Cut30 kickoff: the camera won’t save you, the hook will

People are like, we're coming in hot. Well, welcome in, everybody. We are. We're going to give it a minute for everyone to join. Alex is just talking about how he's a ruthless hatchet man.

Yeah, we always get some familiar faces, but we've got Greg in here, which I'm excited to see. Yes, dude. Greg's in the house.

Greg's in the house. Excited to see everybody. welcome welcome if you're uh yeah feel free to drop in the chat where you're coming in from we can get to know good i know we got a lot of it in the uh in the intros in the intros too always curious where people are logging in orange and i was gonna make some europe i'm in london yeah london dogs london sucks just saying it'll be like 70 today it was like 70 degrees like into a hailstorm like within the same walk between two locations that does sound like austin last week when i go front austin has been terrible weather this week's been good but no i think london's very very overrated very overrated i'll take i hate when people hate on paris though that one i don't understand yeah nah i'm headed there i'm headed there tomorrow dog i had to sneak in a day you know yes like put me i'm going to paris at the end of june and i like this is and this is how i pull it off i gotta wait till vanessa walks away because i'll be like babe let's take let's take zara to uh to disneyland for her birthday and you know it's just me i'm just trying to go to paris so i'm talking with alia if those don't know alex is like the ultimate shopper yeah i met up with oran and uh where he stays and i was like hey you gotta take me around boy i left with the bags bagged up yeah i mean he uh that's the one thing i spend money on that's the one thing i spend money on i really don't spend money on other shit but i like to i like clothes all right the flow the flow has has slowed to a trickle so i think we can get after it we can pop in That's right.

What is it? Session 23? 22. That's not a Michael Jordan session yet. Not quite yet. Welcome to the 22nd session of Cut30. And so we have done this many, many times.

This is a proven, if you run through this and you do the stuff that we're going to hit here in this 30 days, you are going to make banger content. It may take a couple of weeks to click in. It may, you know, you may have to keep experimenting, but you will get everything you need, even if you know nothing to do this.

So a quick overview. We're going to introduce ourselves today. So if you will get to know Alex, myself and Colin, we'll talk a little bit about we have some coaches who are in here with us.

We'll give them an intro as well. We will cover how everything works. We are going to go through the Kajabi, which is where all the coursework is. We are going to go through Slack, which is where the magic happens.

We are going to kind of walk through a bunch of the introductory questions, how the homework works, everything here. But basically the gist of this is in the next 30 days, you are going to learn to master short form content. And so what and I guess what we want to make sure you get away with today is we are going to walk through basically any questions that you think you have. You have coming into this.

We're going to have gone through here. So you can drop those in the chat as we go, but we are going to get to a grip of them later and zip through. Without further ado, I think we can start off with some intros. Alex, besides shopping, what you got for the people?

What's up, y'all? Alex Garcia, one of the co-founders of Cut30. I'll tell you that I'll give you a little bit of my background and then how we got to where we're at now in the shopping addiction. But really began early as a creator. So this was 2015 when like the only person that was talking about creating social content was either Tai Lopez or Gary Vee early, early days.

And you sat it on the Gary Vee train, right? And so at that time, I was here in Austin and I was learning kind of like the videography, the photography side. And that was early days where a brand would pay you $500 to basically be their social media manager, their videographer, their editor, their creator, their community strategist, right? The whole nine, do everything and anything.

and still somehow prove that, or basically still get told that there was no ROI for the $500. And then, you know, to now it's been a CMO at Good Startups. I've been working with eight, nine, ten-figure brands on all their content strategy.

And now House of Distribution, which is an entertainment studio here in Austin that we work with mostly eight, nine, ten-figure brands producing their social shows or evergreen content, mostly staying in like the health fitness performance lane and, and kind of like luxury fashion lane. Sweat equity and, and is another thing on my plate, but overall just obsessed with content creation, what it can do for a brand, the ability to build a brand with organic content and how to do that in a way that's tasteful and that build an audience and build affinity is, is basically everything that, that I love specifically on the brands.

I love all the creator aspects as well, just as much. I just love to focus on the brand storytelling from a personal side and things that I like to work on work-wise. But a little bit about me, I'll pass it to you, Oren, if you want it, and then pass it on. Perfect.

Yes, my name is Oren. I'm at OrmeetsWorld on social media. I was a designer who worked my way up in marketing, became a marketing leader. I was CMO in consumer electronics, in the toy industry, in outdoors, like a whole bunch of different categories.

I started making content because I wanted to be a better marketer. Our brand I was working at was not amazing at organic social and I wanted to learn. It took me about 50 videos of sucking at it, of which Colin and Alex and inside the group chat got to see the worst of, but then eventually kind of cracked the code there early on, found out I really enjoyed doing it.

And now it's changed my career and my life. I worked with tons of companies since then. I was speaking at KFC last week. I'm here in London right now talking at a big e-commerce conference called Pulse with all the big brands in Europe about their creator programs and have worked on everything from social media strategy to influence to creators. And yeah, I love sharing that along the way.

And I'm excited to share everything we've learned with you all. Colin, you want to give a little back down? Excellent. Yes, my name is Colin Landforce on Social, which is my real last name, not my superhero last name.

I'm a serial entrepreneur and marketing guy. working mostly in consumer consumer brands, uh, my entire career, uh, one way or another done a lot of that with Oren on various projects, including now this one, apparently, um, for me, I was creating content on Twitter for literally a couple of years. That's how I met. That's how we both met Alex.

Um, and I just always had this inkling that like I could, I could make videos and I never knew where to start. Um, and then I have this friend named Oren who started making terrible TikToks and eventually bullied me into making videos.

And that was like three years ago and the rest is history, so to speak. Little known fact I want to throw in there because it's relevant this session.

I have a consumer brand, a weed brand that has never made an ounce of content in 10 years. We're number one in the category in the state of Oregon and we have never done an Instagram post. And I've got Alex from our team who is in this session making content for that brand for the first time it's going to be weird it's a a strange little transition point for all that so i'm excited for that um i think that's that's all i got oren mentioned it but we have uh alexandra victor and gabe who are three coaches that you're going to see in slack besides us so don't uh don't be surprised when you see some other names jumping in and giving feedback and whatnot and don't be shy with them they'll be in there every day with us um or you want to give us tour.

