Sam of Bad Hambres on formats and the series that carries them

Vanessa just sitting next to me shaking her head like this stupid shit again Vanessa gets paid for this good evening everyone what's up y'all oh man the fireflies are really in the building tonight it's actually way more otters these days than fireflies Dude, Fireflies has been janky lately.

It's been pretty bad. You got some granola, you know what I mean? Shout out. Thank you for sponsoring this last YouTube video.

Shout out to all my friends at granola. I opened X and it was a parody of Margaret Qualey for Palantir. I had to just shut the app. I can't take whatever's happening. Enough is enough.

This week has been brutal on Twitter. Yeah, this week is rough. I can't log in. Everyone supposedly could have been TVPN and just didn't want to execute somehow.

Yeah, they discovered content. Yeah. I know it makes you as mad as it makes me. I'm like, it's not how this works. Sorry.

I know. For those of you joining us who are not here for Niche Jokes, We are excited to break down week four, where we're in the final week. You've learned all you're gonna learn.

We're gonna let you off into the world like doves being released into the sky, mid performance. But we are gonna do this with a seven day challenge. We are gonna talk to you about some of the important things of tying all this together with this idea of content formats.

We have our friend and an awesome recurring guest, Sam from Bad Hombres, who has an excellent brand who I can't look at because I get hungry, who is going to come in here and do some Q and a, um, but we are excited to dive in.

On the agenda tonight is talking about calendar and planning. Uh, Oren's going to talk some about format, um, finding a format for you, a signature format, if you will, as well as pillars and how to think about that as you sail off into the distance and in your content journey.

And then I'm going to touch on series. Um, and then, uh, like Oren said, Sam from bad hombres, who we just dropped in the chat.

All right. And so before we get to formats and let me go pull some of this up here, I want to get to some logistics. This is the last week of cut 30. So what does that mean?

You still have access to everything in Kajabi. As you have probably noticed, there's way more stuff in there than you've probably looked at. And something's going to come up in like six weeks. You're going to be like, I really need to learn Snapchat spotlight, or I really need to think about, Oh, I do carousels again.

You have it. We update it all the time with new stuff. Definitely like check it out. Use it as much as you want. Slack goes until this time next week.

We will feedback everything. Everything is in there. Please use it. We will also have in part of the seven day challenge and Colin will break down the rules.

We do office hours five times this week, not just once. We want you to end strong with lots of feedback. So those are going to be Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Monday.

There won't be calendar invites. We are just going to post the links in Slack, but you'll see some details coming on there. We just want you to have as many opportunities as you can to workshop videos towards the end of this because you'll see it starts to fly pretty fast.

We're going to be posting way more inspo in Slack. We're going to be having kind of way more aggressive. People are going to be posting for the seven days. There's a lot more in video sharing. So you'll see the energy will shift a bit.

But Colin, we'll get into the details on that in a second. I am going to pull up this idea of a format. Give me one second. perfect so all right right now you have we've covered a few things we've covered how to make all these different content types you've learned all those we've covered this idea of a content funnel you want content that attracts people up at the top and you want to be able to educate them and it's all right some of your videos do big and some of them do small and we've covered this idea of content pillars having three to five different types of contents why you learn carousels why you learn vlogs that help you reach different people that help you improve.

But one of the things you'll notice most creators do really well at is they have kind of signature styles that evolve over time. And we call those formats. And as a quick example, you will see Alex and I kind of do a lot of this.

We're like testing those. So I have a new format. If you watched my content last year, you never saw me make any videos on a professional camera. I did not do these edit styles. This is a new thing we've been working on since December of last year that is a format for me.

There's these kind of overview, highly edited videos. Same thing with these kind of very graphic designed, fast moving green screen videos. It's a little bit different than your average green screen. I move these images way faster.

Alex is another great example of this where he's kind of trying and testing stuff a lot. that's relatively different, where he did all these carousels, there'll be like collections of like little snapshots, doing whiteboard videos.

You'll see he's kind of repeated that a few times, kind of sit down, explainers on a set. He's trying different formats to find stuff that is like unique for him.

And when they do well, you keep them. When they don't do well, you kind of move on. So this exercise I'm gonna walk through here with you guys that we're gonna do this week, is we want you to think about finding your kind of first unique format that you wanna test.

So a few examples, and there's a ton of these inside Kajabi that you'll look at, a whole reference set, so you can find them all. A key thing, the easiest example is Nara Smith, one of the biggest creators that you've seen.

She does a thing each video, she creates something from scratch, and she does it in a unique setup. She's wearing couture basically every single time. So it's a standout look about doing, making a recipe.

It makes it unique to her because of what she's wearing and because she's always making it from scratch. Then we have Ken who sits down. That new series I'm doing is very based on what Ken's doing. He sits down and talks with full screen overview images about fashion.

I've basically taken that and done the same thing about sociology. Same thing here. This is someone who has a, basically they have a manufacturing group.

They cut open a garment every video. And then they talk about how it's made. That is their kind of unique format. And you'll notice they are also have their own kind of unique titling that every time you see it, you know it's one of their videos 'cause it always has the logo, it always has the title.

