The coaches’ final week: a hundred days, a hundred videos

as I frantically approve the AI notetaker bots to join the meeting? Are any of y'all switching up on the notetakers? Thank y'all, Granola. Thank you, Fathom.

Firefly. Everyone's dropping fireflies right now. Grant's the one that has the physical one. What's it called? Plod or whatever?

He has the one where you carry it and you record people while you're with him and record your phone combos. And he was like, we were on a call today and he's like, yo, you have to get one before they ban them.

And I was like, well... Maybe not. Maybe not. I don't know if my day has the need for that level of notes, my brother.

I'm going to put the link to this. This is not a sponsored post. I'm putting the link to this in the chat just because we're talking about it. I'm curious.

The return to hardware, to dedicated hardware. I like it a lot. A lot. You carry on a big-ass note taker.

It's actually a hilarious move. All right. Welcome in, y'all. It's May. We know people are tapering off.

It's June. It's June, brother. Colin, is this in Slack? Yes.

We put it in Slack. It's June. It's September. It's getting nice outside. Y'all are like, man, let me go for a walk.

I don't want to make this fucking content. It's going to be wrong. I've got to lock in. It's time. It's time.

Yeah, so I would just say don't let it get you. This is where everyone else is going to drop off. This is where those who don't have the hearts of lions fall by the wayside. They try to pick that shit up in August. No one wants to hear your shit in August.

They're just trying to keep their job and shit after Euro summer. They want to hear you right now. Amen. Or is just like warming you guys up for the, for the motivational speech about the seven day challenge.

It's coming later. Yeah. Yeah. For the rest of your life. You know, we still got a couple people flown in while we're waiting.

If you miss this in Slack, I'm putting a link in here. This link here, you'll sign in with Slack and you'll have access. This link has all of our past guest conversations.

conversations, searchable, clipped by topic. You can create a playlist by guest. You can create a playlist by topic and find all sorts of good stuff.

So I know as you can see, when we do this, we kind of have a range of guests every session so that we can kind of get somebody for everybody. But if you dive into that archive, you will find more of everything, whether it's the appers, whether it's brand side stuff or anything in between.

So enjoy. And as always, if you have any feedback, I vibe coded that last weekend. I would love to hear if you have any ideas or anything like that for it.

Colin, you need to plug lovable at the end of that or perplexity or you're good, brother? No, yeah, not yet. I know you're making that intro though. So Pat just asked what happened.

I'll break that down. That's literally the intro of this call. But we are not even close to done yeah this thing this thing starts tomorrow days locking in left all right yeah all right it's slowing down we can jump in quick quick housekeeping this is the last one of the live sessions of cut 30 yes this has gone by fast but it is not over we are going to we have the seven day challenge coming up and we do a whole set of office hours we are going to um you know do a do a few more end of this week etc so you have more face time as we do the seven day call and get some details on that but let me just discuss what happens at the end of this you keep your access to Kajabi.

So you have all the coursework because especially if you've been a repeater, you notice we've changed it. For instance, the last like six months, we've added in graphic gaps and a lot more of the yapping content.

We've changed like we've kind of the order of things is very different from last year when we didn't hit any of that stuff at all because content changes. So you can always check in and see what the latest changes are. You have Kajabi access. You will also have Collins guest archives. You also have the video database we DM'd you.

It's tag the alumni channel that you can join and keep in. And we do shut down these channels next Tuesday. So just a quick FYI, the channels you have will be gone then, but everything up until then will be feedbacked.

To be clear, content wins also last forever. Content wins at alumni. Continue on. Perfect.

Any other logistics you have, Colin, you want to hit on there? Or do you want to hit the seven-day challenge or how do you want to do it? I can't remember our agenda.

We got to run into content calendar, which I could break down. Alex, your turn. Giddy up.

Yep. Let's run through it. So let me pull this up real quick. I think this is showing. Is this showing my airdrop or is this showing my, the content calendar?

It's got your bag account statements. It's frame.io. Yeah, it's got the feedback. You're yelling at your editor in the frame comments. Not right.

That many chat I got to get out. You just call your editor a cracker in the comments? Yeah. there we go okay so week four is when we give you the content calendar the reason for that main thing for that is because we don't want to give you a content calendar in week one and this is going to be when you're obsessed and over trying to build out like the best system the best process to get content out the door the whole thing is to get as many shots on goal as fast as possible instead of trying to obsess and build out like the best processing system before you publish a piece of content.

The more you focus on that, the more, the less content you're going to put out in the next, you know, timeframe. Now where this does come into play is when you do start getting ahead and you do start figuring out what's working and you've started, and you're like in a position where like, okay, cool. Like I also have to focus on building my business or monetizing or whatever the case may be. And I, and I'm starting to get ahead of content, start planning my content. I know my pillars, I know my content funnel, and you want to start using the calendar.

This is where it's going to this is where where you can start using this and leveraging this so we built this out in notion for you it's a simple content calendar and like pipeline that you can start using if you have just some logistical elements that you want to integrate into into your workflow so i'll tell you guys how to work it so the first thing is it's easy to duplicate and bring it into your notion uh workspace if you excuse me if you have one um you just hit duplicate as soon as you hit duplicate you're able to bring it into your workspace now overall from like how it works it's pretty simple so if you look over here you could hit new this is like the the board view that i like you could also change all the different views um and add all sorts of different views based on on kind of how you like to look at at all the content that you're you're working on but easiest part you're going to hit new video this is going to pre-populate a template that we created for you so this has like status owner if there are other owners or people that are going integrated into your content dates platforms pillars formats etc you can change all of this so this is all added like you could edit all of this you could make this completely custom to anything that you want integrated into your templates on the other end we put a little just like framework for your video script so just overall hook bullet point value cta if needed slash wanted and then you want to run through this especially at the beginning if you haven't been been making content for months and it's like everything is new right like turning on the lights making sure your mics are connected and turned on like all of those little things you want to pay attention to and so going through this video posting checklist and just knocking it off every single time and or just scanning it to make sure that you I mean it still happens to me I'll record a video don't turn on my mic don't turn on my light and it's I've been making content forever and it's extremely frustrating when you rip through five videos and then you look at the playback and there is no sound like there's there's nothing worse and so having this allows you to just kind of scan and remember those little oh shit kind of things that you need to you need to remember once you put a video in here so let's say someday challenge let's say you want to put it in progress that is going to pre-populate this this board view right of this over this pipeline you can adjust again all of this if you want to add more steps in here like ideas and scripting, not shot listing, but like, or if you do have shot listing or, or like matching to the, to the script, et cetera, like you could add all of those layers in there.

