Cut30 kickoff: the whole game is content-market fit

we've won maybe your faces yeah we're just right in we usually we yap for a minute or two prior to everyone before we jump in yeah yeah we still got a healthy healthy amount of people flown in here so we'll give them another minute damn um alex where you at in the world you shooting this week or you off the road no i'm back home i'm back home and then i'm in augusta next week and then new york augusta let's go yo i got some i got some golf content i got some augusta content coming it's gonna be great just yeah i'm excited for it um so i was just telling calling off line a bit like some of the series that we have cooked up with just some of the like the big names that are going to be there hilarious and then we're doing one that i think it's going to be cool it's going to be like the lore of augusta like a whole series on that that's like the whole thing yeah dude yeah i learned so much about like yeah the like the underground tunnels and shit underneath the course like these are all things i did not know the weirdest part is how it's like some small town and like in the south except for this one week yeah two weeks you know you gotta do that origin story video you gotta be like yo is this it's this town that allowed but here's four alternate towns that would have done just as well it's like muskogee oklahoma it's like yeah all right i think we're uh wells the the influx has slowed down if we want to if we want to like we want to get serious let's run into it get focused orin you want to kick us off yes let's go welcome to cut 30 for all y'all that are are in here we are here to learn short form video so whether you are a brand new creator or an experienced creator we're here to lock the fuck in for 30 days and get it done so how this works um is you have a bunch of coaches here and we're going to introduce all of us we have a series of these calls where we do training and eventually we have guests we have coursework we have a slack and we have what's called office hours where we do kind of free workshopping.

We will break all this down. There's tons of information in and around it, but overall we are excited that you're here and I want to call out before we get into this, that this is your opportunity to any question you've ever had. There's no question too dumb.

Anything you want feedback on, we will feedback it. Our entire goal here is we want you to win and we want as many little rippers making content rolling around as possible, perpetuating it.

We've had tons of wins so far. Literally anyone from grandmas to teenagers. We've had high school students come in as a class. We've had it all. And anyone can succeed and we're here to help.

So we're going to start off today. We're going to do intros. We're going to break down all the different stuff inside the coursework, like where you find everything. We're going to go through the first assignments.

We dive right in. You're going to start making videos tomorrow. And then we're going to go into basically it's like an FAQ of just all the common stuff everyone asks. We're just going to rip through it. This is going to be a full wall-to-wall hour, but you should have a ton of answers coming out of it.

That's it. Let's hit some of the intros. Colin, you want to break it down? Yeah, sure. Guys, my name is Colin, Colin Landforce.

Landforce is my real last name. It's not just some weird content name that I bring here to the group. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've been making content for five years, and I think two and a half or three years ago, My friend Oren bullied me into making some videos after he started doing the same.

And that's part of the origin story of all this, right? I own cannabis brands here in Oregon. I also do a bunch of e-com stuff. My content personally is kind of centered around me and golf and my obsession with building things and making things.

So on our spectrum across the three of us, I'm kind of the like personality, do yourself, be weird guy. And I hope to make a bunch of videos with y'all over the next few weeks.

And as Alex and Oren both mentioned, the Masters, which is like the Super Bowl of golf, times 10 is next week. So we got a lot of content to make in here. I'm excited to be here with y'all.

Alex? Yep. What's up, y'all? My name is Alex Garcia, Landforce for short.

I do need a better way better. I've been doing content for roughly 10 years. Really, the last year and a half has been me actually doing a lot of my own content, but my journey started really early on in 2015, kind of like the beginning of the YouTube era where people were just making travel content.

I was starting to get into that world, started on the content creation side when as a videographer more so with a camera versus an iPhone. At the time, I was producing a significant amount of content for local brands here in Austin.

And so I worked with more eight and nine figure brands. And that then evolved into what I have now, which is House of Distribution, which is more of a creative studio here in Austin. And we're focused primarily working on social shows for eight, nine figure brands, mostly content strategy and social shows and then obviously different campaign productions. But, and then on the personal side, there's, there's a lot to, to my content, whether it's the podcast, but on the short form side, biggest thing I, I, you know, that I get out of the cut 30 and that I want to do this round of cut 30 is just getting more consistent.

I hit these like sprints where I can, I can do it for 30, 45 days. But again, like, you know, just with running a biz, whatever, I want to get to that point where it's like, can, you know, publishing every, every single day.

And like, that's what you'll learn out of all of this is like publishing every single day. like that is the key. Like if you can do that, you could be probably just about anybody. Um, but a little bit about me excited being here with you all excited to post every single day, run through this, um, or if you want to hit yours.

All right. So yeah, so I'm Orin at Orin meets world and social media. I was a, uh, designer and then a marketer who started making content because the company that I was working at was a toy company was bad at organic video.

And I said, cool, I'm going to learn it to be a better manager. It ended up working out very well. after about 50 extremely terrible videos where my wife was like, oh my God, is this like a full midlife crisis?

He's making TikToks. But it worked out for the good. Now I'm a combination of, I'm a creator and then I work with a private equity firm to help on social strategy for their portfolio.

And with that, you'll kind of see between the three of us, we cover a decent gambit of Colin making more kind of like lifestyle informational content. Alex knows a ton about making content for brands like serialized content. I have a little bit more wild card on the different kind of content types I work on with brands.

But also we have a couple coaches in here. One of the things you'll see in Cut30 is every single video you make, one if not two of either us or the coaches will feedback them. We are big on feedback and we want to have diverse perspectives for that.

So recognizing that all three of us make slightly similar content, we have a kind of wide swath here. So we have Alexandra. They're not always on, but you'll see them in the chat. uh alex you're not here by any chance are you i don't think so all right so alexander's kind of like a she does a you know find yourself health and wellness uh you know kind of a more personal yapper approach about like her life and things that people deal with and finding spirituality all kinds of different topics and is an awesome person at like finding your own vision for content uh we have victor he is a dj and music creator we end up with lots of musical artists and people in here and so he's a great person to help the more creative types and then we have gabe who's kind a wild card creator when he did cut 30 uh he was making like stop motion intricate content and has pivoted to doing all kinds of stuff but you'll see all of them have different perspectives to feedback and you'll see responses from all of us in here all the time uh without kind of further ado uh what do we want to hit first want to hit kajabi or we want to hit slack i don't know what we usually do here all right i will i'll pop right into um the kajabi i'll go real quick i've got a note in our doc from last time to take a moment to take a deep breath and give you all a motivational speech um and on a serious note uh like orin mentioned uh this is a guy who started making tiktoks uh questionable tiktoks as a late 30 something dad um there are a lot of people here for for whom what we're about to embark on is probably terrifying and we want to start with a salute to you guys for jumping in and doing it.