Faceless accounts, same thing. This is an account that makes videos that where they're just talking and they run photos through it and they have the same title, Rich People Who Rich Write.

Same thing with Carousel, this Carousel account as always does the kind of same, a stylist, no bullshit list. You'll see people that use their apartment or a set to kind of, to good things.

My friend Eugene has the same titling style on all his videos and has a kind of a chaotic graphic style. Hans, who came in here, he basically has darkened his videos a little artificially on the graphics.

Has built his kind of title in there. Our friend Denny, he does his green screen in a unique way on white, where he kind of has this really clean look feel that he's kind of edited in himself.

You'll see there's just a ton of examples here, but you'll notice the common themes is that people are doing something. Our friend Thor is always chopping wood, and then he's talking about different things in life related to that. You know, Han's obviously talking about interior design in his unique visual style.

They found one or two things to be uniquely them. So what we will challenge you to do, if you want to workshop it, you can workshop it in your track, is to think about what is the unique thing you can do? What is the unique look and feel?

What is an action you can be taking? What is like a type or style? Based on all these things you've learned that you wanna take a shot at. And then we would encourage you to try it four to six times.

Don't have to do that during Cup 30, but that's kind of what it takes to try and see if a format works, is doing it enough times so you can keep improving it and then get some feedback.

My first three or four videos in that new style did not do amazing. And then probably the fifth one started to really catch. And then now it's solid for me. So that's all part of the homework.

You have a whole bunch of links that are in there. We want you to think about how you can do that unique thing for yourself. Sam, who's our guest this week, has a great example of this. They storytell in a really unique, awesome way.

And so we'll get into that a little bit later. I will pass it over to Colin for series. Yep. All right. We're going to talk series for a minute here.

Series are exactly what they sound like. They're important to all of us for a couple of reasons, really. The big one is that as you set out on this journey to lock in and create a ton of content, if you can lock in a recurring series or even two, that's going to check the box on one or two videos a week, which is a big deal when you sit down at the beginning of the month or the beginning of the week to make seven or 30 or whatever the case may be.

Now, what is a series? We've got social shows. They could be as simple as a repeatable or brandable hook. They might be a recurring concept or like Oren was just alluding to, as you develop a format, maybe it's you with your format talking about a topic or again, like a recurring concept that you always bring back up.

The key thing here is that you are doing them in a repeatable way and doing them ongoing so that people can get used to them, rely on them, come back to them every week. Some of our favorite examples of these, it's funny, we talk in this about the journey and the day X of doing Y, which is kind of like the cliche series that we see on short form these days.

It's always a roller coaster. These got completely cooked and then people took them up a notch and they came roaring back, right? This is the day X of doing Y, this is doing X every day until Y, so on and so forth. We've all seen them.

The Apex example here, which is still here after all this time is Tim Naki, who got a million followers, I think, or 750,000 followers in a matter of months.

doing day X of playing blackjack and betting 10 cents for every follower I had. This kind of thing is on steroids because it's got the money element and it's escalating as he grows.

If you go down this path, if you want to do a builder series like this, you need to take it up several notches. We've talked about this some up to this point, but it's worth restating, right?

I quit my job to start a business is not compelling in 2026. That is not going to cut it, right? You need to find your angle.

You need to find how you can take it up a notch. Another one here, we all remember Jason. Another one here is the resource video, a resource series.

So in the example of Jason, he didn't just do, you know, software tools I like as a creative. He did tools for lazy creatives. He branded the series as his own, which makes it exponentially more valuable for him. And again, takes a basic resource video, which sure you could do that every Friday, but you do that every Friday with a branded title.

You've got a different animal. And then Oren with an apex example here of just commentary around your niche. This one developed over time, but the basic thought here is like, guys, if you have a good hook, if you have a hook that bangs, you can try it again and run with it and see if you've got more there, right?

So his example of product versus brand pans, that's just a forum, a vehicle, if you will, for him to talk about consumer product. And that was developed over time out of a slightly different hook and basically is just a hook that he runs with.

Yeah. And a quick note on that and how it evolves when you're thinking about this is I did a series. I think I did a video called Status Luggage and it worked really well. So I did a whole video of status, other stuff, status, iPhone cases, status, whatever that started to die.

I went negative. I did red flag, red flag wallets, red flag, whatever. That worked pretty well. I felt bad about making negative content.

And then I started this combination of the two, which is what's good and what's bad. And it evolved from there. That worked really well. It stopped working well.

I gave it six months off, brought it back. It did really well. Started doing bad again. Now I've taken it off. That's a good example of how the relationships you can have with your series.

Okay, stops doing well. That's all right. Okay, I have another spin on it. You can basically do that with any types of content in your niche.

And I would highly recommend those versus comparison videos for basically everybody, whether you're talking about hotels or writing styles or running shoes, it does not matter. There's a lot there for you. Something I want to note, because I know it came up in my office hours last week, is if you're doing journey content, the timeline is not flat, right?

I've seen at least a handful of questions about doing that, where how do you produce content every single day like that? Anybody doing journey content with a few exceptions, that's day one, day two, the timeline is not flat. Good girl snacks, the hot girl pickles folks have done day 17 like five times.