On top of that, then you'll have a calendar view. That calendar view is going to have, again, could have multiple views. So if you want to have in progress to see what's in the pipeline. So if I went back in here and I added a date, it's like, let's say the 10th, it's now going to pre-populate down here into, into the 10th.

Very similar if you if I change it to scheduled, it'll be probably scheduled into scheduled. If you have things way out, you can, you know, you could again, like you could adjust this and completely we put it in a place where you can use it as is, but at the same time, you can change it to however you want it to be.

But the main thing that I would say is as you go to the seven day challenge, as you go in and continue to make content after Cut30, don't obsess over this be focused and obsessive on getting more shots at goal um and in trying to just continue to publish as much content as fast as possible the reality is like the majority of you aren't going to need this you're going to be able to just operate with the notes app like when in an or google doc like that's that's the reality of it now when you do start getting two weeks ahead three weeks ahead or you're trying to like plan videos based off you know if it was April and you're planning a video for the World Cup, right, or a series for the World Cup.

That's where it could be beneficial to have this pipeline or this calendar that then could help you lay down some ideas and start planning all of those without losing any of the information or organization. So you'll get access to this instantly. And then again, just bring it into your workspace and it's yours and you could fully customize it.

Guys, at this point, we always mention that the best planning tool is the planning tool that works for you. And we intentionally leave this entire conversation until the end because it is so easy to get super caught up in having the perfect plan and perfect strategy and let that get in the way of just like shipping a video for tomorrow and moving forward. And many, many great creators have let that slow them down in the beginning or delay their start.

So do not let planning get in the way and use your notes app. Like Alex said, use a sticky note, use a whiteboard, or use that Notion template or some version of it, whatever works for you.

Oren, you got formats for us? I do. So now that you have been making content for a second, hopefully you've found a few things that are starting to resonate for you.

We want to talk about making those yours. We focus in this for the first few weeks on making the most templated version of this, right? Use the default captions, use the default titles.

Find whatever it is that you have and don't add any variables. And so now we want you to think about how you've done that. You understand the value of having a clear title, having clear captions, having everything set up.

How can you make some of your stuff feel more unique? I'm going to walk through a few examples of what we mean there. So through a combination of your graphics, your text, et cetera, how can you begin to stand out?

And I'm going to use Ashley. She's a Cut30 grad as an example of this. So you see up top here, you always see this purple title, this same font, she's got a nice professional outfit on.

You scroll down and you will notice her swapping that. Basically, she did a blitz at the end of last year that kind of did mediocre in terms of content. And she was using all the default stuff and she needed to find her particular look and feel.

She actually cleansed her Instagram. And you can see she experimented. She tried to go green, didn't really work. Content didn't perform as well.

And she tried these backgrounds. And then she settled on this particular green screen with this exact purple title. And note, same principles. It's still super readable.

It's easy to find. It has a color that people can associate with her. They'll know it's her when it's on there. And you'll see she has some very particular styles of the way she uses the visuals around that. She still uses the default text.

She does a lot of these grids of four. She has come up with a visual format that is unique to her to use, using all the tools that we have in Cut30. And so, you know, this is a combination kind of green screen, similar style to some of the graphic gap.

We want you to start thinking of things like this. There's a lot of ways you can do it. Another good call out is Ken Sakata, who we show a lot. I'm going to switch really quickly between some of his videos here.

You see this? I'm switching a video every time it flashes. What do you see? Exactly the same framing every single time. You see him literally framed exactly the same in his studio.

And then it goes into graphics. He has his yellow, nice, large, easy stuff.

Doesn't even have a title, which since he's a bigger creator, people know his face, he can get away with. But that is his format.

If you scroll back a while, you'll notice that he updated it. He used to do it a different way. He used to be sitting for a whole bunch of his videos. And he would do these kind of, he'll kind of do them roughly in a row in the same way. So we want you to think about whether you're doing yaps, whether you're doing green screen, whether you're doing vlogs.

What is that combination of your setting, your first shot, your title that can be unique to you? Look, this is what I've done recently. The beginning of this year, I set up a new one, similar style to Ken's.

I literally borrowed from Ken when I was putting this together. I'll be like, cool, I'm going to talk about my subject. But I like that same idea of you are going to see for at least the majority of my content. I'm in that same area. I'm in the same set.

It looks a certain way. And I'm going to do that for six or nine months. And so we want you to find your idea of how do you want to do this and do this in a unique way. And the easiest way is to break it down to its foundations.

Is there an action you're doing every time? You're in your car, you're making a recipe, you're chopping wood, you're doing whatever. Is there a visual standout?

That four graphics on the green screen is a great example. The you at a desk and there's always something or there's a painting or whatever. There's the title and the color of your thing. We want you to find one or two trademarks that can be perfect for you to have your format. We have a whole group of examples inside the notion.

And if you want to workshop those, put those in your brand track. But we cannot advocate enough that in a world where everyone makes really similar content, once you begin to add that stuff and then modify it over time, it's going to lead to people building an affinity with you.

End of rant. Colin, I think you're muted. yeah man it was really i really came in hot there it was i was flowing but i was muted all right let's share my screen we're going to talk momentarily here about series um series are important for a couple reasons one as you embark on this journey to fill a full week of content every week right seven videos seven days or something similar having a repeatable series to come back to every single Friday or every single Tuesday or whatever it may be is very valuable for you as their creator.