Some of our biggest success stories are people that thought that the entire idea of getting on camera was crazy. And certainly we're also going to look at ways that you can do this without getting on camera. So first and foremost, congrats for jumping in.

This is going to be a weird battle. You're going to have like strange friends from college be like, what the fuck are you doing? That's part of the drill. And the answer is I am communicating in a modern way and doing something that you are scared to do, my friend.

I've had plenty of those moments with people from my past It's really, really exciting And there's a ton of fruit for you On the other side of it So just wanted to lead with that And then jump into the course and take a tour with Orm Let's go, I'm personally motivated So let's roll Alright, so you will see You have an invite to Kajabi That is in your inbox If you don't have it, check your spam Colin, that came when they signed up Correct, or did it come today?

All this came this afternoon. Okay, so this afternoon, which will be recently in your inbox. And we're going to reiterate, if you have any issues in anything during this course, you can't access something, something's messed up, you can't find something, info at cut30.co.

You email them, they will resolve it. Monique is in there and extremely on it and knows everything about where all the bodies are buried, for lack of a better term, and will help you hunt down any issue you have with access.

But you should have this in your inbox. And you will see, it will lead you to this. So this is Kajabi where we have a really thorough course. But a couple things to know and understand is you click over to the syllabus side. This is where you will be able to always find what you should be doing.

So it's broken down week by week what we're doing, what you should actually look at. So for instance, what curriculum you should get. You'll be able to match the curriculum here over to the side.

You can look at things like tracks and basics, et cetera. And so you'll be able to kind of go navigate based on what we are telling you to cover. And you will be able to also see the homework, what you should be making.

And we'll have that for every week. So if you're ever questioning what homework should I be doing, what do I need to look at? It's on there. So what we know when we note the stuff to go here, that's kind of the minimum.

There is a ton of stuff over on the side here. Basics, recording and editing, content types. Like we have all, we have so much information on what you can do. But if you want to just make sure you're covering what you need to know, it's just covered in these handful of items here are the stuff you kind of absolutely have to look at.

And you can kind of navigate through this and you will see we have really thorough stuff on everything from how do I get started and what platforms do I choose to what equipment should I get? We have videos and breakdowns and text lists and links for just about everything. This is our 21st run through of this. So we have seen every question. We have put everything we can inside the curriculum.

There is pretty much nothing you could ask that won't be in here. And so we encourage you to check in there. And if there isn't something we cover in the coursework you want to know, it's probably also here. So down here in this section, we have playbooks.

You want to learn more about storytelling. You want to know how to negotiate brand deals. You want to learn more about ideas. You want Instagram stories. You want to get started on Snapchat.

We have covered tons of this and you have access to this forever. It does not end when Cut30 ends. But just worth noting that that is Kajabi. That's how to navigate it. And that is where you are going to find all the information that you need to be covering separate from what we're going to talk about on these Zooms and go through inside Slack.

With that, I'll pass it to Alex for Slack run through. Awesome. So before I dive into why we have the different channels and what purpose those channels serve, the biggest thing to understand is if you look at all the successful creators that you probably see in some emails or you see us talk about on social, et cetera, the common denominator that all of those had outside of public, like actually publishing content was that they were all very, very active in Slack.

They were in Slack every single day, either A, looking at feedback that other creators were getting or that other people were getting as they were publishing their video and taking that feedback and applying it to themselves and or publishing their content and getting feedback every single time on their content and really taking advantage of the fact that, hey, for the next 30 days, you have five individuals that are going to be giving you feedback on every single thing that you publish. Right. So like if you think this is a bad hook, we're going to tell you or, you know, you want to just overall feedback on a video.

We're going to go in there and be like, hey, I would change this verbal hook to X, Y, Z. I would change this visual hook to this. I would change your storytelling structure to X. I would take out this last 20 seconds of this video and just make it 30 seconds versus 50 seconds. Like those are all things that we're going to be we get going to be doing. And so that is going to fast track your success over the next 30 days.

You could accomplish what you would take. You may be 90 days. You know, like Orin was talking about taking 50 days before one pops. He didn't have anyone to really go to and be like, hey, like, what do you think about this? Should I have changed this?

You have that for the next 30 days from a lot of people that have been successful with short form video and have done it not just for ourselves, but for brands and other creators that we've helped. And so we know what works and we're going to tell you what works. So the more active that you are in Slack, the better it's going to be for you.

But on top of that, we have a series of different Slack channels that you can go into and they all serve a different purpose. So the more general channel where you're going to get announcements from us, we're going to tell you, hey, office hours is happening this Friday at this time. And or like things that we're working on, things that maybe we added to the course as time goes on. That is going to happen in the session 21 channel. This is the more general channel.

It's mostly going to be myself, Colin, and Oren putting announcements and putting messages within that channel. The next channel that is important is the troubleshooting channel. So the troubleshooting channel, either it's going to be things related to, for example, Kajabi, hey, I'm having this issue, and or things that are happening like in-app if you're trying to troubleshoot something that's happening in CapCut or edits or you're editing in Instagram, like some of those things are the, or that channel is going to be for some of those things and the questions related to really the difficulties that sometimes come with learning a completely new skill and or navigating maybe some software like Kajabi that you never navigated in the past.

Then the next channel, very straightforward is Q&A. You're going to have probably a ton of questions throughout the next 30 days relative to either A, the course or be, hey, I want to go down this route.

Can I also like explore, you know, this topic? Because it's a hobby. All of those things are going to happen in the Q&A channel. We also have the idea workshopping channel.

So think of this more so like a brainstorm session, right? Like think of it as the whiteboard and we get to jam in there. It's like the group chat you essentially have with some of your friends and you get to jam on ideas.