They've done day 21 like six times, right? And so it is important to remember that both from an executional standpoint, as well as you can make the video about the thing that you did three months ago today.

And you can talk about it like it just happened. It does not matter. That is not an important part of the value that you're providing. All right. So moving on from series.

Actually, Alex, your turn. Let's talk calendar planning, so on and so forth. Right.

The link real quick for you. Cool, cool, cool. So there's a reason that we, you guys could see this right. There's a reason that we don't talk about this or go through this or share it with you guys until the last week.

And the main reason being a lot of us like to get stuck on strategy. It's the thing that makes us feel like we're getting somewhere, but we're really not getting anywhere. It's like false momentum. Same thing happens a lot of times with a content calendar where you get a content calendar, you get a notion board or pipeline like this.

And all of a sudden you want to put every idea you've ever had in here. You want to make it perfect. week, you want to have the perfect pipeline, 45 days have gone by and you haven't shipped a single video.

Right? And that's what would happen to some of you if we would have given it to you in week one, day one. So we avoid that by then giving it to you when you start doing the seven day sprint. And then the goal is for you to build momentum from that seven day sprint and start getting ahead of your content and you can start using a content calendar.

You don't have to use Notion. We give this to you so that you have something that you can use if you want to use it. Okay? thing is very easy for you to bring it into your uh your own notion so all you have to do is you're going to click these three right dots uh uh dots in the corner you're going to hit duplicate you'll be able to bring it into your workspace it's as easy as that okay now the pipeline's already been built for you now what you'll see is there's different here there's different ways that you can add different views for for your pipeline i personally like to have this board view where i I could just slide things over and start shifting them as I, you know, as I, whether I'm working with my team or as I just want to have like a clean pipeline.

So easy as this, you're going to hit new video down here, drop down. This is a template. So if you want to again, personalize this for yourself, all you have to do is hit the three dots right there, hit edit, and then you can start changing any of these kind of template ties elements that we already put in here. You could add different properties within this.

You could change all of this based on your needs, the platforms, and essentially what is going to help you continue to get content out. But you're going to hit – that's how you can actually use it. So you're going to hit new video. When you do this, now is when you can start putting all the information.

So if I'm going to make a video about PANS status, if I want to put it into in progress, it's now going to put it into this column. Owner, if you have different people, different folks on the team, you can put those things.

Let's say I wanted to go out on the 23rd. Platforms, you could choose the different platforms that you want here. So pillars, if you want to add all of your different pillars in here, you could do that as well. And then different formats.

So you could change this again. Once you really start getting into your content strategy, your content funnel, your content pillars, and having that all established, you can really look at, okay, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, I'm always going to be posting educational content about X.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm going to make entertaining content falling in and leveraging these formats. That's how you can start thinking about this and developing that content strategy. Now, on the other end, we added two toggles here where they're both semi-basic but good reminders, meaning on video script, just to remember, hey, think about your hook and put a lot of time and effort into your hook.

Same time, you want to understand the value that somebody's going to extract from this video. And so you want to almost highlight the bullet points. Like what if I – like it is not a good script.

It's not a good video if somebody can't clearly state what they're walking away. Even if that walking away from that video is like with a huge laugh, cool. But you should be able to put that into a bullet point. CTA if needed or wanted.

This is if you're making bottom of the funnel content. You shouldn't be throwing them CTAs in your top of funnel content. Now, the other part is this is going to sound like a not important thing to do. And you're probably going to be like, I would never record a video without my mic turned on or without my light turned on.

I promise you that shit happens all the time. This is probably a week and a half ago. I recorded eight videos. Sound wasn't on or mic wasn't turned on for a single one. There's nothing more annoying than having – and you just feel like you ripped all eight videos.

They're all bangers and then you have to record them all over again is the worst feeling in the world So go through this start scanning this until you start making this a habit of yours little things like is my light on? is my mic plugged in and basically you have this all for before during and post all the way down to then when you actually post the content, but You're able to run through this fairly simple Let me come back up You're able to run through this pretty simple if you want to then actually see it on a calendar basis you can have your in progress calendar your schedule calendar then you're essentially like your master calendar that has everything linked to it um and in here you know like again this is all driven by these toggles so if you have something scheduled um but it's it's yeah if you have something scheduled it'll be on this calendar if you have something that's marked in progress it's going to be in this calendar and again you can add all sorts of different views to this and in different filters as well so like if you want to add something that's like ideas, scripting, needs visuals, and make it a bit more specific, you can run it that way as well.

Right now we have it as basic as possible so that you can just start and start using it. And then you can kind of go into optimizing it based off your workflow.

But that's my spiel. This is super easy. It's linked in Kajabi. I think we'll send it in the email as well so you guys can start using it. You can drop it into Slack as well.

Guys bear too much time on this though. Yeah. Bears, bears repeating. The best planning tool is the planning tool that works for you.

Whether it's a intense notion doc or an Apple notes or sticky notes on your desk or something in between. Um, do not get bogged down in planning instead of making content. Um, let's cover homework. Then we're going to talk to Sam.

