now, right now, our goal is to really push clearly as a note taker that replaces like fireflies and otter and all that. Like I will go on TikTok and I will look up like, not specifically note takers, because I just don't think that's a viral concept, but I'll look up like note taking tips or like corporate tips or something like that and kind of see like what types of ideas are going viral.

I think a really good hack is also really stalking comment sections, like go to a viral video about corporate life, Go to the comments and see what comments are the most liked because those most liked comments are ideas that everyone, a lot of people have thought about.

And you can kind of write scripts around those really viral like ideas within a comment section. That's an excellent tidbit. I don't think enough people use TikTok as a search engine for formats. Like, and kind of like you're saying, like, you don't have to look at other note takers to pull inspiration because then you're always just going to be playing catch up and competing on like who just executes the idea best.

But you can look at all these different creators, all these different brands, different categories, et cetera, and look at what's working for them and then be able to look at then your brand and be like, okay, like, how can we test? How can we create that format for us? Right.

How can we recreate that idea for us? And like leveraging TikTok that way or leveraging any platform that way. Because you could do the same thing on YouTube and kind of bring it in, you know, like as an example, like you can look at a cooking channel who does, you know, dollar cookie versus a $50 cookie and then be like the free note taker app versus the $50 note taker app. Right. And like all of a sudden you have like these different interesting angles that you can pull for your content that you're not copying anyone.

You're just bringing over a format no different than like somebody recreating a TV game show format for social for a completely different category. Yeah, 100%. And I'd say like, for specific, like, prob, like, um, for, I would recommend looking into videos that are not ads at all, that warm someone up to the problem that you solve.

So like, I'm trying to think of an example, like, um, like, let's say it's just like a car cleaning, like product or something. I don't know.

like i would not just okay that's like a little too visual i don't know you get the point though like if you're solving a problem like don't just look for like videos about that problem already like look for concepts that would warm someone up to that problem and then you can just add your ad at the second half of that format i would add to that that like a lot of times when people are looking for reference videos we saw this a lot with y'all's copy work homework right you're like looking for people in the niche like like fashion and cosmetics and makeup are make for great reference videos even if you're making any other product because they're hyper competitive and the the creators and the brands that are like playing in cosmetics like that's the most competitive space in short form right so those videos which like the frameworks and the formats that are working there like aren't necessarily don't necessarily have to be about lipstick or what what have you right um and and you can just port that over to i don't know deodorant or mixology or whatever the the case may be a lot of times better than one would think i want to hit tom's question um for the value creators uh you mentioned in the tweet breakdown what separates standout creators and what are what are they doing differently these days yeah um so for some context on what Tom is talking about um like I have like a tweet breakdown about like the UGC program and there are based on like the hundreds of creators I have now worked with I think there are three skills three separate skill sets that a creator can have some creators have one some creators have all of them um but essentially they I think of them as the first one are like skit creators these are people that i think would have thrived in the vine era because they can make a seven second video and tell a story within that video that is like funny or like extremely viral in some way they tend to be able to hit really viral videos like videos that get like a million views two million views um however they're not always the most converting like skits are not always the most converting there are definitely types of skits that are converting but not all skits are converting or as converting.

Then there are two different other categories that are both talking head creators. So the other two are like storytelling and then value creators. So a storytelling creator is someone who can like get on camera and talk about their day and make it sound interesting enough that someone wants to listen.

They could talk about their friend who just had a breakup and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or they could really just talk about any sort of story and make it interesting. Then the value creators are the ones that give advice.

So this is the type of creator that I am. If you look me up on Instagram is like, I like to talk about things that I have learned that I think other people can learn from. So they position themselves as like a mentor or a big sister or something like that. I think for value creators specifically they they have like a certain like confidence in the way that they talk um in which like you like they're like yes you should be listening to me like even if they're 18 years old and they just like graduated high school there's like a little bit of a vibe of like yeah you should be listening to me because I already went through it like even as an 18 year old like so it doesn't really like age is not necessarily a factor they have confidence I think one thing that um I actually like recently confirmed or like noticed is just how important your background is we had this one creator who um she like has been pumping out for she's been making videos for us for probably two or three months now and she did not hit a single successful video for like two months straight but we always saw the potential in her um and it wasn't until she changed her background that her video started popping off, which was really interesting to me.

It's kind of like a person to background fit. At first, her background was her like standing up with like a curtain behind her. And that was it. It felt very boring. It felt very like, like, not sad, but just like, not interesting.

But we were having her do a bunch of corporate videos like like talking about stories about her corporate life or like tips to look smarter at work or something like that so we actually told her to sit down um have a macbook in front of her and then put the camera over here and talk like this and all of a sudden like all of her videos are like popping off because now it actually looks like she's in the middle of working from home and telling the story as she's working from home or something so I didn't realize that that part until recently but i think that actually matters a lot for the value creators it's like the creator aesthetic fit or form i don't know uh yeah y'all next week we're talking more about formats which is like kind of surrounding that and like taking the stuff you're making and figuring out how to package it and experimenting with that and i think that even though like lo-fi and simple that fits the the bill on that in terms of going from like a raw yap to just like a slightly more composed intentional environment um y'all i'm gonna be respectful of everybody's time and wrap it here katie i'm gonna drop your instagram here again do you have anything to plug or anywhere to send people while we're here or any parting thoughts for us um tom yes you're right her name is tips with rage if you want to check out what i was just talking about um but yes uh just check out my instagram sorry how did you find that how did you do that that's crazy yeah i'm impressed sorry katie plug the instagram yeah check my instagram um if you want a coaching session i offer those um occasionally as well there it's in my bio but yeah that was very impressive tom yeah seriously uh all right guys thank you so much for joining us katie appreciate it big time go hit her with the follow and check her out and uh for the rest of y'all we will see you in slack recording will be posted in an hour or two and uh let's let's get after that homework this week see you in the streets guys thank you thanks katie thanks katie Bye.