Yep. I'm going to give a quick note. So what we're going to walk through here today, just so you know what to expect. I'm going to give a tour of what's in the coursework. Alex is going to talk you through what happens inside of Slack. Colin is going to be going through some of what we have coming up in like the homework, talking about content market fit, a bit about content in general.

We're going to talk a bit about what a hook is, how you start videos. We're going to cover a lot of the basics. And we're going to go through how the track system which is how you determine what content you make in Cut30.

And then at the end, we're just going to blitz through a ton of the common questions people have about what account should I have? You know, what social networks do I go on and why? You know, every common question you have, we're going to blitz through at the end. So this is a jam packed hour.

So quick note on the Zooms, how they work first. We do one of these every week. We will, besides this one, we will have guests every session. We have a, you know, basically different types of creators, whether that's brand creators or individual creators who do different things.

Specialists will come in for the back half. The front half will be training. The back half will be a guest to be able to Q&A. In addition, we know that this time zone isn't the best for everyone. So we also have what we call office hours, which are every Friday, where that is an open workshop session.

These are recorded. We will put these into Slack and email them to you after. Office hours are not. They're more of a candid. You can come in, ask any question you have, feedback content you have with the group, and we will kind of blitz through all the questions that you have there.

So two live sessions there every week, plus the course in the Slack we'll go through. That's our little brief run through of what we have here today. And I am going to now share my screen, see if it's up here.

Y'all got it? You got to call on your mute. One second. Thank you. We got it.

And I want to add to what Warren said. There are invites for your Wednesdays. The office hours, there are no calendar invites. It's just posted in Slack. or they're at 8 a.m.

Pacific. So look out for those. There will not be calendar invites. All right. So what do you have here?

You should have an invite in your inbox for this in your initial emails. If you have any problems at all with this kind of stuff, access, you can't get in Slack, you can't find this, info at cut30.co and the team will take care of you.

Any troubleshooting or problems or access you have, just email there. They're pretty quick with the turnaround. Big shout out to Monique there.

But inside this intro you have in Kajabi, we have all this info for you. So the most important, we have the syllabus page where you can go to any time if you need to wonder about what should I be working on. So for instance, in week one, it has everything of the curriculum.

It has everything like for these separate weeks, what homework you should be doing. It lets you know when the Zooms are happening.

All that info is there. In addition, it has like a guide to Slack If you need to figure out, you don't know what channel it is, Alex is going to walk through all that in a second. That's there.

And you will have a ton of curriculum going down the side here. You'll note in the syllabus, we will tell you each week what basically the minimum is to cover. So this week, tracks, basics, recording and editing.

You will see these kind of here on the side, content types. That's what we want you to cover. But there is much more here than just what's in the curriculum. We want to make sure you have the minimum to execute what we're going to give you for homework.

But if you want to dive in deeper, we have tons more inside this. We cover everything from if you want to start Snapchat to what you should do if you have software or an app or you're a musician. We have separate playbooks, stories, coming up with ideas.

If you have a question about content, this is super thorough and we have a ton of that info there. These sections, for the most part, all have videos from us walking through it as well as written recaps of everything with reference links. It covers everything from equipment to profile setup, et cetera.

You can find all that in here. So quick notes on week one, just so you know what we want you to do here. We're going to talk about some of these concepts here in a second, but we will want you to go through the basics, go through the recording and editing sections, which just tell you about how you actually record content.

If you're doing it for the first time, apps to use for editing. I will also want you to go in equipment and we have some basics you can get, like picking out a microphone, picking out a light, stuff like that, which you will notice the first couple assignments we do don't require any of that to give you some time for you to pick up.

We have cheap options. We have nice options. We have minimum viable. It's all in there. We want you to learn about content types.

And then Colin will go through some of the homework here later. But it is pretty easy to navigate. Again, if there's any questions, info at cut30.co.

But if you are trying to learn something about content, we have it all covered in here. Anything I miss, gentlemen, or we want to go on to Slack? One thing I just want to throw in there, I know we always have some video pros. I know we got somebody with a TV background.

Even if you have made a million videos in Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere or you've got big pro cameras, we highly recommend doing the base workflows. Pull out your iPhone, get a little mic, and get CapCut and do this basic stuff.

If nothing else is going to add a huge new tool to your toolkit and shine some light on how powerful some of these simple modern tools can be. Alex, Slack time. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, and I'll add a little bit to that, like, because I come from such a heavy video background.

And I had a rude, rude awakening of like not getting any of this shit to work on, like, at least on my personal side, like not getting any of it to work. And staring at my iPhone for what felt like months being like, I'm not going to use you. I'm going to use a red camera for this 20 second video. And then like, again, just rude awakening, rude awakening.

And then was like, all right, fuck it. You know, and got a video to hit 10,000 and then 200,000 and then a million. And they're all on my iPhone.

And now, you know, and then like you learn all those things and then you're able to apply it to a fancier camera. But the camera doesn't is not going to fix the problems. The problems are in understanding like the things that we're going to talk about now with hooks and things that we're going to talk about storytelling. telling and and all and like the reps and just understanding what's hot on social and what works and all those things that are just so different than like coming from that world of shooting on a on a high res camera and then think it just naturally translate because it because it looks good like that's not the reality trust me you're gonna do damage with this thing and then go to the camera and be like okay cool like i know exactly what i gotta i gotta do here it's a crutch it's a Crutch brothers and sisters.

Sweet. Let's jump into Slack. So the first thing I'll say is, and people that have ran through Cut30 will know exactly what I mean. But the biggest upper hand that you're going to have on anybody in this or anybody else is going to be the fact that you have access to myself and Colin and Oren every single day to get feedback on all the content that you published, on all the questions that you have and on all your ideas, etc.

Like you get to bug us and we're going to answer you every single time. You know, and it might not be all of us, but one of us will get in there on top of everybody else from the team will get in there. And so with that, we have different channels that you're able to hit and put a bunch of questions and content in. And so the biggest thing, as Orange shows it here, the biggest thing is like the people who are on Slack the most and who get the most feedback and then take that feedback and look at all the feedback that everybody else gets in on their content.