So for this final week, first and foremost, uh, You're going to brainstorm some formats that you're going to experiment with. Do not try to find the master format.

That's not the way this works. Figure out some formats, some things you're going to try, and then post them in your track channel. Just a workshop, get feedback, so on and so forth.

Again, this is like a combination of look, what you're doing, and then maybe some font or editing details around that. Just share what you're going to start with. The second piece is, of course, the seven-day sprint. that means exactly that that is exactly what it sounds like starting tomorrow we are posting a video every single day for the next week the office hours that we're doing every day or almost every day are for the people that are in the seven-day sprint we are not getting on there to talk about theory or idea or content you want to do someday those office hours are for people that are hitting every single day with us that is the point it's the honor system i don't have a good way to kick you out if you're not.

But that's the plan. That's what we're doing. In doing that, guys, if that feels daunting, if it feels like a lot, here's the deal. It is.

When you go to every day, it forces your hand. You have to figure out workflows. You will get much faster at everything you've done so far at the end of the seven days, certainly at the end of the 30 days. And then most importantly, every big success story that we've seen out of Cut30 started tomorrow.

it started on the first day of the seven day sprint in the case of guys like Hans it basically just didn't stop for months and months and months I think it has at this point right but every single one the the every single one of the best creators that we've worked with it all starts from a rigorous daily daily grind and it doesn't have to go forever maybe it ends up being three or four days a week or something like that but every single day to get the ball rolling is the easiest path to success here.

If you are feeling lost on what to do that content about, just for some ideas, you can do something around a consistent narrative or a theme, seven days of X, seven days of the same format of vehicle, seven days of telling a story that you're connecting throughout those things, seven days of like solving a problem or building on something, right?

The point is to make a video every single day. Do not get caught up in it being the perfect video fall back on a one shot. If you're overwhelmed one day and don't have the time, that's what some of these easier formats like one shots are for. So you've got some, some, some tools in your toolkit for those days. Cause they happen to everyone without any further ado.

Uh, I'm going to introduce Sam to the chat. I'm going to, I'm going to drop another link to your account, Sam, while you give us a little, little intro, tell us about yourself.

Hi. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Yes. I'm Sam. I started Bad Hombres with my husband about two years ago.

Bad Hombres is a premium frozen bean and cheese burrito company that we started out of our kitchen and we just expanded to Western US shipping. And last year we did about a million in sales, a little over a million.

And that was exclusively from organic content and email. So I am a huge advocate of organic. And like, we would not have been able to bootstrap the business to where it is without it.

So I love talking about this stuff. Our strategy has been basically one main format, which is the storytelling about our journey. And that's where the majority of our followers have come from.

Every now and then we do collabs with chefs and we do like campaigns around those. And that's where we really drive our revenue. And then these storytelling type reels are where we like drive our community and our followers.

Anyway, I love talking about this stuff and I am a complete open book. So any questions are good. Amazing. You know, my favorite thing about you guys is that it's not a million dollars in e-com it's a million dollars like in local burritos.

Yeah. That was literally just in Arizona, Arizona. Yeah. Um, that's crazy. So yeah.

So now we just like a month ago, we launched to Western us and we like our whole theory up until this point was the fact that like, okay, these videos are going viral. The whole world is seeing them essentially, but like, especially all of the U S but only like, I think 10% of our or 15% of our followers could actually order our burritos.

And we weren't sure if like we had a video, if it would hit, if like it would hit and result in sales in other parts of the country, but I'm happy to report we had a video do well and really drove sales in other parts of the country. So amazing. Go ahead.

Well, Sam, you just went through and executed an amazing launch. I don't remember how many breedings is it? Like 100K plus Doritos in X days. Like, can you give us the rundown on how you thought about organic content for that entire launch?

Yeah, so we just did a collaboration with Lomburghesa, which is a local Wagyu smashburger truck. And we use the format that I actually learned from Alex, which is tease, hype, push, pull.

And with the tease, part of the cycle, you get people interested, you get them excited. And so for that, we basically do a reel where we like tease who could this be?

What will the burrito be? And we showcase basically the hero ingredient and like maybe like the hand of the collaborator. And our community goes absolutely insane trying to guess who this is. And then the following day, we drop the video like with the reveal. And it always shows Hank and the chef like trying the burrito and they're like actual genuine reactions.

And like these videos regularly get over 100,000 views, which is kind of crazy for what they are. And the whole point of these two reels are to drive people to our email list. And so all of our collabs are email list exclusives. And like this last one, yeah, we just, it was 12,000 burritos, $10 burritos.

So $120,000 in sales in less than an hour. And it was just Phoenix only again with this one. Just pretty crazy. Justin Phoenix? Justin Phoenix, yeah.

That's crazy. Moving absolutely different. One thing I'd be curious for you to touch on is you've expanded and added in so many and different content types this year things because you had like god i feel like we haven't formula you have though like you had your formula where you do the day uh more so like the vlog format and you always crush those but you've been adding in new content to the mix how are you thinking about that and or even testing it i mean i feel like i'm not really i feel like i need to do more and i have thoughts and ideas about that basically i guess you're right i'm looking at my feed yeah when you look at the different yeah so um like this this most recent one that popped off uh it actually is like part of the building bad hombres series but we switched the hook and i'm glad you brought this up with the you can't do that i quit my job to start a business hook really anymore, but that is kind of like what defines this series for us.

