Jason Murray beat his Amazon salary with an iPhone and one qualifier

He pops out of the van with a little Osmo. I'm talking about this man's huge, right? So a little Osmo in his hand looks like a little toothpick. Walks out with the Osmo and is just like straight gunning it like this, getting steady shots before he says hi to anybody.

Yeah, the pro form, you know? Yeah, he's like perfect form, top down on the plates.

And then as he's talking to everyone, he's like setting up questions about it. When he recorded a podcast, he's making sure somebody was getting a shot for him. He was recorded.

Like anything he did, he had to get a shot beforehand. And he's like smiling through the whole thing, right? And this is somebody that's worth $500 million. Literally, yeah, cut three for doing it.

I love it, Greg. Hey, let's go. Grab a Greg. $500 million, like getting all of his own shots. And he's excited.

He's like, I just started vlogging. I mean, I just got on YouTube this year. I'm going to be up in my content game. So if someone's worth $500, I mean, $500, $500 million, like doing this thing solo with an Osmo, I felt ridiculous having somebody get BTS for me after that low key.

With a real camera? I felt ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. But regardless, this shit's going to be good. All right.

We still got people rolling in. Yo, who's our guest tonight? Our guest tonight is Jason. Jason.

Jason. I'll grab his link. I don't know if he's on already or not. I think he knows the drill. He's in the chat right now.

What's up, guys? What up, man? Well, well, well. I'm dropping a link. Jason just moved to my hood.

How are you doing in beach life, brother? Dude, I don't know what took me so long. It's honestly just so good. People don't understand.

You get from the stress of content and you go out in the sun, it's immediately better. Yeah, I love it. All right. So we're going to run through.

I know this is the first time we've had a guest on this round, so this is how it's going to work. We're going to run through some light training curriculum, similar to what we did last time, but it's going to take less than half the time.

And then we're going to transition into talking to Jason about his creator arc challenges, what he's worked on, any questions that y'all have, uh, looking at his content.

Uh, I think I noted when we, I put his stuff in the chat, like, uh, you can go back, you can see Jason's like first cut 30 video that like popped off, or it's like the art director, like toolbox and stuff and like how he's doing it and the quality.

And then like how dialed in his stuff is now, which is like, look, takes a journey, even for people that are like tapped in and know what they're doing. And so he's been through the ringer on this. And so I think that'll be a lot of good questions to ask.

Yo, even for Dwayne Wade. Even for Dwayne Wade. No, you got to get Dwayne on the pod. All right.

So we are going to talk about today. We are going to talk about optimizing your profile. We're going to run through post vitals. We're going to cover some writing notes and what our homework is. This is a very straightforward week for this.

I'm going to start with a few notes here, just kind of what we've been seeing in Slack and just some general response there. My first note is just a reminder to not get distracted. We talked about this a little bit last week, but if you're thinking about trial reels or you're trying to use a piece of software or whatever, just zone in 1,000% on the homework stuff.

It's going to work. Almost everything else is kind of a distraction. It just is what it is. You'll hear us say it. Maybe it has some use down the line, but just make hit video. So I won't beat a dead horse on that.

The second thing is narrative. Have you seen it in a bunch of the feedback? You also saw in all the content wins, people are telling a story, whether it's their story or someone else's or it's a fictional scenario, stories are everything.

And so I would really encourage you to think through that going into here. And then last, you're gonna see that everything builds on itself in Cut30. So this week, we have two new assignments, the 10 shot and the graphic yap.

The 10 shot is an expansion of the one shot. And literally, it's exactly what it sounds like. You're gonna have 10 shots. and they're going to be really quick clips. But now that you know how to use the editor and the text and you get the general idea that quick videos put up some views, we're going to make a more intricate one.

We'll get to that at the end. And the graphic yap is literally the yap, but you are going to use a couple options of formats for that, of like how you overlay the graphics. We'll give you a bunch of examples to get it done.

We'll reiterate that here at the end of it. I will pass it off to Alex to talk about profiles. Cool. Let me share my screen. We're going to jump through this.

As I pull this up, I want to preface this by saying you want to think about your profile and specifically your bio when we say that as a landing page, right? And so when we think about e-commerce, when we think about trying to sell products and you're spending an ample amount of money on like meta to get someone or to drive someone to a landing page and the whole goal is to get them to convert and purchase the product.

We want to think about our bio through that same lens, right? our entire goal is to get someone to watch our video, click through the profile, and then click follow and essentially get into our ecosystem, right?

Like that is the entire goal. So there's ways to optimize and there's ways to essentially optimize that entire scenario. So I'll start running through this.

Y'all can see my screen okay. Y'all good to go? Just give me a thumbs up. Cool, Greg, I think I saw you say something. Yep, awesome.

So I'll start here. Your profile, a good profile, answers three questions. Number one, why should I follow you? A.k.a. what value will you provide?

Number two, what makes you different than any other X? Number three, why should I trust you or buy into you? And let me break those down each piece by piece.

So number one, why should I follow you? A.k.a. what value will you provide?

The element around this is you want to be crystal clear. If someone was just scanning the lines within your bio that they can think of it like a headline or you think about a headline, they scan it, they get the information that says, hey, this is the type of content that this individual creates.

And so therefore you set a clear expectation of if they scroll and they consume your content, what they're going to get from you, right? And you should be very, very clear about the type of value that you provide so that the individual that's clicking through doesn't have to guess.

The more guesswork you can eliminate, the better it's going to be for you. The next element is what makes you different than any other X meaning what makes you different than any other founder what makes you different than any other creator what makes you different than a specific creator within your category your niche and why this is important is if and I'll go into this relative to to myself or you can do this for any of us um if I'm just somebody talking about content it's not that interesting if I'm someone that's talking about content while running a company more interesting if that's if I'm someone that is talking content, running a company while also trying to be a dad, more interesting, right?