And it's twofold for your audience to have something that they can rely on and know they come back to every single week. Examples of series are social shows, repeatable or brandable hooks, recurring concepts, or even as Orin just mentioned, something that you do and a topic you talk about with specific framing.

Again, that people can lock into their minds as just a way you're presenting a certain type of information or a certain concept, right? Some of my favorite examples, I was looking at this earlier today, thinking about updating it, and I ended up not doing that because I love how basic all of these are.

I think as we've seen some really elaborate series in this day and age, think like Bad Hombres talking about their journey of building, it can be really easy to get caught up thinking that a series needs to be a super elaborate storytelling thing. That's amazing. But there are really, really basic, straightforward things that we can come back to that can absolutely be compelling in 2026.

So first and foremost, we have the journey, right? This is classically the day X of doing Y. Big note on this. It's got to be way more than that in order for it to work, right?

You cannot do, you've heard us say a bunch at this point, you cannot do day one of quitting my job to start a business. We have heard it 1 million times, right?

We have to escalate and crank it up. One of my favorite examples of this of all time is the day X of playing blackjack and betting 10 cents for every follower. This works for so many reasons. The big one being that it escalates and has money involved in it. But again, if you are doing a journey, you've got to take it up several notches.

You've got to make it novel, interesting, weird, something. Bad Hombres does not work because they quit their jobs to do a CPG brand.

It works because there's a huge community around Bean Burritos, and it's masterful storytelling that they're doing. And Bean Burritos, when you say I quit my job to start a Bean Burrito brand, my first response is, are you okay? The other one here is the resource, a branded resource in particular.

So here's the thing, part 73, or in the example of Jason, who's a Cut30 alum, Tools for Lazy Creatives, part X.

This is an excellent example because this started as a single video. It was Tools for Lazy Creatives. It worked really well, so he kept iterating on it and adding to it and turned it into a series. The last one, of course, is commentary, a good hook that you run with, like I just said.

Oren has an archetypal example here in product versus brand. You've also seen good content, bad content. A lot of these use contrast in the hook to grab attention. Again, this is a compelling hook that leverages something and that is just repeated.

They don't necessarily have to say part seven, part eight, part nine. Right. And I'll call out.

They don't have to be super frequent either. I have like four or five of these now. So I have rate the rebrand. I do whenever there's enough rebrands. Happens like once every 60 days.

I have status of hot. I do that every month. I have product versus brand. I will go on sprints where I'll do a week and I'll do like six or eight and then I'll stop.

Get any good hook you have. Revisit it two more times. And if it's good enough, make it a series. And if it fizzles after the second or third, then you can kind of go away.

But you can have multiple of these, and it's going to be the easiest thing to, whenever you need that hitter, be like, you know what, I'm going to go back to the well. So before we get into our guest, Sam, who I'm excited to talk to, your homework is to post your format ideas in your track channel, to workshop them with us as well as other folks.

Post a couple ideas. Post what you're thinking about. Just get some feedback. you will likely not strike gold on your first one. The idea is to get the ball rolling, get your wheels turning on that.

And then starting tomorrow, we have the seven-day sprint. The seven-day sprint is the honor system, but if you are in the seven-day sprint, we are doing office hours or quick daily stand-up every single morning until we're done with this thing at 8 a.m.

It'll be at 10 a.m. PT on Saturday, but 8 a.m. tomorrow, 8 a.m. Friday, 10 a.m. Saturday, 8 a.m. Monday, 8 a.m. Tuesday until we are done. Every single day, we're jumping on for folks that are in the seven-day grind to talk about what's working, what they need ideas for, whatever the case may be, all right?

If you don't know what to do here, it's a great opportunity to do themed content where you're talking about X, Y, Z every single day for a week, or to start telling a story that you maybe haven't told here yet. Again, if you're doing that, make sure to take it up a couple notches.

The biggest thing you can be doing with this is getting in the habit of posting every single day. We've told you this several times. We'll probably tell it to you again. The biggest winners to come out of this are people that hit a seven-day challenge at the end of this and did not look back. And it's not because big picture, you absolutely need to post 365 days a year, but it's because the muscles you will grow, the habits you will form out of hitting that kind of cadence is unparalleled.

100 days from now, you will have 100 videos on your channel. And if you do three times a week, you will have a fraction of that. I can't say it enough. We're going every day. It starts tomorrow.

It doesn't matter if it's morning or evening. We are going every day. It's exciting. If you complete that, you are going to get a strategy audit when we're done with this. We have to have enough content from you in order to deliver that to you.

But it's going to break down everything you're doing. It's going to give you a bunch of ideas for what to do going forward and some next steps to do as you come out of cut 30. Again, that is for anybody who does the seven-day challenge because that way we should have 10 to 15 videos from you at least so we can actually give you some concrete, cohesive, big-picture feedback.

Okay, without further ado, we have Sam, also known as Sam Travels. I saw you earlier. There we are.

Samantha Shagman. I'm going to drop the link in. Sam is a cut 30 alum. um she is a success story you've probably seen her on landing pages or on emails i'm super excited to dive into this with her um sam say hello and and tell us about yourself you're muted by the way okay i'm unmuted now how am i doing connection clear good yeah excellent live from the other side of the ocean yeah i'm excited to be here i love cut 30 it honestly changed my life and my business and it like made everything possible so when you asked me to come on i was like yeah 100% whatever time it is, I'll be there.

What should I tell? What do you want me to tell you? Let's start with, okay, so you mentioned you, your business, you know, when you started creating content, like what were you doing? What were you working on?

And yeah, how'd you start? Okay, so I, let me tell this in not a super long way. I was a journalist.

So like, I've always been writing. And then I went to work for a big tech company, and I was doing content marketing. And the whole time I was like, I think that video is a way that I can tell stories without having to like pitch them or like work for the man.

And I started doing Cut 30 and was like produced, like creating like little travel videos and like things about my life and like nothing was doing great, but like I was practicing. Right. And then I left my job.