Those are the people that women. I'm telling you, like those are the people when we talk about Hans, when we talk about Greg, who's in here, when we talk about everybody, everybody else that's gone through here and like has tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers.

They're every single day just getting getting feedback and looking at feedback. So video sharing channel, that is the main channel. That is the dominant channel. That is the channel where up until like this week, you're going to be publishing videos in there.

You're going to be publishing your one shot videos in which we'll get into. and that is going to be where you are going to get all of the feedback. This is what, like, just put your videos in here, put your ideas, well, some of your ideas in here just for a few days before you have to publish all of them.

Put them all in here, and this is where we're going to give you brutal, brutal feedback. And again, I want to caveat is, like, the feedback a lot of times is going to be very straightforward.

And, like, don't take that personally. Like we're just going through 50, you know, videos in sometimes at night, in the morning, et cetera.

Like we're trying to give you as much feedback as possible, as straightforward as possible with no fluff. Then we have Q&A. This is named very, very well.

So you have questions, you'll drop them in question and answer. We will get to them. If nobody gets them to gets to them there, we will give you Colin's number, his personal landline.

it starts with no i'm just kidding and you could always uh hit up hit up the boy column but in reality just q a very straightforward as you have questions related to um kajabi or just in the course or just like small smaller questions related to like hey i can't find this or maybe this isn't working for me you can you can hit that idea workshopping think about this as like the group chat right like the you know oran was mentioning the group chat that that we have where we're bouncing off ideas and feedback and like hey what do you think about this video i saw this this was up etc like that is what idea workshopping should feel like go in there and brainstorm with us it should feel like a creative brainstorm session at all times exactly like orin's putting there like should i make a video about x should i change this hook what do you think about xyz thing that is what that's why this channel exists um we have then the content wins channel content wins is again like for it's again very very well named but if you have your first video that gets a thousand views 10 000 views you know sean here has a video that got 100 000 views etc like we want to see those wins and all wins are are different sizes for some people it's getting the first video 10 000 views sometimes it's getting your first um thousand view video getting your first thousand followers like i know you're looking at here 140 000 750 and 100 000 there's also in a million there's also a show somebody with like a thousand views uh there are also a lot of people that just get their first 10,000 view video, but hopefully you're just getting these kinds of numbers, right?

Like that's, that's, that's what we're going for here. Great social, great social proof.

And then last one is troubleshooting. You're probably going to run in, you know, some of you are going to run into things that you are going to have to figure out, you know, like whether it's like captions in CapCut or how to use edits or Colin does have crickets in his, in his studio all the time and has to deal with that like those are that's where you're going to troubleshoot that's where you're going to ask us those questions we're going to help you guide you through those those uh small problems and then get you back right back on your feet and then last one is session 22 emmett smith uh it's the emmett smith session um this is going to be yeah i had to pull that out touche um this is this is where we're going to hit the announcements okay so the the majority of the time like anything that you're going to see in here outside of like intros is hey we're doing office hours this time you know i see that the chat's already blown up to like do a a meetup in austin like cool we're that's going to happen in this session 22 channel um it's more mostly for myself colin and oran to to just drop announcements um nothing much nothing else really will will happen in here other other than those things but i'll end my spiel on slack main thing be very very active in here and don't just look at the feedback on your videos look at the feedback on on all the videos right like you can watch like i could publish a video oran could look at it and be like you should have changed your visual hook to this cut out this and you can look at that same thing like shit like i did that to my video let me let me fix that before i drop it in for feedback right and like you just got better by looking at at feedback i got or feedback con got or whoever right and so that's also how you want to to operate in here but that's my spiel if con you want to show the legendary uh legendary graph then diagram yeah real quick before that i was just looking at our agenda and something we breezed over was the motivational speech so i want to take a second for it now uh you know if you are like me a a middle-aged somebody who has just made the decision to get on camera and make and make tiktoks um i just want to shout you out if you're a marketer who's never actually gotten behind the creative and now you're getting your hands dirty and making stuff happen.

I wanna shout all you guys out. This is a big deal. Making content is the most powerful thing you will do. If you take it seriously, it is not stupid little TikTok dance videos, right?

It is modern communication that has infinite scale, relatively speaking. It's ridiculous. It's a super big deal that you're here, whether you're young or old or all of the above.

And so before we embark on this, I just wanna give everybody a huge shout out. You will have people you will have co-workers that say what the fuck are you doing making that stupid video, right? We had we had a lawyer in here who who all of his community of attorneys were like giving him a hard time and making fun of him And then he got millions and millions of views and tons of business. So that moment may happen to you If it doesn't then good for you. You've got great friends, but I just want to shout everybody out This is a really big deal.

You made a huge decision being here and uh, it's gonna be worth your while I'm super excited to meet all y'all and get into it with you. Without further ado, our primary job here over the next four weeks, and really forever, is to find content market fit.

If you're tech adjacent at all, you know the term product market fit. This basically just refers to finding an audience, finding customers for a product, and that being there. That is what we're doing with content.

And whether you're a brand or a personal brand or an expert or whatever it may be, this all basically boils down to, like Alex said, the famous Venn diagram, right? Your content ends up being at the intersection of what you can talk about or show off forever, what you can actually execute on reliably, and then what people will watch and what the algo is actually going to get a hold of, right? Mr. Beast makes amazing YouTube videos. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for every single one, right?

So if he can make a banger and go viral every single time, that's great for him because he can spend $100,000 on every single one. If you cannot, that doesn't work.

And that's obviously one end of the spectrum. But if you figure out how to make incredible deep dive videos that resonate with everyone, but you can only pull off one a month because of your time constraints or because they take 25 hours a piece, that's not viable, right?

Maybe you do one a month, but that's not what we're gonna do every single day. And that's not gonna be a core part of this mix. So again, what you can talk about or show off forever, what you can actually execute on, and what people will watch and what the algo is interested in.

That is our entire journey. And it's not one that ends particularly soon, right? This is, to a certain degree, a continual evolution. Not to a certain degree.