And you add these other layers and all of a sudden you start to differentiate yourself within your category and essentially has more layers that people could get attached to. The third element, why should I trust you or buy into you? You have to think about this through one of two or through essentially one of two ways. Number one being either A, you're trying to, you have some kind of CTA, right?

And you're trying to get them onto a newsletter. You're So you could have your social proof there and or you could have some kind of CTA relative to to what you have. Or B, you can sell them on the story.

Right. If you're saying, hey, I'm trying to build a 50 million dollar company, follow for the journey or something better than that. But along those lines, the reason that is like you want them to understand that you're on this journey, you're going to share this journey and you're trying to get them to buy into your journey.

Right. And so those are the three questions that your profile has to answer. And when we look at a good profile, it's really the intersection of three elements. Number one being your value proposition. Again, to hammer that, what value somebody can expect from you consistently.

Number two, your identity. So what you're going to be known for. If somebody had to be able to describe you in just a few words, how would they describe you?

That is going to be your identity. And then again, your story or social proof. It's kind of either or in the scenario, you could rotate things based on the content that's going out, which we'll touch on in a sec. now this is a old profile um or bio for myself but i'll just break it down so if you look at every bullet point that was in here right content to make smarter marketing decisions there was two elements here that i was tapping into the value prop right if i would just would have said talking about content marketing not that interesting content to make smarter marketing decisions you know if you hit follow every piece of content the goal is to to make you better at your job it is better to make you better at at growing your company etc somebody knows exactly what they're going to get out of that content now the identity layer is obviously me putting in those keywords content and marketing decisions the differentiation which isn't true anymore but training for the crossfit games that was the goal then and so i thought that was an interesting layer to to plug into my content because again if like if we're talking about um how many content marketers there are, how many people there are talking about content, again, there's a ton. You can look it up on LinkedIn.

There's a ton of us, right? But all of a sudden, you add in the layer of training for the CrossFit Games. There's like one little bit like this, one element that just makes me more memorable than somebody else if I'm also creating content around that.

Number three, here I have a bullet point center around what I'm trying to do because I want to show BTS. I want to show or I want to produce vlogs. I want to have 10 shots around the things that we do day to day, right?

All of those things. And so the way I show that element of it is building nine figure media company. Then the last part is I had a CTA in, in, um, in my bio, right?

All the pops, a million dollar marketing playbook goals to get them on to, um, to click the link in the bio for me personally, I like to have one link in the bio and then I'll rotate them.

And, or if I just have general content going out with no CTA, then I'll have a link tree or something along those lines. But typically with the link, I like to have something set up in the back end where I could just rotate links pretty easily.

I've just seen a higher conversion for myself. Now, when we look at a good profile versus a bad profile, a bad profile, nine out of 10 times, it's just too generic.

First bullet point, marketing content, not good, right? Number two, a CrossFit junkie, Again, not good.

There's no goal attached to that marketing content. There's no value expectation attached to that. Number three, entrepreneur. Anybody can claim that.

There's no story attached to that. The fourth, all my links versus a single link. Again, this is when you have like a goal associated to that CTA and link in your bio. And so the reason that we're even talking about all of this is we could think about everything and just about everything in marketing through the lens of a funnel, right? And so when we think about what a discovery funnel is, you have a piece of content perform well it shows up on their their for you page their explore page they click through to your profile as soon as they do that they're going to scan right they're going to read these bullet points they're going to see if you're worth uh worth continuing to scroll they'll consume probably your pinned post some of your top your top content before then they decide to follow you so when you look at it through that lens right they have to discover you scan and get context consume and then decide right and so this is a very very important part of it because this part this part of it gives them all the information that they need to understand as they go to consume what they're going to get out of you right because it could have just been a one hit one or it could have just been a random piece of content that you created that that got them essentially into your funnel and so now when you when you are optimizing for the quote-unquote stage of scanning you have to think about it through this lens of I need to give this information or give this person all the information context they need to get them to continue scrolling and consuming so that they decide to follow me.

That's the end goal. And so we'll dive it, Colin, we'll dive into the homework in a second. But we do have a Notion page set up. In that Notion page, there's 50 plus bios that you can look at. All those bios are relative to either brands that have created a very good bio, either personal brands, creators, et cetera.

There's 50 in there. They're all broken down. And this is a key element. And I'll give you one example that we're running with right now. So like we're here in Augusta doing content from all been home.

Our goal is to get the account to 10,000 followers in four days or five days. Sorry. Started at 1,000, getting across 4,000 today. One thing we added in the bio was because we have like we're going to be doing giveaways.

like one of our growth lovers we have fallen malvin home for anybody that essentially sees a piece of content go viral clicks through we want to make it as easy as possible and almost like have a cta in there and today there's been a ferocious uptick on on false i'm not saying it's all attributed to that but there are definitely people following because of that because we're optimizing the the the one line in our bio right to be clear he literally means it says follow us i'm reading follow Malvin home for daily giveaways.

And that obviously, being that clear with what you want the person to do has an impact. 100%. All right.

I'm going to take you guys through post vitals. Let me get this pulled up. Guys, everything we're about to look at here is a balance between not overthinking it, like Warren was just saying.

They moved my share button, you guys. there we go got it um it is uh every single piece of your post is about between not overthinking it and just letting it roll um and then doing anything you can to inform the algo what your video is about the the end goal of all these pieces is to inform the algo what your content is about so that it can show it to relevant people all right so we're going to go through all of these pieces again Again, it is illegal for you to overthink them.

We're going to cover all the basics. If you have any questions, hit us in Q&A. But the moral of the story, the answer to all these things is just to use them organically at the end of the day.