Like idea workshopping is that. So if you want to jam on ideas before like you go into scripting or before you put a lot of time into a concept, idea workshopping is where that can happen, right?

You're going to be able to put an idea there. And the cool thing about having a place like an idea of workshopping is it creates like this one plus one equals three environment. You put in a, hey, I have this idea.

Somebody comes in, it's like, oh, it'd be interesting if you added this element. All of a sudden that can be the thing or that element can be the thing that makes it or turns it into from a 10,000 view video and maybe into a 100,000 view video or 100,000 to a million viewed video.

Like we've seen that happen time and time again with creators coming in with an idea. Somebody or one of us goes in and says, hey, like maybe you should tweak the overall concept to this, add in this element.

And that's the differentiator for that piece of content. The next channel that we have is the content wins channel. Again, self-explanatory, but as you publish content, the goal is for all of you to win as much as possible, right?

And what I want to be clear on is a win for myself, for you, for Gabe, et cetera. Like our wins are all different. If you've never gotten a 5,000 view video and that's a win for you, publish it.

If all of your videos get 100,000 views and this one gets 250,000 views, like that is a win. Go ahead and publish it. If you've just published your first video, whatever, like wins are the relative to where you're at in your journey.

And so knowing that, understand that like we want to see all the wins just because a video to get 10,000 plus views doesn't mean it's not a win. Your video, again, getting 5,000 views and or a million views. Like those are both wins and we want you to share it within that channel.

Now, the last channel and the most important channel and the reason I leave it for last is the video sharing channel. Again, when I talked about at the beginning of, hey, what was the common denominator between all of the creators who have come through here and succeeded? It's like they lived in video sharing. Video sharing is where all of you are going to publish your content for feedback.

It's where all the feedback is going to live. It's where when you publish your video, we're going to tear it apart and essentially tell you what you can do better. And the other thing, the caveat there as well, it's like, don't take any of our advice in like personal, like, you know, we're giving feedback legitimately like all throughout the entire day.

And so a lot of times, like, will you be very straightforward and like, hey, like just change this, change this. This doesn't make sense. It's like, it would make sense.

That is the benefit, right? We are never going to sugarcoat it. We're just going to give it to you. We want you to win.

It's not going to be mean. Don't take it personal. We're there to help you. 100%. And all of that happens in video sharing.

But the reason I say it's important to look at everybody else is like, let's say 50 videos are published in video sharing tomorrow. And you're going to publish, your video is going to be like the 51st, right? You get to look at feedback for 50 different videos before you publish your video.

There's going to be so much game and sauce in that feedback and in those comments and replies that you're going to be able to literally make monumental changes to your content in real time. And so that is also like it's not just about the feedback that you get on your content, the feedback, the overall feedback on all the content that is that is given. So, again, the common denominator, be very, very active in Slack.

create your own groups, talk to a bunch of people, um, and, and help each other win.

And also if you see someone posting a piece of content, like go on their page and comment, like help them, um, win as well.

So that's my spiel on, on Slack. Very important. Uh, Colin, I'll pass it back to you before I jump in. Excellent.

Slack is the fun part guys. Can't say it enough. It is where the magic cabins. All right, let me share my screen. Zoom just updated their UI and I'm getting too old for this shit.

There we go. Pardon me. All right, guys. So whether you are a local business, a pizza stand, a e-commerce brand, an expert, someone who owns an agency, a doctor, in all cases, Your job here in Cut30 and inevitably forever in your content journey is to find content market fit.

If you're not familiar with this term, right, it's a derivative of product market fit. This is largely coined by like tech guys, which basically means we have a product that the market wants to buy. Cut30 has good product market fit.

That's how you got here, right? And so every single video that we make is part of our journey to find content market fit. If you have content that you love making, but nobody wants to watch it, you do not have CMF, and it doesn't matter that you love making it, right? It doesn't matter that you wanna talk about it forever, right?

That is the goal here today. And since these things change, your interests change, what's important to your business changes, the algorithm changes, this is a continual journey.

The testing involved in this never really goes away. In all scenarios, this is how we want to approach this. I'm gonna give you guys an anecdote with this as we talk through it, but what you're going to end up making videos about, Again, whether you're a small business or a brand or an expert, personal brand, is the intersection of what you can talk or share, talk about or share forever, what you can execute reliably on, and then what people in the algo is actually interested in, right?

Mr. Beast makes incredible videos that cost a half million dollars to make. They're incredibly engaging and they do really, really well. That's not particularly helpful for you because you cannot afford to spend a half million dollars on a video every single day, right? Like huge, crazy production value is not helpful if we can't execute it every day or four to five times a week, right?

This is the most important piece of this. What you can talk about forever, this is what you can yap about. It's the products you can showcase, the community you can showcase, the services, the knowledge you have, right?

This is the stuff that you can just go and go and go and go on. And then again, like people being interested, the algo grabbing a hold of it. This is largely a packaging thing, but this is the critical third piece of this equation.

And at the middle of this is going to be the elusive, not elusive, the content market fit that we are talking about, right? You're going to get here by experimenting.

My anecdote on this really stems back prior to video in the early days of my time on X on Twitter, which was I knew that I wanted to make content. I didn't know exactly what it was going to be about. I knew I'm kind of like lunatic all over the place, builder, entrepreneur.

I knew that I just needed to break the seal. I was really into basketball cards. So I just started yapping about basketball cards, just tweeting like crazy about basketball cards, investing in them, selling in them, what I think is interesting about them, so on and so forth.

This was just because I knew I could talk about it forever. And in doing so, right, I figured out how to execute reliably or a version of that that I could. And then I found what versions of that stuff people are actually interested in, people would read.

This is the entire journey. No matter what type of account you end up doing, we're going to talk about that in a second. This is the whole meal deal and it never ends. It only evolves over time. All right.

Next, we're going to talk about tracks. So we are like 2,500 students into this. Around the 500 mark, we realize that there are some core buckets that everybody that goes through here fits into, right?

In the early days, we had three tracks. Now there are just two. These tracks are personal brand and expert, and then brand or business, right?

All of the content that we do in here applies to everyone, especially the technical stuff, like how to do this kind of video, how to do this with CapCut. This applies to everyone, right?