It completely is. And lean into it. And our job here is to find our initial traction and some initial directions. We're going to go down and start iterating on for months and years to come. And with that, I'm going to hand it to Alex to talk about hooks.

Alex? My bad. I was muted. I was talking, though.

I was muted, but I was talking. I was hyping him up. Cool. Can you all see my screen or did you just see my crazy desktop? We got you.

Cool, cool, cool. So we are in motion. Week one, we are going to talk about hooks. What is a hook? You've probably heard everybody talk about a hook and how important a hook is.

And typically the majority of people think about a hook and they only think about what you say. Completely false. A hook is actually three parts. A hook, a great hook is composed of three elements.

So your first three seconds and it really becomes or begins even with your first frame. But you have your verbal hook, you have your title hook, and you have your visual hook. All of those things combined is what makes a good hook. And you'll hear myself and Colin and Oren stress this and probably give you a ton of feedback, mostly on your hook, because the majority of you are going to make mistakes within your hook that impact the full video.

Right. Like nobody gets past here. It doesn't matter how good the rest of the video is like. This has to be amazing. So there's three hooks, like I mentioned.

There's the verbal hook, which is what you say. The visual hook, which is what you show. The title hook, which is what people scan. When you look at this, if we break down each one, in this verbal hook, I say, and I'll add more layers to it in the next slide, but I say, this is good content versus bad content running brands.

Okay. And what I show, again, like if we're looking at all three components, I have this guy who's running in the background that's very well known. And then I have the title hook, which is good content versus bad content running brands.

There's three layers here that are extremely important. There's clarity, which is what I'm telling you what I'm going to talk about and what you're essentially going to get out. I'm going to compare good content versus bad content in a specific category. That gives you clarity and context.

And then the fact that I'm almost leveraging the way I'm saying that hook to then present a curiosity gap is what makes this an overall good hook. This visual hook that Oren has is, I think, one of his top performing videos where he's showing a material that changes colors as he puts, I think, hot air on it. Right.

Like that is. And then with the title hook, wild materials. Right. And so a huge thing to show here as well as like it's starting mid action. Like a lot of times a lot of you are going to make the mistake of like starting a video before there's any action.

He's starting mid action with already like showing what he's doing and then like a quick reveal within that first second. You look at Colin and you obviously know he has a weed company by this by this image. It's like a great visual, great visual hook. But no, in reality, right?

You have the title hook, 200K Diamond Machine, okay? That is supported by this visual that he has in the background that is bringing this idea to life. So the second that people scan 200K Diamond Machine and then see it, it's like, again, it's like clarity, context, curiosity.

The three Cs instantly getting cooked up because of all of these layers working together. My bad, my bad. It blew out the eardrums. But great hook achieves three things, which I just mentioned. One, it establishes establishes clarity, right?

The goal here is specificity over simplicity. You want to be very, very specific. That is going to be feedback that we give you over and over again. Like, so instead of saying, hey, these are three exercises you can do as a basketball player.

These are three exercises you could do as a basketball player who's trying to increase your vertical jump. These are three exercises. And then we'll get more specific. These are three exercises you can do as a basketball player who's trying to increase their vertical jump in their 30s, right? Like you can add in these layers of specificity into these hooks, because the viewer's brain is literally trying to make a quick decision of, is this video for me?

And establishing that clarity is going to help you establish that out the gate. Then you need to provide context. And so in this case, context usually takes the form of certain constraints, stakes, shareable or relatable situations.

When I show these, play these two videos, see the context that they provide. And then opening a curiosity gap. So in this case, that's that missing information that makes somebody watch past the hook. They both, Bad Ombedist and Midday Squares, both do a great job of opening a curiosity gap that makes you say like, I need to know more, right? Curiosity gap is just missing information.

And so if like you can get someone intrigued and then present information that is unknown and that they need to hear and that they want to essentially find, that is how you're going to get them to stick to video. And so let's watch each one of these and we'll see like it, it, they all establish clarity.

They provide context and then they open a curiosity gap. So let's play this one by one. The last part of that in his hook is like, and here's how it's going, right? So very clear, crystal clear about what the video is going to be about and who they are and what they're trying to do gives you all the context and then hey i did this like i quit this to do this here's how it's going curiosity gap i'm i'm very curious how is a a business doing with this husband and wife combo as they try to take this on midday squares this one's a little louder let me les is a wild child okay provides clarity hey they just got into costco then they provide the context and and kind of enter the constraints and stakes of like hey we just got in but the basically like job's not over like we still there's still more that we need to do if we want to stay here let me explain right curiosity gap out uh there as well this video both of these i think bad omit this video has 1.5 to like 2.5 million views this one for media squares has probably in the i think four to five hundred thousand views like both phenomenal videos but the storytelling uh on the back end of their hooks is is is what makes these amazing videos and so we are going to get into one shot videos but um all of this basically applies to a one-shot video everything that i'm saying here about uh presenting clarity and and providing context and a curiosity gap like all of these videos kind of kind of do um use text to be able to do the same thing right you're more likely to become a millionaire than accomplish these uh these things my biggest flex is i'm not scared to go broken again because if i lost everything today this is what i do to make another 5k in 30 days this this uh one shot on the right has two set two parts to it but all of these are very crystal clear about what the video is about going to give you enough context and then create this curiosity gap that again want uh present you with missing information that you want to find that they're either going to reveal in the video or in the caption right and that's what these are these are all about um we'll get into this and so i don't want to give too much but everything starts with your hook and you should be religious about looking at your retention graph your skip rate and obsess with those numbers and understand all the common denominators and i should add this slide in there but like all the common denominators that you see like hey when my skip rate is let's say 50 percent or below like i have a banger what did i do in that video cool these are the things that i did let me apply that to the remainder of my videos everything's above 50 percent not not the best it Why is it 60%?

Like, let me figure out the things that I'm doing here that I need to change to make this hook better. Like, that's how you need to start thinking. Don't just publish something and be like, oh, it flopped.

There's data points as to why it flopped, right? If it had a very high share percentage, but then the skip rate is very low, it's like you probably just have a hook problem or a packaging problem.