I wrote an article about farm hotels, which was like this idea I had. And because of everything I learned in Cut 30, I learned the format in order to actually tell these stories that had been living in my head for literally six years.

And because of that, it's been able to grow. Like farm hospitality is this term I came up with. And when I was thinking about why I think it worked, it was because it was like an obsession I had.

And I created a label for it. Like I created this term, this category that then other people could adopt. And so now, like I was scrolling on Instagram yesterday and farm hospitality is like a category that you can search like on your explore page. And all these big creators started using it in their terms.

And so I trademarked it. That hasn't been confirmed yet, but like I was able to create this idea of farm hospitality. And so now I built like a book, what's it called?

Like a travel curated group, like farm hospitality is a group of farm hotels that you can book. And like, now I'm doing sales calls with the best farm hotels in the world. You know, I have like a book proposal out called farm hospitality.

I get, I talk to thousands of a day that have the same like obsession that i do and so all of that was possible because of the videos that i started creating here that's amazing i just googled farm hospitality and google says farm hospitality is a glowing global movement of luxury rural retreats blah blah blah and then it tags sam's instagram handle you literally coined the term moving the internet yeah yeah yeah literally what was that process like from your first videos to like getting some traction okay um here's the thing when i started creating videos and i told this to somebody who then joined cut 30 but i was like i had three ideas i was like i'm going to start doing making tons of juice videos and like make a juicing how to juice at home course like cold press juice i'm going to become like a barcelona person who makes this barcelona guide or i'm going to like be able to do the thing i really want to do which was farm hotels and so i actually started creating content in like all of those. Like I did like one video for this and one video for that.

And like I experimented, like I didn't know that farm hospitality was going to be the thing to hit. But once I kept creating the videos, I literally like was constantly thinking about it. Right. And so like I would be walking around and like the scripts would be writing in my head.

And so when I, once I started thinking like in terms of scripts and hooks, I would write them down. And then as I would write them down, I would make the video.

And so I think it was like, first of all, I didn't know that it was going to work. It was only once I started creating the videos that it hit that I was able to like go all in on it, right? Like I didn't have, I haven't gotten another job.

I've been doing it for like 10 months now. And I didn't know that it was going to hit. And I think it was like learning the process of thinking about the script all the time. So like I have two little kids. I'll like be giving them a bath or like washing the plates and constantly be scripting and thinking of titles in my head that then become the videos. And like, to be honest, I had two videos go super vile, which helped a lot, right?

Like early on, I made two videos that got 1.1 million followers, 1.5 million followers, not followers, sorry, 1 million views. And, but I remember sitting at, sitting and I was like, the script came to me and I was like, oh, I think this is it.

And so like, then I was able to turn it into the script with like the images. And it seems so minute, it seems so minute, but like picking the images and like putting them in the Canva, like it seems like such these tiny steps.

But then when you create the video, it just flies and it still flies. Like one of the videos that I made that went super viral in the beginning was about Ballerina Farm. And now like Ballerina Farm is calling me being like, this is what we're going to launch.

Like we want you to come on for like many years and tell our story. and like, can you fly out here to meet with us? And like, we're creating this like relationship.

I don't know if I should say that to everyone here, but like we're creating this relationship because of video I made, like in my little house, like, you know?

And so it's, I don't know if that answers the question, but I think it's getting, once you understand like the ingredients of making the cake and then letting your mind like always be thinking of what those stories are, but writing it down, like the notepad in my phone is still where I write all of this stuff.

And so honestly, when you pulled up the content calendar just now, I was like, oh, I should start using that. Because like, I still literally just do it all in notes on my phone. And then I sit down and like put it together, the package to record.

But I think that's even a prime example of like what we were saying. You're at roughly 60,000 followers, millions and millions of views. And like, you're just using your notes app. And you're getting content out.

Like you don't need the scheduler. Like you just hit throwing shots on goal and quit, you know, in coin terms, moving the internet with a notes app.

Literally. And I should start using something at this point. But here's the other thing that I'll say that I think is important and like had a big part in growing it. Two parts.

One, like the taste was important. So like literally picking every one of the images, I think I was doing a lot of green screens in the beginning. And so I think like me picking the images had a difference because like I had an au pair and one day I was like, can you like pick the images for this and like see how it works?

And like, it just wasn't the same as my images. So I think like doing all of the steps alone makes a difference. And the other thing is editing. Like, I also know people who were like, I did a video and I'm going to do cut 30, but I'm going to hire this guy in India and he's going to like edit the videos.

And they didn't take off, number one. And two, she stopped doing it. And so, like, I think that editing it and I still edit on my phone, but like I would be editing like while I'm breastfeeding my child, just to be completely honest.

But I think that me editing it and choosing the images is what made the difference because like it was completely me coming out. And not that it was me, but like anybody who's creating content, it has to be that person who's actually doing it. And I think that makes a difference. So like even if you like feel like, oh, I can just somebody else can edit this or somebody else can pick the images.

I think in the beginning specifically, it's really important that you do it every step alone. Yeah. And I can also say my sister had a lot of success. She has like 500,000 followers.

She did not help me grow, though. We have very different niches. But she did all of her own content and she grew it a lot. And then she hired someone to start doing it for her. And like her engagement plummeted.

Like, and she's now she realized, she's like, I have to bring it back. You just have to do it. You have to do it.

And I get, as you grow, you have to bring on the right people. I haven't found them yet. But I think that, especially in the beginning, like your energy of the images and the editing is like what makes it you.

And it makes it like your piece of art. Amen. That's what I have to say. Well said. I got a question for you.

You mentioned you started very green screen heavy. I've been looking at some of your more recent stuff. Like it's what we call a graphic gap. You're also experimenting with carousels. Like talk to us about the different formats you're playing with and just like what you're doing now.

I love green screens. I actually think I want to go back to them because I think I look good in them. But one, but then I realized that for people listening here to yaps are getting super saturated. Go back to green screen. If you are yapping heavily, I would just call that out now.