We have this track layer, which is a specific set of course content that basically is going to help guide you down a path of what type of content you might make depending on your track, right? What would make sense? When we look at some of the homework assignments, like it's going to nudge you the right direction for what that homework assignment might look like for a brand, for a business, so on and so forth.

Critically, before I explain each of these, critically, do not get too hung up on this, right? Some of your homework in Cut30 is going to literally be make a video that you wouldn't have otherwise made or that your track does not find untypical, right? So do not get hung up on this. We'll talk more about that in a second.

But the first track is the expert or personal brand track. This is a creator making content about a topic and things that they care about, right? I'm an expert, Alex is an expert, Oren's an expert.

We're going to have a lot of experts in here, okay? You're sharing resources, tools, news, commentary, your opinions, alpha, a journey that you're on if you're doing something, right?

This is built around the person. Now, obviously, the other track is brand and business. This is a business promoting the brand, the product, the community, so on and so forth.

They're sharing how their stuff is made. They're sharing the lifestyle that their brand is centered around. They're sharing the stories. In the case of Alex, Alex is helping brands produce a lot of episodic content.

They're doing episodes in these short social shows. They're introducing characters, customers, so on and so forth. right?

There is a lot of overlap here. Again, the tracks are going to help guide you with that, but these are guardrails for lack of a better term. They are the tracks. They're going to help send you down the right direction and critically do not overthink it. Before we pass this back off to Alex, I want to give the disclaimer that the most common pathway to success with short form video is to build your personal brand and become an expert on the internet in your thing and then use that audience to shine light on your business, right?

If you own an agency, you don't need to do Colin's marketing agency. You can just go be Colin and impress people and build an audience and then be like, by the way, I have a marketing agency, right?

Go here if you want to work with us. That is the most common track. Any approach to this can work. You see it done a hundred different ways.

That is the most simple and straightforward one. If you are having confusion about this, which you inevitably will, you're welcome to post in in in slack with your questions about it but we will probably tell you like look if you're not sure just do personal brand do expert right with you when you have an audience you can shy line on anything whether it's your business or your friend's business or the new kitten you got this weekend what have you right without further ado alex is going to talk to us about hooks because it doesn't matter how good your video is if the hook sucks alex yep let's run it so can you all see my screen okay yep cool cool let me present all right cool let's get into it so i will first want to start with what is a hook there's some misconceptions from you know years ago where we think of a hook just through the lens of like a verbal hook right just as what you say so you always have to think about like how can i create as much shock value through what i say that is not the reality of what a hook is again like when we think about how many people scroll instagram or any of the, or mostly Instagram, like with sound off and it muted and you have to get someone's attention, the verbal hook at that point doesn't matter.

There's other elements that play into it. And so when we think about what a great hook is, a great hook is composed of three elements, a verbal hook, a visual hook, and a title hook. Those are typically what are going to take up the first three seconds of your video. It doesn't mean it can't, I'm going to go through some examples that are at that four to five second mark, but still the same elements apply to this, where your first three seconds are these three elements coming together to try to get and retain someone's attention and also get them to commit to the remainder of the video, which I'll go through how that is done as well. And so when you look at those three hooks and kind of what they look like in an actual video, you can look at videos that myself, Oren, and Colin have made.

So in this case, when you look at one of my top videos, one of my verbal hooks in this is, and again, the verbal hook is what you say is this is good content versus bad content running brands, right? And I have another iteration where I'm like, is this good content or is it bad content running brands?

In this visual hook that Oren has in this video that got 3.5 million views for him, the visual hook is what you show. In this case, he is putting that machine over different fabrics. The fabrics are changing. That is his visual hook, right? Like out of the gate, the goal is for that visual to get someone's, obviously someone's attention and retain that attention.

In this, in this example here for Colin, obviously the visual hook is he looks a little stoned, but we're not going to talk about that. The title hook is there is the text that says 200k diamond machine.

That title hook is what people scan. Imagine I'm scrolling very fast and all I have is all I'm going to read because again, sound is off is these title hooks, wild materials, 200k diamond machine good content versus bad content running brands now when we look at how the visual hook supports the title hook look again at at all of our title hooks good content versus bad content running brands and i have different runners and different brands getting showcased in the background wild materials or in a supporting that uh that title hook with the visual of showing materials literally changing colors as um i'm guessing he's like putting putting heat on it and then the title hook here being 200K diamond machine with a giant machine behind him, right? And also the listed price here.

That's how these elements work together as someone scans. And so, sorry, I hate that Canva auto plays, but a great hook achieves three things, right? So when we put together like what somebody is actually saying, what they're showing, and then what somebody is going to scan via the title hook.

It does these three things. It establishes clarity. So in this case, the goal is specificity over the simplicity, right? The viewer's brain, as they're scanning, is making this split, this second decision, essentially saying, is this for me? Is it worth my time?

So you want to be as clear as possible to answer that question so that they're not second guessing. Hey, am I, is it smart for me to essentially give my attention to this individual, to this creator, to this brand, right?

The next layer then is providing enough context. And the goal with the context is to get them to buy in, right? If they have enough context around the story, then it's much easier for you to retain their attention than not, right?

And so a lot of times, if you pay attention to a lot of the viral videos, context is going to come in the form of either constraints, stakes, or shared or relatable situations, which I'll go through.

when I run through these examples. And then the last layer is opening a curiosity gap, right? This is that missing information. When we look at these hooks, you're going to see that there's essentially a curiosity gap getting created for both of these hooks.

These are both million view videos for two brands, right? And so there's missing information at the end of these hooks that makes you essentially want to be like, Like I need to watch the remainder of the video.

The best way to think about it is it's like a debt that's instantly given to the viewer. And the only way they can pay it back is by watching the video, right? Like there's this information that's missing that they want to retain. And so I'm going to show each one of these. So the first layer is there's five visuals.

Like there's, I think this, quote unquote, like this whole hook is five seconds. They've done a ton of testing. This is what's worked best for them. We'll actually have Sam on, actually just to agree to the day and time.

But chances are Sam is going to be on, who's like the mastermind behind all of these videos. But they've done a significant amount of testing. This is the best hook for them. When we talk about visual hooks, there are multiple visual hooks within, right?