And so like, those are things that we'll get into, but it really all starts with your hook. And it's the most important thing that you can get very, very good at.

because you could be an amazing storyteller, but if you can't get them hooked on the bait, then you're going to have a rude awakening as you put a lot of time into these videos. Hook is all that matters. All right. So I'm about to talk to you guys about tracks, and then we're going to cover homework real quick before just jumping into rapid fire FAQ slash Q&A.

So the story with tracks is you guys are, we're like 2,500 people into this. around the 500 mark, we realized that while we have people doing all kinds of different accounts, there's really a couple of core buckets that everybody fits into that we can provide, especially like tailored references and inspo and examples around.

And so part of your homework this week is going to be to pick a track. And the two tracks are expert and personal brand and brand or business. I like showing the spectrum here with like the craziest lady on Instagram in just for fun. If you guys have seen Judy and your algo, then you're a real one. So what we're looking at here is with expert and personal brand, this is a creator making content about a topic and things that they care about. They're sharing resources, tools, news, commentary about headlines, their opinions, their journey.

They're often yapping. They're doing a lot of green screen, so on and so forth. I am an expert. Oren is. Alex is, right?

You've seen a bajillion of these. On the brand and business front, this is someone who's promoting, excuse me, this is a business promoting their brand, their product, or their community, right?

They're sharing product, lifestyle, stories, characters, maybe they're doing skits around it, so on and so forth.

Now, as soon as we label these two things and you start looking for it, you will see that there's a wide spectrum between these two. Accounts oftentimes end up being a little bit of a blend, and it will be very easy to overthink which track am I.

And you are not going to do that here today, my friends. There is no right answer here. The clearest playbook that there is with short form video is to build a personal brand and then use that personal brand to shine light on a business. So if you are wondering which track you should do, you should probably do the personal brand expert track.

If you have a very clear case for brand or business, then you do the brand or business track. If you are doing agency or services or you're a doctor, you have a clinic, something like that, again, nine times out of 10, we recommend doing the personal brand track and then using that attention you get to shine light on your services.

This is as clear cut of a playbook as it gets with short form. It just is. So part of your homework, the first step in your homework is going to be to join a track channel. We showed you a bunch of Slack channels earlier. There is also a personal brand and expert track and a brand and business track.

You're going to join whichever tracks makes most sense. And then you're also going to look at some of the track specific content in the course as it relates to some of this first homework and references. Again, there's a lot of accounts end up being a blend. Part of your homework in the third week is going to do a video that you never would have seen yourself doing to do a video from the other track, right?

But it's a good starting point to dive in and see inspo references, etc. around your specific track. All right. So again, pick a track.

Homework number two is the one shot. All right. We're doing a one shot so you can practice your text hooks and your visual hooks. This is a single shot video with text. There are exact examples of what to do in the coursework.

And you are going to do it exactly as we've laid out there. The framing, the fonts, you're going to use everything that we lay out in the content, including if you have brand standards around your font. Just use the defaults that we show you.

Please, please, please, please, please. This is due on Friday. This is a typo. I thought I got all these, you guys.

This is a disappointing moment for me. I thought I got all these updates. The one shot is due Friday. You are allowed to upload the video to video sharing for feedback before posting it. For context, in week two, you're not allowed to upload anymore.

It's only sharing links that you've already published because we don't want to create nasty feedback loops. But for these one shots, these first couple of moments, you are allowed to upload if you want. If you're a real one, you just ship it and move on. We're going to give you feedback either way.

All right. Video number two is the yapper. This is for practicing your verbal hooks and basic edits and chops. All right. You're going to record and edit this in the CapCut camera.

Can't say it enough. Record and edit in the CapCut camera. That makes your workflow much easier, right? The Yapper exercise breaks down exactly how to execute this, like literally the buttons to push in the apps, right?

And you're going to follow a very simple hook, intro, 0.1, 0.2. That's the it. That's the end of it for your video.

You're not going to do anything crazy. This is a 30-second video probably for most of you. As you're sitting down to make this, You're going to have really good directions on the inspo and the kind of videos and the hook ideas for you to make.

The point of this is not to make a million view video. The point of this is to record and edit for the first time if you've never done that and to write a script for the first time if you've never done that.

Emphasis on a decent hook, right? Like Alex mentioned, nothing matters if you can't get someone to stick around.

And then your final is going to be, whoa. hang on guys sorry and then your fine sorry i'm glitching over here your final homework for week one is going to be a graphic yap right this is a yap on steroids this is a yap with images dropped in between we will see some of you guys decide to do a green screen probably on this it's very similar to that right but you'll notice that this homework is escalating starts very very basic and goes up up up by the time we meet next week on wednesday we want to see that graphic app posted and shared in slack and we are off to the races um yep and you'll see if you have questions on those we are going to be dropping examples in slack there are thorough ones inside the curriculum on this so if any of those words are intimidating to you all this is covered there and that's what all the channels are for to walk through but don't worry there's a ton of information about this uh inside Kajabi.

Without further ado, the rapid fire FAQ. Perfect. Yeah. So a couple notes, kind of like Colin mentioned, all of this is designed to be, uh, to basically escalate. So if you're looking at this and you've already made a bunch of content, um, or, and you're like, okay, this is all pretty simple. Or if you're looking at this and you've never done anything and you're like, okay, this is a lot, uh, we totally understand.

And we've designed this for a reason. So the way the cut 30 works is you start with the simplest types of videos, the simple one-shot video, the simple yap, or you're just talking.

And then we begin to gradually add things. So for instance, that graphic app builds on the app by basically, Hey, now you're talking, now you're talking with graphics.

Then we begin to, you know, we add in from a one shot to a 10 shot and we go from a 10 shot to a vlog. Then we go from a, you know, you've done, you've done a graphic app to, okay, now you're doing like a more comprehensive copy work video.

We do carousels later on. We really elevate into ending here at the end of cut 30 with a seven day sprint of videos. So there's a design to help you build up to become a good creator for you or for your brand. We often get a lot of people who are doing this for a brand who at the very beginning of this, like struggle kind of reducing their content to those first principles.