All right. So we're looking at here the title, the captions, the description, the hashtags, which we often get questions about, the audio and the location and the mentions and tags.

First and foremost, on your title, yes, you can upload a custom cover image. for Instagram, you don't get to on TikTok, but you do on Instagram.

Every single video I've ever posted, I think this is the case for pretty much everything Oren or Alex has ever posted. I am putting a title in my video that I intend to be able to also use as a cover image. I am not making another cover image. I do not need to add that stuff to my workflow.

My title that I put in that first three to five seconds is going to double as a title that I can stop frame on and use as my cover. All right. Sorry, I got ahead of myself there.

Your title is three to five seconds. You should be aware of where it's going to go when you're recording and framing, whether green screen or otherwise. It's simple, it's clear, concise.

And then, like I said, it can double as your cover image, your captions. Captions and safe space are probably the biggest consideration that you're going to find yourself going, oh shit, and missing in these first several videos, right?

My favorite spot for a caption is just above center, a little bit lower than this example here. You'll also sometimes see them on the chest. The thing to think about is whether you're recording a yap, a graphic yap, or a green screen, or whatever it may be, or even like shooting a subject, think about where you're going to put that text, that it's not going to be like right over somebody's face or right across your mouth or something stupid, right?

And again, you don't need to overthink it, but it is going to make a difference when you set that up in advance. You should always use relevant keywords in your script so that not only does the algorithm pick up that audio, it's also putting those words on screen in form of your captions.

Again, these are both two little signals as to what the content is about. Next, we have your description, often confused with a caption. I think we're all on the same page. Captions are classic video on screen.

Description is the text that you post with your video. SEO is very real here, especially on TikTok. TikTok is increasingly becoming a big search engine. You should just go for two to three sentences here that hit on relevant keywords, right? An example I like to give is I'm almost always going to get the word golf into my description.

Even if my video is about golf and it's obvious on the screen, I want the word in there, in the words for the algo to grab onto. The more, the better. But again, two to three cents is going to do the trick.

Hashtags by themselves are not important. And really in general, if you find yourself over thinking hashtags, just don't do them.

That's fine. Right. But again, they're little tiny itty bitty signals.

We recommend doing like two to four. Use bigger ones in your niche. Use more specific smaller ones in your niche. Ignore entirely the huge stuff like FYP or for you, so on and so forth.

And again, do not overthink it. Look at some relevant stuff, hit it and move forward. Next, we got tags and mentions.

So again, if I make a video and I mentioned my friend Oren in it and I tagged my friend Oren in it, the algo is that much more likely to show my video to Oren's followers, right?

This is the same if you're talking about a brand. It's the same if you're doing a collab with another brand and you mentioned them, right? Use these tags and mentions organically to get into these other algos.

Do not tag 10 other brands. Do not tag 10 other creators whose attention you want to get. This just dilutes that. And again, that totally misses the mark on informing the algo. The mention in the copy is more direct than a tag on Instagram.

They're the same thing on TikTok. When you go tag on TikTok, it ends up just putting it into the copy. Audio, we recommend tagging the audio or using the audio natively in the app when you post it, unless you're doing a really elaborate edit where you're like cutting on beat, which happens, in which case you can bring that into CapCut, cut to the beat.

And then most of the time, The apps are going to recognize it, whether you get them to or not. And you can add it manually just to make sure they do. That audio is another little lever, right?

If you use a piece of audio, the algo is going to show your video to people who have liked videos that also use that audio. Again, just to test it out and see what's there.

And then finally, location. Tag where you are or tag a location relevant to what your video is about or don't do it at all, right?

I pretty much always tag my videos locally. That means I over-index in the Portland area compared to how I otherwise would. If Alex makes a video in Augusta, he's probably gonna tag it in Augusta at Augusta National Golf Club or tag it at the Masters or whatever it may be.

Again, that's gonna give it a little bit of play in that algo. But again, don't overthink this. Do what is organic and make sense and don't try and game the system here.

If you are making content about a city, If you're doing the top five coffee spots in Augusta, I don't know that there are five coffee shops in Augusta, but if you're doing that, make sure to tag that.

The local algorithms rip. They get you very relevant views, even if it's a small amount. And do not miss the mark and miss out on tagging location there. Let's see here. Next thing I got for you is probably one of the more common pieces of feedback that we're going to give for these next couple of weeks is around saying less with more words.

All right. I would think about it as word efficiency. We are doing short form video. It's going to be a little bit different for everybody based on your cadence. For me, 130, 140 words is like a 40, 45 second video.

If you sit down to write a script and you come out the other end with 250 words, it is way too long. You need to shut up. Right. And again, you will you will be disappointed to find as you go through this.

I'm going to give you an example. You can I still do this. You you can write a draft of your script and then go back through it and take out all the words that you don't actually need there. And you will come out of the other side with the exact same meaning, the exact same video, having used 30 or 40 percent less words.

right? So the example that I like to give, this is a real one from a Cut30 student long ago at this point. So the first chunk of the script was, this is my Black Friday ads playbook as someone who spent $100 million with Meta.

The three most important parts to the playbook are your offer, your creative, and your landing pages. I like this because it uses words inefficiently in every way you possibly can, right? As we streamline this, we just say, I've spent $100 million on Meta.

Here's my Black Friday playbook. Let's talk offer, creative, and landing pages, right? It is literally the same video, the same hook with 40% less words, okay?

Using the word ads is implied by talking about meta. We don't need to do that. Saying playbook more than once is just redundant. We just don't need to pack it in. We don't need to introduce the things as ads when we're already in the context of ads.

And then finally, literally the word your is just unnecessary to say it over and over again. We've already established that. Right. And you will find again, time and time again, that you can do this with every single script that you write.