Like she has literally tested the fact that it's like him taking a bite and like the like the burrito literally squeezing out like the stuff squeezing out. It's like is the visual. But then there's another four shots on on top of that. They provide clarity about like what the video is going to be about. He quit his nine to five job to start his frozen being in a bean burrito company.

They provide context that he started it with his wife after he left his job. And he opens a curiosity gap by talking about essentially in the, in the next line, he, he mentions, this is how it's going. And then he has another layer where he like goes into, into the numbers.

Now we look at midday squares. I'll have to reduce the volume because Leslie likes to yell at the beginning. So like that's right there. She established the clarity. There's the context about she now there's late.

layers of constraints and stakes that they just added to the situation where, hey, we want to stay here, right? Like out the gate, you're like, oh, you made it into Costco, but it's like, we're not going to be here forever unless you help us.

Let me explain, right? Like that now opens the curiosity gap. When you form that together, and again, you look at, I think there's three or four visuals within her, within their hook on top of like, she's not just talking to the camera, obviously, like she's runs out the camera, like she's in your face.

There's like all of these other layers that play into their visual hook versus like if I'm just standing here and I say we did it or I come to screen like we did it and I'm all excited and I'm in the snow and I have my hood on like that's a whole different layer added into into these visual hooks and those are things that you should uh consider as well when when you're making all of your videos and so when we think about a great hook you're achieving these things and so let me I hate that Canva auto plays but we're going to talk about one-shot videos we're going to go like deep deeper into one-shot videos um it is your your homework but there's a lot of um elements from actually all the elements essentially that you're going to be plugging into your gap videos into your green screens into all the different uh formats and concepts that you're going to be doing all this applies to one-shot videos as well right one-shot videos the goal is for you to get a video as fast as possible as early as possible and start training that muscle publishing a video.

That doesn't mean everything that I just talked about doesn't apply to it. If you break down all of these different videos, all of the same best practices you can see in this video. Like if I just put this one, this is a literally 7.1 seconds on the dot, which is exactly what we tell you to do.

This video has millions and millions of views. I think it's at 5 million views. It starts with a visual hook of an individual running and yelling, all excited. you're more likely to become a millionaire and accomplish these things there's a curiosity app it's crystal clear there's enough context like again it's hitting it's check marking all the different boxes the only difference is there's not really like your title hook and there's no verbal hook like your title hook is essentially like the the text on screen in in this case you look at all these examples and they all do the same thing they all have the same layers and when you start to kind of like study it you notice it you'll be in your screen like that's a second second video here.

There's a clear action. There's a curiosity gap. You start to really notice all the elements in winning videos. And again, all the best practices that translate to a video like a Midday Squares or Bad Ombuds also translates to a one-shot video, a 10-shot video.

There's nuanced differences, but overall, same aspects, same ingredients go into winning videos overall so obviously just showing us some one shots which is a perfect lead into covering our first week's homework and then we're going to rapid fire through q a um just to say it now um as we're going through q a feel free to hit questions into the chat as we go or before you show some of these i'm actually going to take the screen and hit the homework do not feel like you need to write this down you're going to get emailed this it's in the course content so on and so forth but we're just going to roll through it so first and foremost pick a track we already talked about that you're going to do that you're going to join its channel in slack second tomorrow you're going to make a one shot the point of the one shot is to practice texting in visual hooks like alex was just talking about this is literally a single shot video with text over it. Orin's going to show us a couple examples after this.

It's just as simple as it sounds. We beg of you to follow the brief and keep it simple. After that, we have the yapper.

The yapper homework is to practice verbal hooks, right? We're going to write a simple script. It's going to have a great verbal hook that's compelling and stops the scroll. And they're going to do very, very simple chops and edits and slices in CapCut to edit up a video for the first time for some of you, certainly, right?

This is, again, very straightforward. We lay out exactly what you're gonna do in the Kajabi. Do not deviate. And then the third homework for week one, which is gonna be something for this weekend before we meet here this time next week, is a copywork video.

And this is choose your own adventure. You're going to find a video that you like that has performed well from any account and you are going to remake it as your video. You're not gonna copy it.

The concept of copy work is like treating an existing work as like a template to fill your story, your visuals, your thing into. And by doing that with a video that performed well, we have to take a lot of these variables out of it. We don't have to guess whether or not the script structure is going to be good or whether or not the hook is going to be any good. If we use something that is already won, we've got a much better, much better shot there.

Okay, so OneShot is due Thursday, Yapper is due Saturday, and then the copy work is due before we meet here next week.

When I say due, I mean posted in video sharing like Alex showed us earlier. And critically, these first couple, the OneShot, the Yapper, you're allowed to upload a video, like upload the file, okay?

After that, like we highly encourage just posting it and getting the feedback and moving But if you want to upload a video, we'll give you feedback before you post it. After this week, there's no more of that. It's only sharing links.

With that, Oren, let's see some one shots and then get into FAQ. If this all sounds super confusing to you, you have no idea what these terms mean.

I'm going to break it down real quick so you have an idea. But again, this is all in the syllabus and will all be emailed to you. So this is what we mean by a one shot. Literally a single video shot. If you want to get creative and have three, whatever.

But the general idea is five to seven seconds max text on screen. in the classic font in TikTok or the classic font in Instagram Reels edits. They also have those in CapCut. You want to do the white font with the black outline.

We specify this again in the syllabus and stuff. Follow it exactly. No deviating on fonts, no deviating on sizing. We want you to do this because it's readable and it works.

And you'll see we have a bunch of formats and ideas on how to do this in personality or how to tell a story or how to do stuff for brands. There are tons of examples that we have in there but when we mean a one shot we mean literally one shot no video longer than five to seven seconds uh same thing with a yap you've probably seen lots of yap content before this is one of my yaps introverts need an extrovert spouse i am literally talking in my office with the same text we mentioned before as the caption with a title above my head with this relative framing that you will see inside the coursework we tell you to copy the framing, where you put the title, where you put the text.

We are telling you that because that is the easiest stuff to mess up. And if you mess up, you put some ugly stuff or it doesn't make sense or people can't read it or it's huge, they scroll away.