I cannot recommend enough, like treating yourself like an expert for that brand and talking about topics relevant to your customer, about how they use those products, et cetera. And we will workshop any of that. That is what these tracks are for.

That is what idea workshopping is for. So I just want to throw that out there, make sure y'all know. So like we mentioned, FAQ, these are all the things that people are typically asking us and we're just going to blitz through them.

The first is new account or old account. And should I use my personal account as a creator? So the way that we look at this is that if you have an existing account on Instagram or TikTok, we would recommend that you use it, except if in this scenario where you have had an account where you tried to make content about a different topic, like a year or two ago, say you had a photography account and now you want to make account about the fact you're a dermatologist.

If you have a completely different topic, we would recommend starting a new account. If not, if you have existing followers, whether that's just your friends, whether it's a hundred people or a thousand, it's a little bit easier to start with any level of support.

Um, and so we would recommend just keeping that account as long as you are not uncomfortable with it. If you're uncomfortable, there has never been a better time in history to start an account from scratch and get views.

So again, just start a complete new one. We'll get into business or creator here in a second, but that is, you know, do not be afraid to start a new account.

Don't be afraid to use the old one. The main caveat we have is just don't switch topics. Don't go from, you know, your account about your dog to an account about your marketing career.

Then we're going to talk about what if you are, if you, this business account versus creator account. So on TikTok, you want to have a creator account unless you are selling products for a brand on TikTok shop.

Swap to a creator account, even if you already have a business account, they are weighted less in the algorithm. You must use the creator account if you want to get traction, basically.

So I don't think there will be anyone in here who has an account where they're selling products on shop. Maybe there's a handful of you, in which case, totally fine.

You'll be able to work through it, but everyone else swap to creator on Instagram. There is, uh, there are, we would recommend the same thing.

If you have a reason where you have to have a business account, and if you don't have a business account, if you just have a creator account, that means you can still run ads. You can still use the account for ads.

Instagram shopping has essentially gone away. That used to be the only reason we recommended keeping it. There's also pretty much no reason to have a business account, but on Instagram, it is, um, a very minor difference in how well it performs.

Uh, but if you have to choose one we would always pick creator um and someone had asked business verified accounts on tiktok again if you're doing shop great uh if you're verified i might keep it but um i would be doing creator for basically any reason yeah creator better than business always your choice yeah uh and they are and look we are just telling you what's going to be more higher weighted for for stuff.

A quick note on, on networks. One of the reasons that we love Tik TOK is that we inevitably get people in here and we get it. We've been through this too, who don't want their friends and family to see their content when they're starting out. So Tik TOK has the, the ability, if you go into settings and you go into privacy and we break this down inside the curriculum for you to have a Tik TOK account where no one's your friends and people in your phone aren't going to get suggested your content.

So it's a great place to start and experiment. I did that. I was on TikTok for six months before I went over to Instagram. We're going to recommend you do everything. I'll get to that in a second.

But if you are concerned about that, we have the settings for TikTok to do that. That will never happen on Meta. If you set up a Meta account, no matter how much of a burner it is, it knows your friends, it knows who's in your phone, is going to show them that account and your content. You will never be safe.

So just worth noting that there's no way to get around that on Meta. And I would just get over that sooner rather than later. So quick conversation creator Kanika, always creator, just for what it's worth.

We'll see those words. All right. So what networks to post on? We are extremely heavily focused on Instagram and TikTok. The operation here with the opportunity here with content is basically generational that if you, you're going to notice all of you are going to post your first videos, you are going to get basically at a minimum 300 views on TikTok, unless something's really weird or off.

And maybe like 100 views on Instagram on your first video, even if the video is absolute trash. That is the opportunity, right? That did not exist for the all entirety of time until these networks, you had to be able to pay to advertise to get that kind of attention.

You'll also see in, if any of you that were in the three-day challenge saw it already, that people were going to get thousands of views, tens of thousands of views, even up to millions of views from video one.

So the ability for you to get free organic attention is the opportunity here. It's why we are all here. And we would take advantage of that. We would be, we have made all of these exercises with the idea that you can post them on Instagram and TikTok and you don't need to have a separate strategy.

So we would recommend creating these all in the CapCuts app or the edits app. Those are the two apps that we have here. Edits is free. CapCut is, we generally consider it to be better, but if you don't want to pay, you could use edits and it has all the same features and you can post to both Instagram and TikTok for everything.

In addition to that, YouTube shorts is actually pretty solid. They few months ago, they are better at showing interest-based media. We would also recommend that you post there. You will likely see some traction on that network as well.

It's a little less important. Audience is a little less valuable, but if you are making content, we cannot emphasize enough that you are going to find out. It takes time. It's hard work to make these videos.

Put them in as many places as you can because that attention will compound. You'll make probably 15 videos and cut 30. If in the next few months you make 50, if you post 50 on those networks, even if the smaller ones, the fact you took that extra three minutes to cross post is going to help build something very legitimate and help increase reach of those videos.

LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great place to post video content. Why? Because the views don't matter. The likes don't matter. You can get four likes on a piece of LinkedIn video content and you can get a hundred people watching it, but guess who they are?

Professionals in your niche who are likely involved in purchasing similar products or would be able to hire you for a job. So if you are comfortable with it, if it works out with your job, et cetera, we would post that content on LinkedIn to excellent network because again, the metrics don't really matter.

You're reaching a great audience. One of my favorite anecdotes is that if you have a company and you are basically posting content on your company, Instagram account, and you start to bring that over to LinkedIn, you'll notice you'll get like a lot of people who are in that industry who may not consume your content on those networks, who see what you're doing over there, even though you're purchasing it on a personal and it, uh, it goes, it goes really well.

We had someone at a previous job I had who became a bit of a legend off that, um, and use it as part of his sales sales process. Um, other networks.

So like X, for instance, we wouldn't start a new X account, but if you are on there and you're already posting, post your videos over there that video does great on that network. It's useful. I would not start anything new there. Um, but it is, is kind of worth cross posting.

If you are under the age of 30 and you already use Snapchat, then Snapchat spotlight is an excellent place to post. If you have not logged into Snapchat or you're over 30, don't just forget.