It's very disappointing. The good news is you come out of it with with much more efficient word usage. And that is the essence of short form video. Right. Is punchy and efficient communication.

So in addition to just thinking about this constantly, in addition to getting the feedback from us, I would start with every script, write it, and then go back through and delete.

Alex, what are those famous words you mutter? It's write with your eraser, right? I don't think that's actually an Alex Garcia quote, but that's the joke. All right.

Now, we're going to hit homework now or hit homework after we talk with Jason. Let's hit homework real quick. and I've got examples ready to go. If you want to describe them all, I'll pull up the example.

So your homework this week is first to optimize your profile. Like Alex mentioned, there's a big gallery or library of examples for brands, experts, all the above.

And then really start shipping guys. Like, so our goal this week is to share a minimum of three videos and video sharing. Up until now, it's been okay to upload a video to get feedback.

We're not doing that anymore. We are shipping the work. We're getting feedback on it and we are making the next one better. And when it gets to the work of those three videos, we want one of them to be a 10 shot and one of them to be a graphic yap.

Oren, you got those? Yes, I do. And then quick note, you're going to drop your bio in your track, personal brand business expert, sorry, personal brand expert or brand business.

I just put those in session 21. You can click them and you will find them, but put them there. We will workshop them. We are happy to workshop your bios.

Take advantage. and yeah then let me pull up here uh what do we mean by a 10 shot i'm gonna use i made a 10 shot last week i'm gonna use me as an example this is literally 10 shots it is uh each shot is less than a second and it has the white text with the black background so quick note on these the longest we want your 10 shots to be we do not want you to change the requirements you had on your one shot We want these to be five to seven seconds.

And the entire goal is that your clips for this, you can use up to 10, are basically between half a second and one second long. That is the secret sauce to this. If you think of it exactly the same, you have a hook up front, you have your text hook on top of it, but you are clipping through footage quickly.

And you can tell many types of stories. We have a whole section on 10 shots in the curriculum that we'll post. We'll put even more examples in Slack that you can pick from.

where it's basically slightly expanding your editing skills. More important, the 10 shots are great, but more important is going to be the graphic yap, which I have a bunch of examples.

So it is literally a yap with graphics on top. This, I would pay attention here because this is the highest performing cut 30 format of the last 90 days. And I'll show some examples.

This is a recent cut 30 grad. She's doing a really simple graphic yap. She is just talking on camera the way we did the yap. And she is literally using the overlay function in edits and cap cut.

And it allows you to bring photos over it. And she is putting them over her face. The design isn't good. She doesn't care about the layout. Doesn't matter.

This video absolutely smashed because it's a good yap. And it just keeps people paying attention because they're watching a visual. So this is the easiest format. We'll call this the chaotic graphic yap.

And I will have all of these in Slack for you by the morning as well. Another Cut30 grad, she did one very similar where she's putting graphics and she's doing it a little more thought and intention as to where they're placed above while they talk. And she has a jewelry company. She is talking about styles of wedding rings.

It's a good example. Another Cut30 grad, this guy crushed it. He is setting up his framing extremely specifically to do this. So he frames himself so he can use his captions right above his head and graphics right above that. He runs this the whole video, makes it very simple.

This is a really easy to digest format that if you set up how you shoot well, is an awesome one to copy. A quick rule for this is that basically you wanna have a graphic, one graphic for roughly every two seconds or so of your video.

So how he prepped this for instance, this is about a 60 second video, he got about 40 graphics to put over it. It sounds easier than it is when you use Pinterest, et cetera, or if you have a library for your brand.

When I do sponsored videos, I pull from death to stock. We'll get there in a sec. All right, this is a more organized one. This is me.

I am doing full screen imagery. I will either use death to stock if I need to use royalty free imagery, or I'm just pulling stuff from Pinterest, Cosmos, Google image search, if it's not a video where I'm doing any kind of paid promo.

If you're a brand using your own libraries and stuff like that, and stock photo sites, that kind of thing. But this is literally, I will pull one graphic for every two seconds is my general rule.

I often do a little less than that. And it's just, but the full screen really gives it a nice feel. So that's another option you have for editing.

You can also get artsy with this. You will see people that will like get a little bit fancy with how they do their overlays. She's a good example. Again, I will post all the links to this.

But the general idea is that we are going to do a yap this week where you overlay the graphics and you're gonna have that in your toolkit Highly recommend doing a bunch of those in the rest of the program. Just a quick highlight.

I think that's the end of my rant here. If you need dates for these, then we want you to have your bio in there by the end of the week. We would love to see your graphic yap here by Friday and your 10 shot by the next Zoom. And so quick question from Greg.

How are you doing full screen images? This is all in the curriculum too, but I resize the images. So I bring them all into Canva, just the free Canva. and I have a 9x16 template, and I just drag them to be that size, and I export them, and they're there.

But you can also just hit the overlay button in CapCut. It will show up, and you can drag the edges and stretch it. Same as in edits. You can pinch and stretch.

It's just a pretty easy UI to resize any of those graphics. I do a lot of this on CapCut Desktop. It's easier for me. But the quick overlays, like Julie's video, is super easy in CapCut on the phone.

But all of this, we have full descriptions, all of this stuff in the curriculum. With that note, and we'll get to Q&A here as we get in with Jason. Actually, quick, I'll hit Eva's question real quick, and then we'll get into Jason.

She asked, normally we would tag more than 10 vendors in one post. I think that's okay every once in a while. You have a big marquee post. You can tag everybody. But typically, if you're making something, I would focus in on kind of like the one or two that make the most difference.

um just kind of quick how i do that all right so quick intro to jason jason was in i don't know was it the first cut 30 or like the third like third or something yeah not the first yeah so jason show us the tattoo you got the session yeah it's on my butt sorry oh yeah yeah there we go uh so jason came in um as a employed art director at amazon and then now jason and i are like are on the same management agency jason is a full-time creator jason runs his own cohort on art direction.