People are just gone. They will never watch your video. So if you just follow this exactly and then begin to use the formats of this, it will work really well.

Why are we doing these exercises to start? Because we build on top of them. You will see once you do the one shot, you get familiar with it. It's a really great way to easily convey a concept and then we'll move next week into 10 shots.

We all use 10 shots all the time. I'm going to make a 10 shot about the event that I was just at. They're awesome quick content and one shot leads you into that. Same thing with the yap. You make a yap where you're just talking and you're not worried about editing or graphics or anything.

You're just talking because next week we're going to do a graphic yap where you start to do the same thing and add overlays. Everything in Cut30 builds on what came before it. We start simple. You don't even need a microphone for the first video. It gives you time to get stuff in the equipment thing if you need it or headphones or whatever.

We'll cover some of that in a minute. This is literally, I just want to make sure you understand what these are. And again, there are tons of examples. And the last thing I'll mention before I zip into all the frequently asked questions around this is the idea of copy work.

We describe copy work, and I still do this all the time, is you take a video in your niche that's popular and you just write it out. You go, okay, how did they hook? Was it a joke?

What was the formula they used? After that, did they make another joke? Then did they tell a story? Then did they use two points? And how many times did they change their graphics?

Like how long were the different shots? If it's something like a vlog, if you actually write that out and it takes maybe five, 10 minutes to write out, you now have a formula you can add your own story into.

Be like, cool, that was a really cool restaurant showcase vlog. It was eight shots. They were all 1.5 seconds. And it started with a really fast camera motion.

I'm gonna do the same thing in my brand's warehouse. And I'm gonna follow this same template and it's gonna help you kind of get used to the real commonalities of creating, and we'll get more creative as Cut30 goes on.

So without further ado, I'm going to get into basically just speed firing really common questions we get every time around your account types and networks, etc. We're going to rip through those for about 15 minutes, get to a handful of questions, and then get after it.

Just a quick note, not all of these Zooms are like this. Usually we talk for like 20 minutes and we have a guest and it's more conversational. The whole point of this first one is you just download to y'all as hard as we can with as much info as we can.

So you're ready to rip and have no excuses. So first new account or old account, or should I use my personal account on these social networks? The quick answer is if you have an old account, that's just personal. You've never really posted videos on just you and your friends.

It's just totally up to you. If you want to use it totally fine. I used my account that had like a thousand of my friends on it. I didn't care if anyone saw it, that worked out just fine.

We have plenty of people that start brand new. Don't worry about it. What you shouldn't do is if you have an account that did something else. So for instance, you have 8,000 followers from when you were a nature photographer, and now you're trying to sell dermatology or you, you know, you can stick of any number of examples there. I used to have, you know, used to post memes or reels. I want to switch it over.

It's likely not going to work. I would just start a new account. Then the other worry is, uh, the location of your account.

So if you're on TikTok especially, it will show your content to where your account was created. And it is extremely hard to get around that once you've already created an account. Instagram is very similar, but it does let you set your location for the account once you've made it. And that can help out.

And so we have a section in the course on VPNs, et cetera, about where your location is. We inevitably, every Cut30, have someone who started their account in Singapore and wants to reach the U.S. and never gets any views.

And a big part of it is because it's showing it to people in Singapore. If you are in Europe, which I know a number of you are, this is kind of a superpower. European creators, especially in niches, smash it in Cut30 because there's not as much content in your region.

And virality goes way farther. You get 200,000 views. It means a lot of people, maybe the entire demographic of your country have seen it. And it will begin to show it slightly more outside of Europe, et cetera.

But we have a whole section on the course on that. But it's worth noting, if you have not set up inside the US or the country you are trying to target, you should set up a new account to do that.

What if I'm an established account? If you have a bunch of followers? The whole point of this, if you are already a big creator, you are going to get a bunch of new stuff in your toolkit. We would still execute all this homework.

It is made to work for new and old creators alike. Business or creator account. On TikTok and Instagram, which we focus on here, and I'll get into networks in a second, You always want a creator account. So in Instagram, you'll basically be able to choose a professional account.

Professional, when you choose professional, it'll be business or creator. Choose creator. It doesn't make a huge difference. It's fine if you have business, but it makes a slight difference. You can still run ads if you're worried about it.

But we've noticed in general, those perform a bit better. On TikTok, you 100%, unless you are selling on TikTok shop from that account, and it's a brand account, you should have a creator account.

Business accounts are significantly gated on there. so you should you can switch to it you don't have to start a new one but just worth noting creator accounts always even if you are a brand unless you are selling on tiktok shop going into networks we really heavily focus on instagram and tiktok here but we also encourage you to post a number of places i'm going to walk through them all this entire opportunity exists because of tiktok and instagram from the start every one of you that posts a video is going to get between 100 and 500 views on every single video no matter how good it is or no matter how it is.

That is a massive attention arbitrage that did not exist. You used to have to pay for that. And if those videos are good, we've had people on their first video, those do 100,000 million views. Many of them get a couple thousand. You can get real attention from the start. That's why those networks are powerful and why we push people to do them.

We push people to put the same content on both. When you're more sophisticated, you can develop a different strategy for both. All these exercises that we have here are designed to work on both so you can cross post them.

If you are making the content, we encourage you to post it wide. Do not be like, I'm just going to do Instagram. I'm just going to do TikTok. I just be frank. That is stupid. And you are wasting energy and time you put into content. You need to post in both places.

We always have people that are shocked. My friend Orchid who did this a while ago only did TikTok for a minute. Then moved over to Instagram was like, oh my God, why didn't I do this prior and blew up way more on Instagram?

You just don't know. One of the other benefits of TikTok is there is some settings that we have inside the account setup here that you don't want any people to see your content. You're afraid of it.

You can set it so that no one on your phone will see your account. It won't show it to any contacts to recommend you, which is great for people that really just want to try it without any potential judgment. That does not exist on Meta. Meta will show it no matter what you do to people in your phone. It is what it is. There's no setting. There's no option.

So just worth noting, even if it's a brand new account, it's the evil empire. YouTube Shorts is great. We used to talk a lot smack on YouTube Shorts.

It's actually changed the algorithm recently. It's a good place to post. Not a great place to get a ton of money, your leads, but you can get some good traction from good viewers there. We encourage you to cross post there.