I said those words, but there's a whole section inside of the Kajabi for that. It'll be very confusing to you if you are, if you are younger. Someone asked, which we can be concerned about the difference in professionalism people are expecting on IG versus LinkedIn. Yeah, look, if you're making prank content or like kind of more funny or derogatory in your approaches, you may not wanna post that on LinkedIn, but that is basically the only thing that is there.

But yeah, to the point that Gallup posts on there, a lot of people shitpost on LinkedIn. A lot of people do kind of do that. I wouldn't have, be concerned about any standard of professionalism.

If you are making valuable content to your audience, it should also live on LinkedIn. You'll hear us say it again and again. If you put the time in to make the content, put it as many places as possible.

There's a huge difference in between like, like I look at this, I compare this to a lot of people in, like I compete with, right? Or I make similar content too.

I post on every network all the time, more often than everybody else. And I'm not necessarily a better creator than them, but because I've done that, my stuff has compounded and gone to a larger scale because of volume and distribution.

And that'll be the same thing for you if you take this seriously over time. Some other notes, posting manually or with software and scheduling. So we have done some pretty thorough testing on this and all of these scheduling apps hurt the reach of your content.

We've even had Adam from Instagram has come out and said that it doesn't. And we have data to prove him wrong. He does not know his own network. The it is you will do not use a scheduler, post your content manually. And it is easier.

Inevitably here, we'll have someone being like, it takes so much time to post my content. It doesn't. I post my content every single day. It takes maybe two to three minutes with an upload speed to post to a network. You can do that in 15 minutes.

You can post everywhere and have it around there. No schedulers to do the draft. None of that, including Instagram's own scheduler, including the meta scheduler, including using a schedule to draft and posting, post it from your camera roll on basically everything, especially if you are a new account related to that.

If you have an EA or someone else posting it, we're gonna talk about location here in a second. That is if they are in your same like rough state or country, that is fine.

If you have an international person logging in your account and posting your content, it's going to negatively hurt you. Do not do that. Just stop it and go back to the original. I'll talk about location here and then timing in a second.

So location, it's a very similar thing. Where your account starts is where it's weighted. So if you have a TikTok account and you started it in Singapore, but you're trying to reach people in the US, it is not going to happen.

You need to start your account where you want to reach. A few exceptions, Canada and the US, Australia tends to go over pretty decent to the US as well. UK, similar thing, but your content's gonna be heavily weighted to where the account starts.

And on TikTok especially, you can't get away from it. Instagram, I would still recommend setting up your account where you want it to be focused on, but you can set your location there that's helpful.

And so that's just very worth noting. So if you want to, if you are in a different country than where you wanna reach, We recommend setting up a new account in that country. We have VPN information inside the Kajabi on how to actually do that.

If you have any issues with that, we have a number of people here who have done that by hiring someone on Upwork or getting like a VoIP and then setting it up. So there's ways to get around that.

And it's like someone's asking, I think mine might be tagged with the UK when I lived there. Yeah, look, you can go, you can see where your location is set to, like in your settings, But look, if you set it up in a different country, it's probably there.

And again, if you have the UK, you have Australia, you have Canada, you will probably get the reach you want.

But basically anything else, you're going to be focused on your location and it might be worth starting a new account. Do not dread a new account. Again, you can get views from post one. I wouldn't be too worried about it.

You know, Hunter, it's not on the list that I want to answer here. Can we only post videos we're making for the course and video sharing? These first, this first week is very prescriptive homework.

You're doing these three videos we just talked about, and you can only post those. As soon as we get into next week, it's just video time. So that's when it opens up.

We don't wanna see stuff you made three months ago, but it's a free for all starting next week. - Yep, exactly. And so if you make other stuff outside of the homework, you can happily post in that, but please just like new stuff.

And you will probably see if you post stuff in there and it's like not following the basic instructions, we're gonna be like, just do the homework, right?

But if you're posting like other good content, you want feedback, no worries at all. So related to that timing, timing generally doesn't matter that much.

Just we would say use common sense. Pick the morning or pick the early evening, wherever you are, and choose to consistently post around the same time. You'll notice I mostly post in the mornings, roughly 8 a.m.

Pacific time, give or take 40 minutes. Alex mostly posts in the evening, around 6 p.m. Pacific time, give or take 30 minutes.

Just be consistent, and when you choose to be, will be helpful. And then don't post in like the middle of the night. That's all we're gonna kind of say on content.

Same thing with like the weekends, doesn't matter. Like rip your content whenever it goes. My main note would be if you have really like intense business content, like probably keep that, a lot of people don't wanna hear that Saturdays and Sundays, but it doesn't really matter.

The main thing is posting. All right, so some questions about, okay, like recommend spending time on platform engaging after you post. No, don't.

There's a lot of like guru hacks, do this, do that. None of it matters. Just organically interact on that account. Like log in and check stuff out every once in a while.

Be a real person. You don't have to be like, oh, I got to spend 10 minutes, whatever. Doesn't matter. Related to doesn't matter.

There's a lot of questions we're going to get about things like trial reels or, oh, this AI scripting tool, this whatever. Don't care. Oh, can I do a two-second video because it hacks the whatever.

Don't do any of that. Trial reels is a waste of time for 99.9% of people until you become a bigger creator. We do a thing called Cut 30 Legends at the end of the year for people that are all established. That's a great thing to use trial reels for. Basically, if you're over 90% of people here are overthinking content, and when they start to get into stuff like that, it's basically an excuse to try to find a hack.

There are no hacks. The only hack is making fucking banger videos. We are here over 30 days to teach you to make banger videos, and you're going to do that, and that will solve all of your problems. Any of these little things you're trying to do will not matter.

When IG says your people are most active, sure, pick based on that. Just pick something. It doesn't really matter.

If you post when they're slightly less active, it doesn't matter. But just pick something. If you want to use that as a guidepost, that's a great guidepost to have. Just again, don't overthink it. Yeah, just do 8 a.m. and then don't think about it again.

Exactly. Look at most active, pick the time, never think about it again. People will mention in here caption description. Yeah, we talk about this in future stuff, but basically, so captions and descriptions are two different things.