And it is still a good hook in the sense that it piques people's interest, but what it does not do is stop the scroll. It will not stop the scroll because people, it's just become so common that it's too common to stop the scroll. But I think personally, people will still be like connecting to those things.

So I'm Hank. I quit my nine to five job or X months ago. I quit my nine to five job to start a frozen bean and cheese burrito company with my wife, Sam out of an old Taco Bell. It kind of evolves.

It's evolved. That's that, but that's so much there. Like there's so much more there than I quit my job to start a business. Right. And I think that's right.

That's my point with that. Like if it's a coffee shop, no one cares if it's an agency, no one cares. It's like frozen bean and cheese burritos out of, you know, like there's a lot more there than meets the eye.

The specificity I think is really important. So like the X number of months, specifically frozen bean and cheese burritos is like kind of outrageous with my wife, Sam, it connects to men and women out of an old Taco Bell.

You know, anytime you can bring in a name or a brand of something that's like highly recognizable, you can kind of steal some of that away. So that's why I incorporated that into our latest one but I did not start our latest reel with that I if you look at it it's uh Hank looking up saying we're totally fucked and then goes into that same hook that we've used a million times and so I basically that's like kind of like apart from the actual video or from the actual story it's like kind of like the most emotional part and so going forward like we have that hundreds of little sound bites like that I'm going to have the first scroll stopping little two second thing and then go into the series hook and then go into kind of like the curiosity loop of what the whole story is going to be about so you'll have like a more traditional like scroll, scroll, stopping hook, and then introduce yourself and do the familiar element for the folks around and then get into it.

Yeah, exactly. I like that before it really worked. I had a question about like when you said you did, uh, um, T-type push pull, um, did you do that launch was over a series of days. Was that like literally four videos?

Did you do the four videos over four days was it more spread out than that like what did that actually look like so i the the drops are always on tuesdays and so the first teaser reel goes out the wednesday before and then the reveal is the thursday and um i'm like posting to stories all through the week but that just kind of gives those two reels time to perform.

Cause like not all the views come on day one or minute one. And then the day before I dropped like a storytelling style carousel that in this case, this was like a rerun. And so it's about the burrito, but it's also all of the social proof.

And so, like, I mean, we we do not drop a burrito unless it is an absolute banger. And so, like, that is like it has to be so fucking good that people are like, holy shit.

And so we we have like so many screenshots of people talking about it. It literally put us on the front of a magazine in Phoenix. And so, yeah, this carousel is kind of like the last reminder. And then like, yeah, the push for us is exclusively just the email that goes out.

And the email is so simple. It's just like the drop is live at six and we send it five minutes before and we have a countdown gate because like the email won't get delivered fast enough for it to not be sold out by the time that everyone gets it. So you send it earlier so that it's...

Yeah, yeah. And then the pulp component of it is like once it's all delivered, actually we show, we do a story series of like, we sold out.

Thank you so much. It's like always like emotional. It is emotional for us. Like it genuinely is. And so we like video running at all times.

Like I document everything. But for stories, I take screenshots of our faces, like in the exact moment that that emotion is that I'm trying to portray is like coming off. And I do text over in the stories.

So I have like a thank you for selling us out. And then I have like the fulfillment day, which every time gets bigger and bigger. This last one was like 275 deliveries on one day and like our website broke. And it didn't limit the pickups.

And so 240 people came to our Taco Bell the next morning. I'm not kidding. It was such a shit show. And then the pull component in that, in both of those, and in once people get their burritos and start sharing how good they are, I always repost that.

And for every one of those, I have an email. You missed this one. get on our email list for the next one and so the pull component is getting the emails to load it up for next time yeah and we get like 2 000 emails probably each time aside from the buyers yeah um i'm gonna hit questions from the chat here go ahead yeah so there's a good question here about creating hype content so how did you think about creating hype content that engages your brand community when you don't have a strong community?

Did you wait until you had enough followers slash engagement before creating hype? How do you think about hype? How do you think about creating anticipation? That's a good question. I think creating anticipation, for us, we do have such a strong community and we do a lot to build our community.

If you look at our comment section, we literally reply to every single comment. We reply to every single DM. We want every single person, even if they can't be a customer, don't want to be a customer, like we want them to feel engaged and connected to our brand and feel like they're part of this.