But yeah, go ahead, Sam. No, your Twitter was freaking me out. I was looking at three hours ago. I'm like, the yaps done. What do I do now? I literally go to Orin's Twitter every day. I'm like, OK, what do I have to be freaked out about? Or like excited about?

I like your Twitter. OK, so I started with green screens and I think they're a really good format to start because they really structure your thoughts. right? I was like, here's the images and it goes with these three words and here's the images and it goes through with these three words.

But I realized that collecting all of the images ahead of time was actually sometimes delaying my actual recording, which was when I decided to try Yaps. I'm like, okay, I have the idea. I'll sit in my, like I live on a farm.

So I was like, I'll sit on the farm. I'll stand on the farm. And then I can put the images over and like that switching of the workflow from like scripting images, scripting images at recording to recording.

And then the images like worked for me at that time. But I love carousels because you don't have to get dressed up. I get like dressed up to do these. That's the other thing I'll say. Like I, as a journalist mindset, I kind of thought about it as like, um, like a journalist broadcast, right? Like I was like, I'm going to put on makeup and like do my hair and like look presentable when I'm doing these.

but that took time. So like sometimes there was a week where I was like, I can't do that. I'm going to do a carousel, but those took off like so well. So now actually where I'm at right now is that I do a video and then a carousel because like, for example, I did this whole deep dive into like Italy and agriturismos.

And so now I have the carousel to be like, here's 10 agriturismos in Italy that you can check out. It worked really well with the Menorca post. I was like, here's all of this, the background of agriturismos in Menorca.

And now here's 10 Menorcan places you can go. And the carousel didn't take off at first. It took a few days, but I don't know what it's at now, but it like, it was like, oh, this is a dud, too bad. But then after like three days, it blew up.

And then the Italy post, I was like, I don't know if this is good. And then it like, I think it went to a hundred thousand, but over a time, what I'm seeing is that right now, what I've experienced with my content is it doesn't always hit right away like the earlier ones did but it does over like three or four days so I'm like okay give it time and I just really personally like the balance of like the recording and doing the carousel I think it gives like a bigger um I don't know I guess I'm a writer so like I still like writing and using the images in the carousel form and putting those two next to each other it feels like I can go deeper like people are like oh give me more and so like by following it up with another post it's like I'm immediately giving more value within the same few days question for you on that are you like doing those complimenting each other um or are you doing like take that video and just flip it into a carousel obviously rewritten a little bit but are you like is it same source content in two formats or are they complimenting like two pieces of content yeah no it's not just like the video turned into a carousel they're different like in i'll dive into like let's say in minorca i'm diving into the history and regulations around this type of hospitality and then in the next post i'm talking about like why would you go to minorca it's like then like talking a little bit more flowery it's like lighter because it's more of like a travel guide versus like this is what you need this is like more of like a deeper dive into the history and culture of it gotcha so no they're i'm writing them completely differently i got a question you mentioned early on uh that you were you were initially thinking uh juicing um but basically that you were you were just getting reps early on like there's a lot of people in here that are at that stage and we obviously preach just like shots on goal and experimenting but tell us about like some of those early days and some of those first videos and i guess what you learned from those things besides like a farm hospitality video going viral like like what what was that like okay you can if anyone wants to scroll back to my content, you can see like a year ago, like actually one year ago from right now, I was doing any, like I was doing random things. Like this is where I go in Spain and like, here's a farmhouse barbecue.

And honestly, I really believe that that's what set me up for them. When I had the good idea, I knew how to execute on it because the biggest thing was like, how do you even turn this idea into these videos that I'm watching? Like, how do I literally get from step one to step four.

And it's the green screen video that changed my life. Like the how to make a green screen video changed my life. The next thing I'll say is that what was the process from going? So I had three business ideas and it was kind of like, I'm just going to keep, I basically was like, I'm going to walk down all three paths and see which one hits.

So I have an entire course on how to juice that I then never published because now I don't know how to fit it into my current content. But like I have this whole course ready to go. So at some point I'll probably publish it. So it's not worthless.

But like, I think it's worth if you're in this exploratory phase, like walking as far as you can down a few of the paths, because that was the only way that I found out what hit. Like I could have just been like, I already made the juice course. I'm only going to make juicing content.

And then I would have never gotten to the thing I really want to do, which is what I'm now set up to doing and doing. But it took walking down those paths. And like my friend who's maybe on this call, he was getting so like frustrated because he's like, I don't know which path to walk. Which one do I do? And I'm like, just do all of them. Like make one video about juicing.

Make one video about Barcelona. Make one video about farms and see which one you like. I think it's also about having fun. Like I was upset. Like when you're obsessed and you're having fun you want to keep making them as soon as it gets boring you're just not going to keep doing it yeah i was gonna say one thing about having fun one thing i love about you on this call right now is that you obviously love making content and care about it and think about it and i think a lot of people are afraid right you don't want to get too obsessive about something you don't want to get really into it get really into it that only kind of goes well for people so just encouraging people on that call to do that um related i know you have the journalist background like how do you think about writing how do you think about any of the like tips and tricks or things you brought from that career into this. We'd love to know any thoughts there.

Oh yeah. I think that had a big impact on it because as a journalist, I wrote about the business of travel, but the biggest thing that the, I worked for a guy who made a website called Skift and Katie here is a Skift podcaster.

And he was always saying like, you have to make bold claims, like make the bold claim. Like farm hotels are the next big trend in travel. And now like 10 months later, PR people are emailing me that. I'm like, yeah, I know I made that up.

So don't be afraid of like making the claim, like whatever you believe in, state it in such a way that it's not like a question, make it a headline that says like, this is the next big trend.

This is the, this is what's happening. Don't be afraid of being the one to name what you see. Don't, does that make sense how I'm saying it? Like name it, give it a name.

That's the other thing is to give it a name, like farm hospitality I made up, make up a name for whatever the thing is that you're trying to do, right? Like design led dog beds, right? Like name it. And so that way people identify you with that term, but they can also adopt it. And therefore this is the other thing I'll say is like, I would approach each piece of content, which is like, I'm not just telling you something, but how does this fit into a movement?