Jason's the man and he's gone through the full journey. Jason, want to give us some background on how you got here? Oh man. Well, I was full-time at Amazon as an art director, had done that for eight years, but had kind of seen the writing on the wall that they wanted us back in office and all that. And so I was planning on quitting my job and had about a six month runway.

Like, okay, I need to quit my job in six months because I don't want to go into the office. And one of my creative directors actually was like, hey, you should take this Cut30 thing.

I took it. He didn't do any of the videos, but he was like, you need to jump in and do this. I did it. And from there, I knew it was either going to help my freelance business and freelance career, or if it went well, I could just go all in on being a creator.

And it went really well within my first year I was able to surpass my income from Amazon which was like it's tech money is really good money um and then this year probably we'll double that so yeah it's it's I owe it all to cut 30 it's so funny hearing like them talk through all these things because it's literally like just do what they tell you to do do do follow the steps don't complicate it and all the same things the graphic gaps and all that it's the stuff that I'm still doing now um to make videos that ideally, you know, go get views. So yeah.

So what, um, so you've, you've been in these, in people's shoes here. What, uh, like what is content that if you were starting again, you would focus on making?

Um, something that I got into a little later was sharing my opinion more, um, and making it personal to me, like sharing my perspective, whether I was, whether it was going to be controversial or not, like not being afraid to say like, Oh, I like this that they did here. I don't like this.

Uh, cause I was really focused on sharing just like as much value as possible, but I was sharing tools and stuff like that. But I wasn't saying exactly like, you know, I, I started to get more into like, I like this tool because I use it this way. And I like this because I do that.

And, uh, yeah, that I, I wish I would have also just like pumped out more. Like I was pretty consistent and I did a lot of stuff, uh, made a lot of videos and, and committed to it but I wish I had just done more um and yeah shipped shipped more than even what you guys are asking them to do because you just learn from from the reps and and now it seems like your content's very intentional you're doing kind of more thought through videos etc walk us through a bit of your process of like how you decide what makes a good video now yeah um one of the like principles that I carried over from advertising was uh advertising creatives like really care about this thing called insights.

And insights, all it really is, is just our way of describing a revelation or something that's like an epiphany, something that feels insightful. And so I'm constantly, when I'm trying to come up with ideas, I'm really thinking about what is something that will feel like an epiphany to someone else or feel like a revelation to someone else.

And it could be something that everyone's already talking about, but can you say it in a way that people haven't heard, that feels fresh and new. So that's where I start, is I'm trying to think of ideas of something original or some sort of, yeah, some value, but can I say it in a way that sounds almost counterintuitive or contrarian and contradict what you would normally expect and make that feel, again, like an epiphany, like a revelation.

And so people can apply to their content really well in both ways, contrarian and non-contrarian is you'll see a lot of people now are anchoring their videos around like basically a concept like feng shui or structuralism, some sociology or psychology principle. a lot of people, the invisible hand, economics, someone, they basically will take a concept and apply it to a thought.

That is an awesome way to make content, to be like, cool, I'm going to make a video about X thing and I'm going to look at it through a psychology lens or whatever lens. But it's also an amazing way to Jason's point, contrarian, to be like, this would make you think this should be a perfect representation of Feng Shui, but it's not.

And then like go left is an awesome way to keep people watching. So something to think about if you're stuck, but you know your topic, you're like, I really want to make a video about this thing. I don't know what to do. It's okay, can you use a, can you find any principle or concept from psychology, sociology, history, economics, you know, organization, something related to your niche, and then either agree with it or go against it.

Like right now in the design and art direction and visual world, taste is like a big buzzword and a big hot topic. And the series that I literally started last week, like that I've started to work on now is basically all about taste, not being the moat to not being the big advantage that everyone thinks it is. And it's like, can I go at it at an angle that people wouldn't expect?

So yeah, that's where I, that's where I really started. It's like, if you have a good idea, you don't have to compensate with fancy visuals or fancy editing.

Like if you can talk about something interesting, then the rest follows and you'll save yourself so much on the backend from like the scripting to the editing will be so much easier. If you can start from a place of like, this is a great idea. Do you, um, I've got this, I check on, go ahead.

You got one. Yeah. Uh, I feel like it's a good direction to take this from where you are now, where admittedly, um, I don't know, videos that really make you think are something we all aspire to.

You blew up off of making a software video, right? And it's like what you did there has become like one of our archetype examples because you branded it, you made it your own, you literally labeled it.

And guys, for everybody else, like we will look at this more later when we get into series. But one banger video also turned into this series that I don't know if you're still doing it, but I know you've done a lot of them. So like tell us about tools for lazy creatives. Yeah.

Yeah. It started honestly from like the whole insight aspect was like, I want to share tools, but how do I make this sound interesting and sound like something people hadn't expected? And I saw another girl, she was doing like, she was sharing tools for hot art directors. And I was like, well, I'm not hot, but I'm pretty lazy.

I'm like the laziest art director and constantly looking for, for hacks and ways to make my job easier. So I shared some software that was like, here is a tool for lazy creatives.

This is why I like it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Check it out. One of those videos, one of those early videos did like 5 million views, but like at least three to four of them all surpassed a million views. And so because I saw it worked well, I just kept doing more of those.

In every single video, I'd share one to three tools for, and the title that I'd use at the top of the frame was literally tools for lazy creatives or tools for lazy art directors. And then I had just a repeatable thing and I just shared different tools that I was using or tools that I saw other people sharing and I tried them out myself. And yeah, that definitely blew me up for sure.