And so they continue to comment and continue to engage with us, even if they're not customers, because that drives customers. Our first collab was after we had built a bit of an audience, but I don't think it's, it's the size of the audience doesn't matter. I would say it's more like the engagement that you have the connection that you have with your existing audience and then the building anticipation is really about the teasing it's about not revealing everything but revealing enough to make them be like holy shit i want this but part of that too is having this trust built with your community to know that you're putting out something that's going to be a banger that they know they can get excited about um yeah i hope that answers the question i think i think something that would be valuable to talk about is obviously at some point you didn't have 180 000 followers that wasn't that long ago but something you've always done a really good job of is just creating tension and urgency like before you had this community that was super hyped about what you're doing you like uh that that's obviously a huge asset now but in the beginning it was just like oh my god can we afford this oh my god what have we done like are we the biggest right it's still that it literally is still that sure but i guess you've always introduced like before you had hype and a following you were still introducing this like injecting this energy into it with like the drama where it didn't matter if you were part of the community or you'd heard it and uh i don't know tell us something about like how you pull people in and just add that drama um yeah true so uh the Stakes, I would say, are often what pulls people in because when I define stakes, why does this matter?

And so something I like to say is if you're just shooting a half-court shot, nobody cares. But if you're shooting a half-court shot for a million dollars, the whole stadium is dialed in and watching. So for us, the stakes are, is our business going to fail or succeed?

And when you're bootstrapping, those are the true actual stakes. In the beginning, it was like, are we going to fail or pass this inspection? And the stakes were smaller in a sense, but they were still like life or death to the business.

But I feel like no matter what kind of story you're telling and layering in those things of like, at any moment, why should I care about this thing? And then I guess also in the beginning, we were doing drops of burritos just like our OG burrito because we could only make a limited number of them.

And so in the beginning, there was a true sense of scarcity. I think anytime if you're like selling a product, having scarcity is part of your strategy. Like even Skims does this. You know, they had their like little hairy underwear and they probably made like, I don't know, 20 of those things and they sold out immediately.

but it's like building in scarcity. But then they sold a bunch of product on the back end of that. And so if you're small and you have real scarcity, take advantage of that.

But as you grow, there are ways to continue having scarcity like these drops that we're doing with these chefs to continue that to be part of the growth engine. You're muted, Colin.

Colin, you're muted. Thank you. I want to get to these questions, but I just wanted to reiterate for everyone. A lot of the urgency you've used is financial.

Yeah. Right. And that like that works for any business telling a story because like, that's the story, right?

Like for anybody that's bootstrapping and probably most people who are like being reliant on content, like that is the story and you weren't shy about that. You're still not shy about it. And it's a good lever to pull on.

Like people get it. Yeah. The levers finance, romance, spirituality is basically, basically what you got what it's worth if you really want to go pull on one people are thinking about it how do i add that urgency is one of those three yeah we got a bunch go ahead sam if you want to add to that we got a bunch of questions here though too i i will just say like one thing is like i always share screenshots uh of like our bank account balance or like you know like make it real and tangible for people um and like i show like real genuine reactions so this is this is a point that I wanted to touch on.

There are people who rip off our videos, which I don't care at all, but like there are people who rip off our videos like word for word, shot for shot, and they act out the shots that, you know, we've captured.

But in our case, we're capturing it all in real time. It's all authentic. We don't act like there's no acting involved.

And so it's so interesting to see these videos that people make that are actually like they're good videos but i can tell they're acting and they they completely flop and so i think it's being genuine and true about your stakes and like capturing the reality of that instead of trying to like manufacture or act in a certain way all right drew's got a question here um and drew to clarify sam did not start content and cut 30. She's just a friend of the program.

So he said, what is your current frequency now? Can you walk us through how you fit content into your busy week between everything else?

So our frequency is like, it's embarrassing. It's not good. It's like one to three times a month and it's maybe 10% of my time. But with bootstrapped businesses, there's this really uncomfortable period where there is too much to do for me and Hank to actually get done, but we're still not making enough money to hire people.

But we just got over that hump and we just hired two full-time people. And I genuinely think the highest value skill that I can provide my company right now is content creation. So that's something that I am actively trying to spend more time doing.

And to answer Alex's question earlier too, about experimenting with different formats, there is one format that I'm kind of like, I put out on stories, I put on TikTok and like, I'm kind of experimenting with.

And that is kind of like these micro stories. So these longer storytelling series that we do, like I will use like a 0.5 second clip from shooting from like a whole hour of this whole like intense thing that happened.

And I don't do anything with that footage. And I'm super inspired by Revival of the Fittest. Have you guys seen Revival of the Fittest? If you haven't, it's so good. It's like this record shop and it's like a two minute long reality series.

And it drops them right in the middle of a conversation, right in the middle of a situation. There's no like lead. It's a cold open essentially is what it's called. And so like, I can't do it in the exact style because we don't have someone filming, But I have all of these like micro stories, these micro scenes that are, that have like a hook and a payoff in their own little way.