Like we're all in this together. I'm the leader of a movement and I think that that's a powerful way as a journalist as a if you're building a business to like frame it as like this is thing that that's happening this is what we call it and like we're it's part of a bigger thing that we're all in together those are the three things I think that help from journalism there's one thing that you touched there that I think is really important because it's like some of the sometimes the most feedback that we give people in cut 30 like just about their hooks which is if they say something like is this the next trend in farming versus this is the next trend in farm hospitality it's like like you just said opening with a question doesn't make you the authority in in the category or on the topic but the second that you turn it into a statement it's like hey this is my strong opinion you could either agree or disagree with me but when somebody agrees with you or other people see it then it does make you it does give you the ability to actually form that movement form that community whereas the question does not it and create that same path.

Right. People, what do, and you guys are probably the ones who taught me this, but like, what do people share?

Like what they resonate with? So if you say something that somebody resonates with, that's what they're going to share. Right.

And the shares are like such an important part of getting that message. And if you make business content, something I'm making a video about this this week, but something that's really important is people share content to impress other people.

That's another one. And so if you are sharing something where you want someone to make a business decision and they go send it to their boss, then they want to be able to feel like, hey, I'm sharing this thing and it's credible.

This person came across as credible and professional. My boss would like to see it. And I'm willing to stake my career or my like promotion or whatever on this idea.

And then, and so if you actually have that, you have credibility, you have a cool idea and you have a realistic path to do it. And that's like the surefire way to like actually get those shares that again, it's not about numbers, that's about the right people.

And that's a great way to look at it if you make more professional content too. That was one of the biggest comments. Oh, that was one of the biggest comments I got in the beginning was that a lot of people would be like, I'm getting your videos from like eight different people.

So like if eight different people are sending me your video, then I'm going to keep watching more videos. Like I think that the idea that people are like, oh, look at this idea because I've made a bold claim is something that helps create the credibility too.

The other thing you asked about was like how a journalist impacted me. And I've written so many blog posts. Like when I worked at a tech company, when I worked as a journalist, like you write just thousands of blog posts. And what you learn is like, it seems so minuscule, this one piece of content, but like, that's all a video is, is what 160 words.

So like, you have to, even if you have this big idea of farm hospitality, it's like, how do I say it in 160 words? Like it's taking the big, whatever you're thinking about.

And then just being like, this is one piece of content. And like, it has to fit into this boundary. I think that's the other important thing was like, how do you fit it into an article right when I was writing blog posts and now how do I fit it into a script and that gives it's like constraint drives creativity right so it's like those constraints I think were something I already had practice with and I think that's something that helps a good video flow and fly.

Can I ask you more about your like your business and what you're doing with these hotels and the email list and like are you are you uh how big of a piece of the mix is the email Are you doing a CTA on videos to that? Are you just letting it sit in your bio and letting it happen? Like, talk to us.

No. So when I started, Oren was the one who was like, put it up. Like, you should say it in the video. And when I said it in the video, I would get so many more subscribers.

The business as it is now is like, if you know about design hotels or Relay and Chateau, they're like collections of hotels. So you don't own or operate hotels, but they're paying you an annual fee to list them. I'm currently doing the sales calls with which I think are the 10 best farm hotels in the world.

So I'm like learning a whole new skill set that's not content, which is like getting these people to pay me money. But they are looking at a few things. What the influence is, like how many followers I have, if they hire me to create a video and to create more content about them and to list them, like where is that reaching? And the newsletter is 100% part of that. But I don't have a lot of followers.

I have like 3,500 newsletter subscribers, which could definitely grow if I one promoted it more and if I ever wrote one. And so that's what I'm thinking about now is like, okay, I only have 160 words in a script, but I could expand on that in the newsletter and also add in like the farm that I visited most recently, let's say.

So how do I actually, instead of recreating the content, make this whole like flywheel work better? And I'm now getting that to that 10 months later.

And I would absolutely, a couple of things to call out for people that are in the chat there that she mentioned is first is once your content starts working, don't think about this beforehand, but once you start getting views, you know, you start having a couple, you get a couple of videos, hit 50K, 100K, have one go viral and you get some consistency.

Ask people to do what you want. Sign up for the newsletter, learn more about my business, follow me, whatever.

People just, people do what they're told. Just don't try to do that beforehand. And then simple call to actions versus like go spend $10,000, right?

it may make it easy for them. Second, on the newsletter front, if you are starting to do that, for anyone here looking at it like that, the way I've been doing it that I find really effective is I have like outlines for my YouTubes and I have scripts for my short form videos.

Whenever I need a newsletter, I go through those scripts and I take Whisperflow. If you don't know Whisperflow, it's just an app for dictating on your phone, but it uses AI so that it's like better at getting the right words basically then because Siri sucks. And I will just literally look at that script and then I will basically narrate a longer version with some anecdotes. And that is 75% of our newsletters.

And so I think it is kind of easier than you think if you've already done that writing to go in there because you have to be so you have to cut down every time on your scripts all the time. There probably was more you had to say. I find it easier to dictate that. I think that's a good flow. Most creators can get into. To riff on that more. Right.

And this is for Sam, but for everybody. Sorry, Sam, to jump in here. The minimum viable product for a newsletter is like, here's the content I made this week and some other content that I saw that I thought was cool.

Right. And so in Sam's case, it's like the agritourism Italy and then the carousel of the 10 places like that stuff. That's a newsletter. Right.

And then also, like, here's a video my friend made that's like kind of relevant also. Boom. But the minimum viable products for a newsletter is is not a big lift. It probably is for Sam, who is a writer and wants to wants to write more. But you can keep it simple and do something totally compelling without without going crazy on it.

And it's a great call to action if you don't know what you want from content yet, or if you're trying to sell something, but it's too expensive to sell in the content. You just get people on the newsletter and you can do a lot more there, right?

So just worth calling that out. Sam, what are you looking at next? What's the future of your content creation look like? Just excited to keep going, to be completely honest.