Would not make it a primary network. It's not going to change your life, but it's a great place to post existing, already working content.

Same with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is great if you're willing to post there because the views don't really matter. If five people see your content, but they're decision makers or they're in your niche, that has a huge value.

And so we highly recommend people just cross post there, even if you don't get much attention or views. Same thing with X. If you're already on there, we wouldn't ever set up an X account.

If you don't already have one, we're not having you enter into pain and suffering. But if you are already on there, definitely cross post your content. If you are under 30, there's a Snapchat spotlight section in here.

If you so desire, that's a decent network. If you've never opened Snapchat, disregard entirely. Post mainly or with software and scheduling. It's actually funny. Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, came out and said, schedulers don't hurt your reach. We can prove that schedulers hurt your reach. So no scheduling content.

He is wrong, as he often is about his own network. But on both TikTok and Instagram, schedulers hurt. They won't destroy your content. They won't make it so you get no views. But we have found that posting manually outperforms it.

People complain about posting or I have to post in four places. I do it every day. It takes 10 minutes. It is maybe a couple minutes of platform. It's not actually hard.

You've probably heard about things like trial reels and stuff. Just ignore it. Any hack, any, we'll talk about this stuff later on. We'll get into it in office hours.

There's strategies there. But when you are starting out trying to get good, anything that's like a hack or I'm going to post 10 trial reels or I'm going to do X or Y is a distraction. Same thing with AI tools.

Everyone always asks, oh, I can use AI to write this. Your AI scripts suck. We're going to see them in Cut30 and we're going to call them out because they're going to be bad. Don't do it.

Just write it. You are going to find the advantage in doing the stuff that everyone else can't do. Also, tools that auto edit, tools that do X or Y, they're almost all terrible.

you just settle down, do the work that will be the differentiator. And you will hear us say that in a number of things. Colin has developed some specific tools to cut 30 that are pretty useful. We'll get into it later in the course, but for now, don't think about it at all.

Guys, the point of this is finding your voice and learning how to do this stuff. Once you do that, then there's a lot of tools to make that easier and did all this stuff. But like, if you try and shortcut that before you've even figured out what your delivery cadence is like, or what you're going to talk about is just like a recipe for the most generic videos on the planet.

And that stuff is totally cooked now. Sorry to interrupt, Doren. Go ahead. And quickly answer Christian's question.

If you're on a Caribbean island, you're trying to target other islands, they'll probably show it in that graph for what it's worth. And we'll talk about location stuff when we get to next week and like the 10 shot. But basically tagging locations works really well for stuff like you're doing.

All right. How do I read a script? People always ask. CapCut, which is the app we recommend using and it's pro, you probably have to pay eight bucks or 20 bucks a month or something. There's app instagram's app which is also great you can use either of them if you want a free one the uh edits app is there most people prefer cap cut it's a little bit better but they're both solid there's a teleprompter function in cap cut where you can paste your script and read it so if you want to do that that's great but most of us i believe all of colin alex and i will basically do it like line by line like we'll read a line to the camera we'll hit stop we'll kind of look at the line then we'll go back and we'll read the next one where we're basically memorizing very short chunks is a much more common way to do it.

Inevitably, people ask, hey, what if I'm in consumer software? What if I'm in some oddball niche? We've had every single type of thing work. We have tons of examples in here for all sorts of things.

The biggest thing I want to tell you, no matter what your niche is, and you'll hear us in the feedback again and again, is it's about a story. So basically, if you post three tips to do this, or here's my new product function, no one cares.

If you post a story of, here's how I came up with this feature that we just launched, or here's how X person used it to do Y, or here's how Steve Jobs did this thing in the past, which influenced what I do now.

People are interested. Everything is about stories. And so you will hear that feedback again and again, no matter what you're doing, put it in a story or a scenario.

One of the greatest examples of this is whenever we get legal clients and stuff in here, don't just be like, let me talk about this particular law or what you do when you get a DUI, craft the narrative. Like, hey, you're a divorced father of three that had too many at the bar and you're coming home When X happens, what do you say?

That's immediately more interesting by putting it in a scenario. And it's the same thing when someone, Tiffany, asks, hey, I have a luxury clothing brand. I have extra Ys. All the same. Why is it luxury?

Tell me the story of the cashmere. Tell me the story of luxury from the start. Tell me the story of how you found the factory in Portugal or the rare family island that had the luxury from or how you would style it if you were going to the Met Gala. Scenarios and stories.

You'll hear us say it again and again and again. We just had another question about this with brand guidelines with fonts. And again, I just want to reiterate over and over and over again, we brief you on using the classic fonts and simple visuals on the one-shot homework in particular for a reason.

And your brand can come through in the content, in the context. Use the fonts. Please, please, please, please, please. I always call it Loewe for this on TikTok.

They're using the classic font. They're doing the basics. It is about the scenarios and what you show and the stories you tell, like 100%. And the reason we call this out is when you put your brand fonts on there and people can't read it quite, or it's like not a great serif for people to get it captioned on or the title is just kind of too big.

People are used to seeing certain things. If they read it and they start reading it, you've won. They are watching your video. But if they can't read it and they skip by it, you've lost. And the biggest thing that will have that happen is if you have some big, crazy, weird font or you have some overly branded thing, people are just going to scroll by.

We are here to prevent people from scrolling. And then you can layer it in from there. same uh people always ask about collab posts and i'll see collab posts in here we will inevitably see someone that's they're posting all their content it's a collab post with their business and their cousin and all those have 300 followers that hurts you do not collab post if there is not a reason to collab and do not collab post until you have at least i'd say at least 5 000 followers what i mean by it has a purpose is if i am making a video about the masters next week and i want to bring in Colin to talk and he's going to have a section in it.

That makes sense. If I have a, if Alex makes a video next week about the masters, and then it's a behind the scenes for one of his clients and he wants to collab post it, that makes sense.

But it needs that reason to exist. And if you have a small following, it hurts. So we would highly encourage, again, all of these things, you'll see all these reels of do this technique or that tactic.

All it's doing is just trying to sell you on that creator or get views. The answer to almost everything is stories, scenarios, and like good active videos, which we'll teach you here.