And so to build this into a new format, into a series of just basically like also taking advantage of the fact that we've built these characters in these storytelling series that people actually now care about that I can have these like micro stories that can have value I don't know if that makes sense but that's the format because we already have all we're already capturing all that content and so it's a lower lift um like in the very near future the thing that I'm focusing on is lower lift content these storytelling reels are they take a lot of time um so colin was like why are you not ripping one shots and i completely agree like why am i not that's kind of crazy i do think there i do think there is an art to the one shot though to be fair um someone in your class right now is my friend gabriella she just has a reel that hit like 16 million views yeah is it at 16 million now i saw that one had 750 likes this weekend when you posted it i can't believe that's 17 now it's crazy wow and she she dm'd me she dm'd me and she was i dm'd her about it and she was like it's always the ones that take two minutes and i was like no it's not that it took two minutes it's the fact that you thought of the perfect text you've been doing this for years you thought of the text that connects with the audience to get to that and so there is an art to the one shot yes it is lower lift but i that's not something that i have mastered yet i'm posting in the chat for anybody who hasn't seen it uh gabriella shared this this weekend 16 million let's go all right uh we have some more questions here um uh just to come back to drew's question how many videos a week right now um one to three a month one to three a month 0.7 um all right from jesse looks like you have only around 40 posts on your grid over two years are you posting okay that kind of answers that actually i want to dive into that though because you do do trial rails yeah exactly i used to do trial rails yeah you don't anymore hear about what you did and then what changed for sure devastating absolutely devastating really really fucked up my whole strategy okay so before i would kind of post whatever as like this storytelling reel and like however it would perform i'd be like that's great i'm going to take what i learned i'm going to rework it i'm going to repost it to trial reels and i would just keep reworking and reposting to trial reels until it hit.

So like any real, any of the storytelling reels, like all of them have over a million views in trial reels. And that like, that's what helped me get good at storytelling.

And so it's kind of a bummer that they took that away. So now you can't post content that is similar to trial rails anymore so that strategy doesn't work all right quick quick hack there is a hack um it's speed so if you go 0.95 or 1.05 and so obviously won't be quite the same but uh that's that's what i do it works really well you can only do that one time Yeah, because she knows you can't rip your test, but you can't redo the videos.

I love this. Yeah, and I went hard into, with the storytelling real specifically, even if you change the beginning and end, even if you cut out the middle, like it knows the story you're telling.

Like it uses AI, obviously. It knows the story you're telling if you try to tell that story again. But for some reason, yeah, the speed up and speed down does seem to work for now, at least.

But so now to test things, I, the algorithm for trial reels is different than for your feed. So I'll post one to trial reels. I'll see how it does.

And like, I will make tweaks and then I'll post a Tik TOK. And then I will see how that does. And then I will make tweaks. And then I'll post to the feed on IG. Some quick notes on trial reels here for those that don't understand.

And there's a reason we don't talk about it and we don't encourage it for almost anyone starting out. 99% of people, every moment they spend on trial reels is a waste of time.

And so we want to kind of encourage that. Once you have made good videos, if you have made banger videos, trial reels is a feature on Instagram where you can post a reel and it will only show to new followers.

And this is great if you are, so for instance, like I will test hooks, very similar. I'll test a hook or two of something, see what resonates more. And then I will post the main one. I never take anything out of trial reels.

Trial reels has an option that lets you publish it to main feed. I've never done that. I will basically take the one that wins and I will repost it. So it's an easy way to test stuff like that. You just be able to do a lot more with it.

A lot of people look at, oh, I post all these new things. I try this. I have all these reels on there. Most people, it's a waste of time. Post to main feed. You are pretty gated on trial reels. When you do have one that breaks through, it tends to not be the most amazing audience.

What it is a good tool for is if you have a hit video, make another version or two of it. Change the hook. If it gets caught as a flag that's duped content, change the speed a little bit, and you will know you have a hit video that can reach purely a new audience.

So you will see a lot of big accounts are doing that, and it's how they reach followers really quick. You see someone go from 600K to a million really fast, it's because they've kind of nailed a system like that. But it is not something to spend a ton of time on if you have a small account.

Only start to think about it when you have some winners. I would point out to everybody that they got there with reps, not with a feature called trial reels, right? They happen to use trial reels to like find their way, but try not to worry about it too much.

Everyone wants to hack. This was the same thing when people were posting one second videos, whatever. Even for Gabriella got a 16 million view video. That's amazing.

She probably got some followers, some attention, but really that's just a top of funnel video. It didn't build like a huge affinity. She now has a bigger audience she can reach probably for a few next few videos, but it's like the little things only go so far.

Yep. All right. Marie said when coming up with ideas, was it all, was it just all about the story and the process?

I know a lot of us are overthinking our content. Also, do you do only organic and no paid? I do only organic and no paid for now, at least. We are trying to scale responsibly and make sure that our quality maintains the same standards.

And so that has kind of been a gate on how fast we can grow. But we are going to test some pages to see what it would cost. Like, we just kind of need to know that as a business. and we don't know that right now um and kind of see where that goes but our main focus is organic for sure and then what's your AOV you don't mind me asking it is roughly that's a good question I don't know off the top of my head and I really should if it's like under if it's under 40 oh no no no no no it's like uh 85 or something yeah if you do that you do regional and you're using some of your existing content, I think you're going to have a ball of paid.

Yeah. How much is a pack? How much is like, how many burritos at a time? You can get six burritos as the minimum. So people are buying like a couple six packs typically.