I have 100 ideas that I still need to make. I have so many videos still to make, but I'll tell you this. There's a few things. one is I want to just keep doing the trends videos because a lot of there's some other people who just highlighted one hotel and told their story and they grew much faster than me but I didn't want to do it that way for many reasons one that I was trying to make those hotels my customers in the long term right but what I there's so I'm going to keep doing the trends videos I've had a lot of conversations with people about collabs but like those take work right you have to like agree on the script and like agree on the images but now I'm actually like working on those so like I'll one of my videos or two of my videos, a collab with somebody who's like in my area.

Like we've already talked, I already know what the ideas are. We've already talked about what the theme would be. It's just about making those collabs. And then what I would like to get into to make some more money off this content is a lot of people have come to me being like, can we pay you to make a video?

And these aren't like the best farm hotels in the world that want to pay me, but like people with smaller agriturismos or like trends, then I can build like a story around theirs. And like, I just let them sit.

Like I talk to them, but then like I don't send them a Stripe link to pay me. So I would like to experiment with like doing more storytelling that I get paid for. Because even if I did like one post a week that was paid, like that would be nice.

It would be. Yeah. I mean, but here's the thing is like, I do think that because I've just done it as like this pure, like you guys can see I'm like passionate and like, I've just let the creativity flow.

I think that's also kept the content really pure. Like it's been very pure. And so that's also why I never did anything paid so far. I've kept it so just like what was coming out of my mind, but I would like to, I'm like hungry for the hit of money.

Yeah, well, look, also that's a skill in itself that you have to sharpen the same way. The first one is really awkward. It's great to do a friendly or something, low pressure or whatever it is.

And then you'll start to learn. And then once you get good at it, it becomes much simpler and you structure the content around it. And so it's worth like taking that plunge on something sooner rather than later.

do the small one instead of the holy grail yeah yeah yeah yes and so i think the collabs and the paid would be like how i would evolve it in addition to just keep doing more of the ideas that i've had what uh right now how like what's your week-to-week workflow how many videos or how many pieces of content are you getting up every week right now how often are you working on it Do you do it in one sit down?

Like what's the workflow? Oh man, it's fucked up. It's not great. I'll say, but I will, this is what I want to say about it.

It's like, I 100% agree that consistency would outbeat anything. If I had been consistent posting even four times every week, I think my account would be much bigger than it is.

And at the same time, if even if you haven't been super consistent, I should I not say this, but I publish at least two every week. But even if it's only two a week, like I've still been able to keep growing.

I've still been able to make all the engagement, like even doing that. And if I had been more consistent, it would have grown more. My workflow right now is I'm constantly writing ideas. I'm constantly writing scripts.

As they come to me, I write them. Then what I do is I sit down and get all the images. And then I record a few at a time. So like I do all the pre-work like through the week, right? Like through life happening.

I'm like writing, I'm like collecting the images. And then I'll like get ready and be like, okay, today I'm going to record four videos. And just like with, you know, everyone here has children and they have businesses and homes.

I have found that like I can do the photo and writing work like in the pockets of time. But then like, I'll be like this, these two days are for recording, like nothing else.

So let me just, Jennifer, just ask a question here. or is there a question here okay i'm just gonna read out loud yeah go for it all right um uh do i kind of sense sam may be referring to finding what are the nuggets within the bigger idea kind of little context stories that here's what this looks like in real life the anecdotes that are analogies and metaphors and the process can sort of begin with brainstorming the nuggets that pop up and then piecing them out into 160 word blocks and then going to substack beehive and talking more about it yes sorry sorry guys you guys just watch me process in real time i don't know that that was helpful but i did it um sam does that feel right to you the the the synthesis breakdown yes 100 and i think like even within a bigger idea there's like all these tiny little angles that you can look at it from right so my thing was that people are going to travel to farms but then like if you look at it from all these different angles there's like the financial angle there's like the family angle so I think that's the the like what you're saying breaking it down into the little pieces like if the pillars farm travel then like all the nuggets are all the different angles that you can take that from yeah it's kind of like you start looking for through lines in terms of you know different pieces how you how you might be interested in it what you might find on it you know or be concerned with where it connects to someone else you know But yeah, even if you haven't specifically done that kind of travel or been there before, yeah, the kind of things that would inform your discernment.

Yeah. And, you know, you talk about anecdotes in here, and I think that's another really good point, that it's like three things make a trend. And maybe that's a journalism thing, but it's like when you pitch Vogue for a travel story and like this is a travel trend Vogue, you have to have at least three examples. And so then when we're doing a post with a video, it's like, here's, I think this is the Cut30 way, but like, this is the thesis.

And then here are the three examples to back it up. And I find it helpful to have anecdotes in that way, like the anecdotes that prove what that big cut thesis was that I just said. Yeah, mixing and matching those anecdotes is a good strategy too, where it's like, here's an example from history. Here's a personal example that I may have. Here's a piece of content that you may have seen, like, is a great way to like fill that out.

It's funny. You don't know how much that matches up to post-secondary college competitive public address events. I competed in college and then was the assistant director of the program at UT. And you've just described extemporaneous speaking and impromptu speaking to a T. That's excellent. You know what I noticed Sam did earlier?

Sam you kind of were going telling us about some stuff and then you wrapped it up with and those are the three things that I do I'm not sure you told us three things but you definitely wrapped it up with three things which made me feel like it was incredibly buttoned up and concise and I think it generally was but I caught you doing the tactic as well I like it real time yeah I was gonna what I wanted to chime in with is what Sam just mentioned I think is really valuable we're talking about farm hospitality we're talking about like a specific um a specific uh venue or a place and she mentioned that you can talk about the financials behind it you can talk about it from a tourism like here's what you can do there with your family all these different angles to talk about this one farm uh hospitality place or this one hotel what whatever it is right there's there's so much there and we had somebody else i think in this session talking about uh doing golf content and talking about doing course reviews.

And he made one video of like, I went to a golf course, here's the golf course. And it's like that one video of going to a golf course could be six videos.