I like something I like calling out about that is like this was in a time where probably this is always the case. There's probably plenty of gurus saying like, you can't just do listicle resource videos anymore. Right. That's probably still the case. That's definitely still the case, right?

But adding a couple layers to it, like not only blew it up, but just like made it entirely yours and this thing that you can ride into the ground. It's just beautiful.

It's like textbook. Textbooks are courageous. I highly encourage people in the chat to think about what that qualifier is. Just like he mentioned, like, look, there was that girl doing like the hot art director videos.

If you're hot, use that. You know, if you're lazy, if you have any introspective qualifiers, term, you hear us hear this word qualifier, it immediately makes your stuff interesting.

And then Jason, I got a question for you. I've noticed your production value has gone up significantly. What are some little tips and tricks, whether it's like what light to get or how to create some separation or like little things you could recommend people if they want to make their content like look a little bit better?

Yeah. Surprisingly, like until last month, I was just doing everything on my phone and I'd constantly get comments from people being like, what camera are you using or what's this or what's that and it was literally just my phone the entire time is the iphone 19 plus yeah yeah exactly iphone 23 whatever but the one trick that i would do was i would drop i would tap on the screen and drop the exposure just a little bit because like the iphone loves to just brighten everything out and make it feel just like almost you want you want your image to be bright but it's just like it looked too iphone so i would just drop it just like a tiny bit.

Um, and that would help a lot because the things that I do for lighting is I just have one big key light, which is just not in front of me, but just off to the side of me.

And that's all I use. And I'm sure they have like resources in the, in the course materials about that. But it's just like, I've used like a $30 ring light. I've got some other like lamps that I'll sometimes sit in front of and I'll just sit that right at like my, I don't know, three o'clock, two o'clock.

Um, and then, uh, but now I'm, I have like up to the production quality a little bit. And that's mostly because I've just slowly built my process.

Like at the very beginning, I wanted to keep the process as simple as possible because my time to create videos was I was working a full-time job. I had a kid and a wife that wants to spend time with me. So it was 10 PM to 1 AM was the only time that I would utilize for creating content.

So while in my full-time job for the six months, it was every night, 10 p.m., I'm going to work on a video and ideally ship it by midnight or by 1 a.m. that night. And so I had to do everything on my phone.

I'd be editing while laying in bed so that I wasn't completely leaving my wife all by herself in bed. It was like sit on my phone, editing everything on my phone. And then, yeah, this last little bit, like I have an editor now that helps me out.

So I've been able to slowly add little things to my process. But even then, I keep it just as simple as possible because any little thing that makes me rethink or like just disrupts the flow could add like 10 to 30 minutes onto the process. And I try to just keep it as short as possible. I want to give a clarification for Greg and then hit Tiffany's question. Greg, he just meant finishing the video at midnight, and then I'm almost positive posting it in the morning.

Yeah, I'd either schedule it for the next morning or it was just like, okay, I've got it finished, and then as soon as I wake up, I'm ready to post it. Especially when I was on the East Coast.

On the West Coast, it's just harder. I've got to wake up earlier. But, yeah. Tiffany asked, do you mainly shoot during the daytime?

this is like obviously a lighting question for you and your videos look great because of lighting i just have i will turn the blinds down and usually just use the lights in my uh in my office and i have lights that i've had since college and they're just like super old whatever lights that you can get on amazon and uh sometimes i'll have the window open but like i wouldn't worry about lighting that much yeah i would say in general if you like get into lighting then you need to black out and control lighting and yata for like nine out of 10 like what's most important is that you like it's bright enough right if you're doing it in a dim bedroom corner it's going to look like shit so i would get enough light and then when you're when you have 179 000 followers like jason then you can get really amazing lighting the thing that i do this ring light i had on here i've made 95 of my videos to date with and it's just literally everything right sitting over there so you don't need to do too much until you want to and the biggest like principle behind it too is Like you got to have a repeatable like spot, like pick a spot that, you know, you're not going to overthink.

It looks good. And you're just going to keep shipping and move on to the next video so that you're not thinking about lighting. Like that's not the thing you should be thinking about. The like returns you get, it's like very diminishing on lighting versus like if you have a good idea. Any setup at all.

I will say I haven't even talked about this much. Like the one of the biggest hacks I ever did was this light is just here. It never moves. There is a ring light that was $98 from Amazon. And then the tripod thing I have attached to it is right here.

There is no setup besides opening the tripod. And that has actually made it. It's just so funny how even the little thing of like getting the light out is just going to get in your way. So like having that little dedicated thing and convincing your spouse or whatever that's going to stay up is 100% worth it. 100%.

Yeah. I'm working my business. All right, go ahead. Sorry. No, no, go for it.

I was just going to hit questions. Yeah. Libor, do you want to read that one? Yes. Which one?

Drew. What does your week look like in terms of content creation versus other work? I'm not doing like any freelance now. Last year I did freelance and I was like, I headed up a creative department for a couple months.

I just found like the 40 hours of time that I put into work was, was great and good money and content leads to more money, but I'm just doing content at this point because it's, it does pretty well for me. So my day, though, when I record videos is just mostly in the afternoon when my son is asleep so that I don't hear him like screaming in the background.

So that also gives me a time window where it's like I got to record videos between he goes to sleep in the afternoon between 1 p.m. and 3 to 4 p.m. So I've got like two, two and a half hours, and that's where I record all of my content. And then any time around that, I'm usually spending like writing videos, working on some other stuff.

Like I'm teaching art direction with my own cohort. Also, you guys have the blueprint for everything. It's literally formatted after Cut30 because I loved the accountability. I loved the Slack channels.