Captions is the words that are on screen when you are talking. We highly, highly, highly recommend for every single video, you have those on there. We cover more of this like in the coming weeks.

You'll see it in the yap exercise. We specify this exactly. Captions in the default style, no weird or fancy captions, every single video, because if people are scrolling audio off, which most people on TikTok are audio on, Most people on Instagram are audio off.

They need to be able to follow your content. So captions for everything and follow the exact styles and sizes that we have in there do not deviate. And then description is used to matter more. Same thing with like things like hashtags. But now all the networks basically use AI to read your videos and decide what they're about.

And they're very, very good at it. So our general thoughts on a description is to put something that is directionally correct. It helps algorithms understand what the video is about. Mention the topic. give some background, but it is not ultra important anymore.

The algorithms are going to know what it is. When we, because there was a question about CapCut and posting on like with something with an Instagram, whatever, like this, we encourage you to make a video in edits or CapCut and then post it everywhere else.

You do not want to make a video in TikTok and then rip it off or download it and then post it on Instagram. It's going to hurt you. Follow the exact flow of make the video in one of the editing apps and then post everywhere.

Do not make it in one of the apps and then try to post it to another app that will hurt. All right, people, all right, teleprompter.

If you are like, hey, how do people record or do this on camera? You will know there's two strategies for recording on camera. One is inside the CapCut app, there is a teleprompter.

We have this inside the Kajabi or you can just literally Google CapCut teleprompter. It will show you how to use it where you can paste your script, adjust the speed.

When you look at the camera, you can then read off it as you go. It's a little unnatural. People aren't very good at reading necessarily. So it may take a little practice, but that's an easy way to do it.

But how 90% of us do this is we go look at the screen. We'll have a script written out. We will look at the screen. We will look at a line. I usually have my laptop and my computer next to each other.

And I will basically go one line and I'll stop. And I'll do the next line and do the next line. And then you cut down your pauses in between them. That is how 90% of content is recorded by people. So just a quick note to doing that.

So inevitably we get people here that are like, oh, I'm in software. I'm a lawyer. I'm a whatever. I can't do like a bunch of these things. You can.

I guarantee you can. We have had, you know, Colin posted the link to the little database of some of the grads before. We've had literally everybody from the most boring, dry on the wall, me being like, this is not going to work content that you could imagine.

And that still made it out, right? Every single thing is exciting. It's about how excited you are about it and how you embrace that graph Colin had of like, well, you can talk about forever, what people want to hear.

And we have designed a lot of these formats to be able to work for any of that. Right. You can make a one shot video. You can make a yap about basically anything. Colin, do you have something you're going to hit? No, no.

OK, good. And then we'll get two minutes more here. We'll we'll pop down there. Collab posts. We see this a lot, especially on Instagram is the ability to collab with another account.

And we will see people who have like it's them. It's their brand account. It's their cousin. And they're doing a bunch of collabs. Do not host collab posts with a bunch of random small accounts.

It hurts you. The idea of a collab post is the algorithm wants to see that the audience of one is interested in the audience of another. And if so, it will boost it to both of those audiences mutually. But if there is no overlap or there's no reason or no one knows what those are because they are small, it will hurt the result of the video.

So do not be doing that. It's me, my brand account on the other, like the collabs is a negative focus on your one account. And then once you are successful, there's a lot of stuff you can do.

So you will note, you'll start to see here, we're going to get into two groups. There's a group of people that are going to start getting like five, 10,000 views on stuff relatively regularly. And then they're going to be able to experiment and try all kinds of stuff.

That's basically, there's a litmus test of like, are you a good enough creator? Some of you that I know, especially we have a lot of repeats in here are already there. You can start to test and experiment with a lot of stuff and be doing a lot of like interesting ideas.

If you are not there, you're only focused, not collab posts, not trial reels, not any experiments or should I do this is just executing the fundamentals to get to that consistency level. And then you kind of the world is, is your oyster.

All right. That is my quick rant on all these, uh, on all these subjects. Again, we cover all these questions we've done this. This is our 22nd run of these.

Uh, we've had close to 3000 people through this. Now we've had, I think five or 600 people who have become like genuine hitter, big size creators from it. So we've covered all of this. We have the answers to anything. You have questions, Put them in Slack and Q&A.

Check, we've asked, please spend five minutes checking Kajabi first because the answer is probably already there. But if it's not, we are happy to answer them. You have ideas you want to workshop, workshop them.

Y'all paid to be here. We want you to win. We want more case studies. We want more people in content wins, posting bangers.

All we want is a bunch of you to become amazing creators. Use this 30 days, use those channels to help you make amazing content. Follow the exercises and it will work.

So just want to end like on that note You never feel bad about, we want to post a video for feedback. I have a question. I don't care how stupid your question is. We're here to answer those.

We want to get you over that finish line. And you'll see, we have had a lot of creator successes. It has been almost shocking, right? There's plenty of people that do this for a number of reasons, right?

You'll see, we have a lot of brand founders who will do this and then be like, you know what? I don't want to make content, but now I know enough to manage people to make content. And you can see, go back to that link Colin had.

There's like maybe 170 people in that one. That's just, I don't even think we've updated that recently. But that's just like a splash of like the wide width of different types of people that do this. You can get tons and tons of wins from this in whatever way you want. And we want you to succeed.

Again, never feel bad about asking the question, posting the video. Just act on it as much as possible. We will be in office hours Friday. You will see a post for that in Slack. That will be the kind of notification you get around that feedbacking.

That will be Friday morning. next week we will have someone who is a expert in yapping as our guest on here on next next Wednesday zoom all the homework is there we look forward to seeing your first videos in slack column that's first one is Saturday or Friday first one is Friday you are making one shots you can post it tomorrow if you get after it you can post it tonight if you get after it but your first homework is a one shot uh Dan that visual interesting Dan that link to slack is in your email and the email with all the info is the link to Slack.

If you have any issues accessing anything, can't find those emails, whatever it is, info at cut30.co. All right.

Congrats, everybody. This is exciting. This is the beginning of the rest of your lives. I'll say it.

Fuck it. Let's make some content and we will see you in Slack. Thanks, y'all.