It's like, what are the greens like at Dallas Country Club? What are the best things on the menu, right? And like all of these are, some are for the golfer, some are for the visitor, whatever it may be.

There's so many different angles of approach to any of these things that there's really infinite uh infinite content here to be experimented with um sorry there's so many ways to take it i'll say that's another thing is like i think that when you get a hit of something that you either like or like you get some positive feedback like just like this is not a nice way to say it but like like jam it down people's throats like i remember i was like how many videos could i make about farm travel and my brother-in-law was like 400 on every single form like just don't stop like just make more content than you could ever imagine and like i needed him to tell me that to be like okay i can just keep going and like keep hitting it from every angle and i think for everyone who's like still trying to figure out what hits you just experiment with a lot like that's the volume game but when you get like oh i think there's something here like i think we can hit it more times than we can even imagine that we can i don't know do you guys would you agree yes completely and it gets easier the more and more you make right like alex is doing a day whatever of 259 right now about one topic right like he can talk about that forever i have like i can go back on the sociology of why people buy forever once you get into it you unlock so many more so i'd never be worried about running out of ideas because once you start getting hits you'll you'll think away more i had a what was i just want to ask i just lost my train of thought i don't know totally spaced it um alex why is it 259 days oh because when i started it that was like when it was the end of the year sean threw me off i had a question i read why why 259 i'm like what what did i just miss all right the day you don't know the number of alex's series by heart sam one question i do have is like what how do you go about then taking a topic and then repackage it into all the different angles have you how have you built a system around that or how do you even think about approaching that just walk around my life and then it like hits me and that's a terrible system but like I just let it come to me what are you doing across platform like are you because I feel like I first saw you on Twitter or X I'm not sure if that's true I'm maybe making that up but are you doing are you posting your videos there are you doing like written versions are you like what are you doing across platform i'm definitely like a lurker on instagram uh what's that thing called twitter x but i don't post down there i do on instagram obviously but um linkedin and facebook have been really fun so like i create everything for instagram first like i'm like this is for instagram but i do repost on linkedin tiktok and facebook and out of all of those linkedin has been the best for me because I was already kind of in the travel world. I was already kind of talking about this stuff in the past.

And the value, like the value of the connections that you can get in LinkedIn are really high. And so it's like, it was scary, right? Because you're like, I'm, why I'm, it's like, I think it's scary to post the videos on LinkedIn, but like, if you've been in any professional arena at all before, putting the stuff on LinkedIn gets like incredible resonance.

Like it really resonates with people because they're like, oh, I'm seeing that person. They're like talking to me. I think people can identify with you really fast because like they've only ever seen you post about your job. And then here you are like talking with energy at them.

And so I think that I've really enjoyed posting on LinkedIn. And then Facebook is fun because then like your mom and all of her friends are like telling you like that it's so fun to see you do videos. So like, you know, your family and like your aunts is fun on Facebook.

And you know, TikTok, I have not succeeded at like i post on there and like nothing really performs and like it's not i don't know it's just not my jam i don't think but like i keep posting there because maybe someday something i would look at with your account if you're okay with it i would start a new one just because like you covered some topics you did some different things it might just be putting you in the wrong bucket like it's just worth like trying your stuff on on a brand new um and quick notes everyone gets terrified of linkedin look the power of linkedin is if you're trying to connect this back to business at all or you want to book anything for your business it happens there even if you get 11 views I keep posting on LinkedIn, even though it doesn't perform as much for me, because I get DMs from constantly from CEOs, heads of brand, people that would just never DM me on Instagram, but they feel fine DMing on LinkedIn because they have, it's not like a hundred followers and pictures of their kids. It's because it shows that they're a powerhouse and they connect the dots. They've seen the content on Instagram, but they'll follow up there.

And to the point that it accounts for a significant amount of deal flow. And so I would just say, don't be afraid of that. It's a very good thing.

If one of your goals is to attract business like that. 100%. All right. Seven day challenge coming up. I want to encourage, just based on this call, just a reminder, if you haven't done a green screen yet, or even if you have, do a green screen as part of the seven day challenge.

We want you to make sure you have covered that in here. We emphasize those a little less hard than we have back in the day. But yeah, we want you all to kick off. This is that final week. Get into it.

We will be posting office hours info all the days we're doing them as they come. We usually do it Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Monday, I believe.

But we will confirm those days and pop them in the chat before they happen. Sam, thank you so much for coming. Yeah, Sam, you got it.

I just linked your Instagram again. You got anything else you want to plug? Any final words of wisdom here? If y'all want to intern at a farm hotel in the summer, is that still available?

Yeah, I can. Do you guys still like it? Oh, dude, I didn't even talk about that. These went so viral.

I made it in two seconds. It was so crazy. Wait, tell us. Sorry, go on. Tell us.

We needed a volunteer to help plant stuff on the farm. So I put up the five little things that we've hosted volunteers for 10 years. And it's almost at like 400,000 views. I got thousands of DMs. I'm like, DM me thinking like five people are going to DM me.

Because there are so many people in Chicago who are ready to throw their entire life away to go thinking that they could make it on a farm in wherever you are in the summer. And then we'd actually end up having a terrible time. But yeah. It's so hot here. I'm like so miserable in July. I'm like, these people don't know what they're signing up for.

We don't have air conditioning. Yeah. You're forcing them into a life crisis. Exactly. But yeah, sometimes you don't know what's going to hit. But the only thing I have to say is I love Cut30.

I do think that content can change your life. I'm experiencing it. I'm in the process and just keep creating, like keep going. I literally took Cut30 many times because I was like i'm gonna make this work and it was learning the skill set and then it finally aligning with my idea that helped it hit so like keep going not that you have to do the course a lot of times i just love the feedback but maybe do it a lot of times and just keep going because it took me months to finally find what was going to hit and then it changed my life thank you so much for joining us so much just dropped thank you guys thank you very much all right y'all seven day sprint is ahead 8 a.m pt tomorrow i will be on and uh let's get after it see you guys in slack thanks sam see y'all thanks sam Thanks.