So even my art direction students, I'm giving people feedback in the Slack channels and using the same format. So follow the blueprint that they've, they're giving you guys. Corey's got a good one here.

I'm working on my business after my nine to five and dinner with my girlfriend. Any tips for showing up with energy after a long day and letting personality come through? I've got one for this after you go, Jason. Yeah. Part of it's like practice.

Like you look at, you look at yourself in the camera and look at yourself in the mirror and you just need to realize like you have to dial it up, uh, an extra 50%, extra like 2x your your like expressions or whatever and I'm a huge introvert like I've mentioned a lot of people in some of my videos that I'm like I get a lot of anxiety I have hyperhidrosis which means I have like the sweatiest hands on the planet so I should not be good on camera at all but just dial it up like 200% and smile right before you get on camera and for that for for me it's just like you just practice and you keep doing it.

And I, uh, I read off a teleprompter for every single video. I script it word for word and I use the edits app teleprompter or the, uh, I used to use the cap cut teleprompter and that's not good for everyone.

Like some people don't read off teleprompters as well, but I've just like practiced and I'm, I present and do pitches for my job. So I've gotten better at just making it seem like, uh, things are natural.

Um, but does that answer that question absolutely and Corey what I was gonna say is like kind of the the uh you see the like old videos of like singers warming up like I find like literally putting a big smile on your face just to like loosen your face like drop your shoulders take the tension out and then I will do like a big billowing laugh just like open up my lungs and just like just like breathe a little bit And it's like silly and stupid to say, but that does it for me.

As well as like take a couple takes and delete them and then do it again, you know? Yeah. Like I've found just like little things too, just like have fun with it.

My latest video on taste, I just thought like, okay, I'm going to use a funny word like develop insatiable taste. And just try to like overly emphasize if you want to develop insatiable. What do you say insatiable is incredible, not going to lie.

insatiable taste you need to become a voracious eater like just over just exaggerate it and and see if that works and it's surprising like your your talking quality and your ability to to talk through your ideas is another one of those things that i found helps me save time later like if i can talk the idea well enough i don't have to edit and compensate with like graphics and all that kind of stuff. Like I start from a good place.

The rest follows a lot easier. All right. Greg's got one. Do you rotate through the formats you're doing on a consistent schedule? Um, getting better.

I'm getting better at that. I've like in the past, I've usually just followed my curiosity. And it's like, if I come up with an idea, I make that idea that night.

And then the next day I come up with another idea and I make that idea that night. And it's like post like a script, shoot, post, script, shoot, post, script, shoot. And it's just like constant.

Uh, now I'm getting better at like, I've, I've got like pillars, like I've got a whole thing on taste.

Then I talk about mainstream art direction. Then I go more like career art direction type stuff. Um, and I kind of cycle through those, but it's also, you, you just, you make enough stuff that you start to get a sense for the response that you'll get from it and it's like oh I I haven't had a big upper funnel video in a while I should rip one of my art direction of uh Lizzo or art direction of whoever's trending now type videos and then I'll jump back to other stuff and follow my curiosity a bit so I don't overthink it that much um but like I try to just stay kind of in tune with what people in my audience are wanting as well. Like I get a lot of DMS now from people saying like, can you talk about this? Or can you talk about that?

And that, that helps once you start getting that feedback loop. Uh, Christian's question, um, any advice on developing a framework to tell your story?

I'm sure many of us want to build a personal brand, but don't know how to start crafting a story around our own personal journey or experiences. Any thoughts before you go, I just want to say make 20 30 40 50 videos and and like let that voice show up and figure out what you like and what works for you etc and do not let like overthinking it right now stop you from just making some videos sorry jason go ahead give them an intelligent answer i don't know if i've ever even like like told my story i think i just kind of inject myself into every video and start with like a place of making the video for them, making it as valuable for them as possible.

But then if there's like an, an experience that I've had, or like a little anecdote I can share, then I'll say like, Oh, by the way, the, I experienced this on set when I was shooting a commercial for this, or like, I had an ECD that gave me this advice.

And that's why I do this. So I don't know if I, if that's answering the question the way you're asking, but I kind of Just like, just inject your opinion, inject your own personal experience in little pieces throughout your content.

Cause like, yeah, even now, I don't know if I've ever made a video that's just like, this is my story. Which, yeah, not sure if that's answering exactly what you're asking there.

Miranda, not sure how to answer, not sure how to do your questions. I'm going to skip it, but wanted to acknowledge. Tiffany asked, do you make content every day or dedicate batch days? um i'm starting to do batch days but usually it's like making content every day and i my goal is to uh i'm like shooting to try to do five videos um a week and to do a video every weekday and then i dedicate my weekend to my family and that's that's been my goal and i've uh before my goal was three videos a week and now i'm surpassing that and so my that's what i try to do i'm always doing at least three videos a week and I'm trying to get to five videos a week.

Um, but yeah, I, like I said before it, it's been just do a video every day, come up with the idea, write the script, shoot it post.

And that's been my process daily, which I think is also kind of helpful too, to know that like you can just repeat the process over and over and over and over and, uh, and not complicate it too much. Like if you don't, if making batch days and then switching your process over to something Like now I'm going to write five scripts and then I'm going to shoot those scripts on Monday and then I'm going to edit those and then I've got to schedule it all out.

Like if that complicates it for you, which it did for me for a long time, then I would just not worry about it and just go through the process every day and keep it simple enough that like don't script a two, three minute video script, just the 30 second to 60 second video.

And you're going to be able to do it within the timeframe that you've got. If you're doing 10 PM to 1 AM videos, like, like I was doing. uh that's a perfect lead into any tips on burnout if you experience it especially while working full-time and doing content on the side um i think you you kind of just have to decide like what time are you willing to give and and stick to that as as much as possible like if if you're going to decide now this is going to be a part of my life for the rest of my life or for five years, then, uh, then I think it's going to just become a lot more of your routine.