The average is a 10.8 burritos or something. Yeah. That's a, that's a great meta business waiting to happen. So excited for you. um yeah and i i'm i think we're set up for success uh i'm happy about things so far so far so good uh excellent um anyway back to the question sorry uh about how do we come up with ideas is that what it was sorry um yes yes let me come back to it um like basically is it just all about story and your process honestly right now it is because it's just the easiest thing it's there it's like what do they say uh don't create capture or document yeah or whatever it is what you're doing instead of yeah yeah uh and so like i would love to have a content pillar that is about like our burritos but that would require like content shoots about the burritos and I just like do not have time for that right now and so I'm just like capturing content of us building this business that's like all of our content is about that because that's what we're capturing um the collabs are specifically about the burritos um and like Alex like introduced me to the idea of a dog whistle so even when we're talking about our business I always have a dog whistle for people who love bean and cheese burritos like in every single post like I make sure like this will connect to somebody who loves bean and cheese burritos even if it's like purely about our business um what is it for people that don't know it's basically like a little injection of a message that you put in that other people might like breeze past but for the people who it connects with like they hear it like a dog hears a dog whistle i feel like that really points out that like i'm not a bean and cheese burrito guy so i don't get that that's a thing right oh my god it's a thing people are obsessed with bean and cheese burritos for real obsessed.

I love this. Dude, you'd be surprised. You'd be surprised. It's, it's, it's international.

I'm telling you, like people are obsessed. But another thing that really benefits us is the fact that we're married and together all the time. And so like all of our content is like kind of just us together doing what we're already doing um i could break down the process of how we uh how i approach writing our scripts yeah that would be really productive i think for these last few minutes yeah you have a really good framework for like how you structure your stories and you've asked me this question a million times and i've never had a good answer, but I wrote it down this time.

So the script writing process, the overall structure of the actual script itself is first the hook, what stops the scroll, a recap. It catches people up. It gives people enough context for this story to actually make sense.

The substance of the story, which is the problem, the stakes, the attempts, the setbacks, progress, escalating tension that lead to a payoff, which is where all the curiosity gaps close and the emotional payoff is earned.

And then a cliffhanger and a CTA that gets people to follow. So how I approach writing it is not in that order. Because I'm telling this story retroactively, I'm just capturing everything at all times.

I'm always documenting. And so like I have a thousand videos to go through before I make one particular part. And so I start from where is the emotional payoff? What is the big win?

Because that's like not something you can manufacture. And like I mentioned, like our emotions have to be authentic. And you know, wins aren't every day, like big wins aren't every day. And so I start from the big one.

And then I basically brainstorm all the things that we had to overcome to get to that win. And I try to find a good starting point for the story. And that would be like where the hook is, where the curiosity gap is made.

And then I try to figure out what's the best way to get from this point to this point in the most interesting way. And so like all those things that I had brainstormed, I have to cut a lot of those out. And so it's how can I introduce the stakes, increase escalating tension.

And so I'm always telling the truth, but like, I might not be telling the full story, like, because I can't tell the full story. I'm telling two months worth of time in a minute and a half. And yeah, then I, yeah, that, that emotional payoff is so important.

Like the best compliment that I receive is when people tell me that they cry when they watch our videos, because like as humans, we have these mirror neurons. And so when you see us legitimately in pain, and then you see us legitimately so overjoyed, like we feel that as human beings. And I think that's what people really connect to in our story.

And then I do the cliffhanger and call to action, which I did test not having our call to action, which is follow along to see how far this bean dream goes. And the conversion to follows was significantly lower.

I think a CTA doesn't always make sense, but in this case, people, for some reason, really connect with this phrase, bean dream.

Like if I put bean dream, the comments are like bean dream. Like people love it. I don't know why they do and uh so yeah that's how i approach so you're saying you're saying having the call to action converts more followers for me it does yeah i mean assuming you have a video on top of the cliffhanger yeah right gotcha um that's interesting i mean i feel like the cliffhanger especially sets that up you need the at least for us we need both yeah yeah um that's excellent guys we're gonna i know that somebody zach asked for um to get that outline um back and i dropped in the chat we'll make sure to pull that out of this and share that with you too if anybody's few if anybody else was feverishly taking notes on sam's outline that was excellent um this has been great as usual any any final questions here i want to be respectful of everybody's evenings um sam any parting thoughts anything we can like send people to um um besides besides the burrito website unless they're in phoenix or unless they're in the west coast nope that's about it i have no personal anything i'm like i show enough of my face through bad hombres fair enough it's all about dream i'm about to drop the link here again for everybody so you can go follow thank you so much for your time you're welcome appreciate it it's always so fun i love talking about this stuff these are the best ones all right thank you so much guys for everybody else um tomorrow is the first day of the rest of y'all's lives um or content journey at least um i will be on office hours i think tomorrow at 8 a.m sharp we got office hours uh for every day except for Sunday and we're getting after it and we will see you in Slack.

Your homework is to brainstorm formats and start making a video every single day. Orin, Alex, we got anything else? Am I missing anything?

Nope. More so just same thing that, you know, just to reiterate what Colin said, these seven days could set you up for the next year and really build off the momentum of changing your career, changing your life, changing a lot of the goals and the plans that you have.

So about the content that you make over the next seven days. Let's go. All right. Thanks so much, Sam.

See y'all on Slack. Thanks, Sam.