That is the end of my rant. Let's hit some questions. So Zach asked, does the TikTok algo like videos made in edits? No, it does not.

The CapCut app can work anywhere. It'll work on reels. It will work on TikTok. It'll work well. Anything made in edits, TikTok is not going to love, but at the end of the day, amazing content will heal all wounds.

Where should you be looking when recording a selfie style yapping video? There's explicit instructions on how to frame this, how to set it up, so on and so forth. In terms of looking, look into the lens. If you're looking at yourself on the screen, it's a little detail, but it comes through.

Look into the lens, which is looking at the view. Eye contact always. And if you've never heard the phrase framing, because I know a lot of people here don't have photo or video backgrounds. If you've never heard framing, it's where you're at on the phone when you record and copy the examples exactly.

It's one of those things you may have never thought about before if you're a dentist, but it makes a huge difference in how people can perceive your video because if your face is huge and right in front of it, people are going to scroll.

Too small or in the corner, no one can tell what it is. They're going to go. We have examples in there for the app, for framing of exactly where to put your body on screen.

Copy it exactly and it will be, it's just going to make your life easy. You'll be so surprised if you've tried 50 videos before and you're here because you haven't succeeded and you just go do the framing and the captions and the titles you to and you hadn't before, you're immediately going to start winning.

All right, some other questions. I have a fitness brand. What's my business? It's really not what I want my personal brand to be about. It's like a personal brand, link it to my business out of being about the same thing.

You can later, right? A, don't collab post, but B, what a lot of people end up doing here is you build a personal brand about whatever. You eventually want to push your business, yeah, your fitness business, but you want to talk about photography first.

Awesome. Build people that follow you, learn how to make content, and then you can either start adding in content about your fitness journey, or you can use your newfound knowledge of actually being good at content to make good content on your brand account.

The hard part comes when you're trying to do all those things at once and you're not good at them. Is editing in Premiere hurt or hindered? Doesn't matter, but you're going to waste a lot of time.

Inevitably, we get a couple of real editors in here, our real videographers who are like, oh, I'm going to do this in DaVinci or Premiere. And again, you can, but you're going to see once you start using CapCut and stuff, you're like, oh, I am been wasting years of my life spending time on stuff that's just a click and there's no difference in performance.

So I would just highly encourage you to be like, well, look at the quicker ones because when it comes to this game we're in where we want to post multiple times a week, speed and amount of time you spend on it is a thing. And Premiere is just no matter what slower there, unless you have like God level workflow.

The mobile workflow too. Like again, I've edited in all these softwares. Every time we have an experienced videographer in here, we highly recommend, like pull out Capca and try that mobile workflow.

It's crazy. It's ridiculous. There's so much power in the simplicity and you, you need to give it a shot. Uh, Vidya asked if I'm still trying to figure out what I want to talk about in the first place, how do you get started on that?

That's that Venn diagram we looked at, right? It's, it's experimenting with what can I talk about forever? What can I execute on every day?

And what does the algo and people actually want to hear from me? Right. And, and, and oftentimes it will be an intersection of things, right? Like I don't make golf content and I don't make brand and product building content.

I mostly make content that's like the intersection of those things. And I found that like 200 videos into my content journey because I was making content about building product and brand. And I've also golfed for 20 years. And I made one about that and I could tell that there was something there. Right. So very much so, like you will find that by experimenting and starting with stuff that you're interested in, ideally obsessed about, or your unique lens or combination of those things.

All right. I'm answering some questions in here, but they're more like one-offs. Yeah. And we also have for these assignments, if you don't know what to talk about, those assignments have tons of references in there. You'll even see for the one shot, we actually have a bunch of like little formulas.

We highly encourage you to use them. They're there for a reason. They work and it's just about applying the things you're interested in to them. And also that's the whole point of the Slack channels and like idea workshopping and stuff like that. And then we're wrapping up here in a minute, but like the core thing here is to use these tools, right? You're here, you paid to be here.

We are here to help you. We want you to win. There's a whole bunch of us. So if you are you're trying to be like, should I post these four ideas from a fitness brand? Drop the ideas in idea workshopping and we will help feedback it.

If you do something and it doesn't work, great. We're going to help you improve that. The whole point of these next few weeks is you're going to make content. You're going to post it.

We are going to bully you into posting it. And then you are going to get the feedback to get better at it. Thomas asked, do you ever film with filters or Lightroom, so on and so forth?

No. If one of your pillars ends up being really highly produced pro cam content, then maybe you're doing color looks and all this stuff. But like, no, like maybe down the road, right?

95% of my videos to this point of the five or 600 have been on this bad boy on the front cam, mind you, right? So don't worry about that equipment and gear and light room and all these things are just a crutch for making good content.

Suzanne, that question, put that in Q&A and I'll give you a longer answer because I know we're wrapping up here, but you need to, If you are doing Spanish speaking content to a native English audience, you need to hook in English and then go into Spanish or it's just going to be anarchy.

All right. Again, so we're hitting the end here. Any of these questions you have. So first thing, most of these questions are overcomplicating it.

All you need to think about, do the homework and do the videos and do it. If you need a new account to start a new account, does not matter. The answer to every single question is in just doing the homework and publishing the videos.

And you'll see one of the biggest things we do here is just tell everyone they've been overthinking it in post and everyone goes, oh, I've been overthinking it. Now I have views. So you will hear that again and again from us and you will hear stories and scenarios for your content. If we haven't hit your question and it's in there, Q&A and troubleshooting inside Slack and we will hit literally everything.

We are super excited to do this. I want to thank all of y'all for being in here. Homework for your one shot. Everything is in Kajabi. We have two days.

I can't wait to see them. And we will see you guys on the first office hours, right, on Friday. We've got office hours on Friday. You will all get an invite.

They are typically smaller. They are face to face, just talking, not like with the chat like this because they're smaller. And you'll, you'll have them on your calendar in the next 24 hours and guys on the motivation tip, congrats.

Let's fucking go. Let's make some content. Let's blow up your business. Let's build huge fucking audiences and go crazy with this. I'm really excited for all y'all. It's a big deal.

And, and we're going to have some huge winners out of this group. And this first