And once it becomes more of your routine and your rituals, the burnout doesn't hit as hard. But I think like the thing that I'm really proud of is that like I was doing videos on the side for years before I even took cut 30, but I just couldn't get the traction that I wanted to do.

But even when I did fall off, even when I've had little slumps here, there, just get back on the horse. Like if you burn out, yeah, you take a day, you take five days or whatever you, you fall off for a week, but then just don't let any sort of overthinking get in the way of getting back on the horse.

And one of the things that I'll do when I feel like, like, oh man, I'm getting into a slump, I'm complicating, I'm not making videos. It's like, go back. Like for a lot of you might, you know, might not have two months of videos, but like go back a couple months, I go back to your very first videos and just start from the beginning, like start with something easy.

And like, cause I, I'll, I'll like complicate my process too much. Um, and so simplify, go back to the fundamentals and just start shipping. As a master of falling off the horse, getting back on it is like exactly the same as starting for the first time.

And it's very natural to be like, all right, I gotta fire this thing up. I need the perfect master plan when in fact, like you just have to make the next one again and get it going. And then ultimately, depending on your personality type and what you need, get there.

But my tip for me is like, I find if I can get ahead on content, it's very sustainable. And if I can't get ahead and I put myself in a position where I'm like making a video every night to post the next morning, like I can do that.

I've done that for months on end. I'm just like, it's not fun. And so getting ahead, even if it's one video, I'm one video ahead.

right now. And I, I didn't make a video today and I didn't post one because I did not want to not be one video head because that's like my whole deal. Um, so I think if you're burning out too, like maybe you're complicating your process or you're taking too long.

Like if, if it's taking you 24 hours of sitting on your phone or sitting on your computer to make a single video, you might be complicating it too much. And that's definitely going to burn you out. But like when you can start simple and start pumping out videos, the feedback of seeing something go out and you get a little traction, people comment on it.

That also gives you a lot of the encouragement to get onto the next video and get to the next video. So yeah, I think like thinking about your free time, the time you have allocated to this, your finish line has to be at the end of that free time.

It can't be like you're doing videos over the course of like five days and you're complicating like that you've got to like if you've got two hours in a day like script for 30 minutes shoot it for 15 minutes and then you've got an hour and 15 minutes to to edit it and and get it ready to post so um if you're and like some of the graphic apps that they were just showing they're not that hard to just save a bunch of images pop them into cap cut slap them on like start it rough you don't have to like align it like the the one girl was doing to start just get it going and make sure you're shipping because if you're not shipping the the like little details aren't worth it like you just got to be posting um i've asked another question here that's a good one i think to round us out how much do you how much time do you spend on research excuse me how much time do you spend on research versus script writing for each video this is that's the part that's like taking me the most time these days especially as i'm getting into like these deeper topics and like Orin, I'm sure, can kind of attest to some of the more intellectual yaps and things like that.

I'm wanting to create really quality stuff that is insightful, that is a revelation. So I am spending more time reading books that I have on art direction and pulling out little tidbits here and kind of digging into things that people aren't thinking about and just making sure that what I'm giving to people, the value I'm giving is truly like something they can return to and be a resource for. And so that's really helping my kind of brand and my audience, even like long term, knowing that I can provide like something really quality to them.

So the question was like, how long, right? Like, I don't know. Yeah, like half a day, like writing, writing stuff and researching maybe for a single video sometimes but then other videos like I sit in and it's like you just pump it out in 30 minutes to an hour so it totally depends on the on the video and I think that's important too to like if once you do get to the step of like having a pillar or having different series having the ones that are easy to just ship and and know that like okay I'm gonna pull a couple tools and share the tools I really like versus the video that is a lot more researched and really, really thought through.

Amen. I want to be respectful of everybody's time. Like, do you have anything to plug here for us? Do you have any parting thoughts before we call today? I'm going to grab a link so that everybody can follow you. No, no, literally, like, I owe a lot of this. I owe the fact that I'm like working for myself and the fact that I can like support my family moved to orange county being like a dope house to taking cut 30 trusting the process and you can even see in the video that i shared earlier that by the end of cut 30 i hadn't grown i'd gone completely viral i hadn't grown my account to 100 000 yet but a year later of just to like keep going a couple months later you'll see some more more good results um i've now got got the base to, to be able to do pretty much whatever I want to do with my career.

So it's, it's been really awesome. Beautiful. You guys, Jason, I think had 14 or 1500 followers when he joined cut 30.

Yeah, it was, it was like friends and family type stuff on like a secret art account that I had. Let's go. It's always court. Like I always find, I find it like corny to talk about the big, big success stories. Um, there are a lot of them though.

And, uh, Jason's one of them. Thanks a ton for for joining us dude i appreciate it yeah thanks guys thanks for having me yo i shared the link go follow him uh let's recap on homework really quick shall we we're doing oren remind me you want to have your bio in there by friday we would like you to have your graphic yap by friday and a 10 shot by tuesday but honestly that's just if you need structure post the graphic app or the 10 shot in whatever order you want inside just get them done this week um but i know some people love to have a deadline.

So we're giving them to you. Oh, one final thing, guys, I'm going to share a link to the video database in Slack tonight.

Now that you're kind of free range making videos, this is where all of our reference videos and a whole lot more are. If you need ideas, if you want to find stuff similar to XYZ, go in there, use the link that I'm going to share in Slack to sign up because that's going to put you onto the creator plan with a bunch of good stuff.

Don't just go sign up willy nilly. That'll be in Slack in the next like 10 minutes here. all right y'all jason thanks so much see you guys see you guys bye thanks bye