Cut30 kickoff: into the deep end of the next 30 days

john and instead of oran sorry john so back in exit too if you want if you guys are fine we're about to let it go anyway oran meet john john this is or all right we're recording i'm starting this hey it's good to see you man my guy from x this is amazing john you're the second ever person to like launch a call with like this on accident so welcome joining exclusive club the last guy was also named alex yeah i think wasn't it he was named alex garcia yeah he was literally named alex garcia so every single time it was just like rolling the dice all right let's do it that's right all right john you got to give an intro you got to kick this thing off i got you get everyone hyped there we go he already knows yeah he's like he works here what's going on y'all welcome in welcome from around the world yeah let's uh throw where you are in the chat whether it is a state or a country in the case of the the orange johns of the world orange just just flexed orange definitely went to like a specific part of the hotel was like i'm posting up here with like the pillow and shit behind me.

This is my room, dog. We have the bedroom, man. You know what I'm saying? You're like telling the people that you have to be quiet.

You got to keep it down. I'm literally in a cut 30 house, basically. We got 18 creators in this house that I'm in right now.

Which sounds crazy. Are you going to JT's thing? I just got back from JT's thing. Sweet.

But it goes till 5 a.m. and I'm too old for that. That's crazy. All right, guys. We're letting a couple more people stream in here. And then we're going to jump right into it.

If it hasn't been said yet, welcome to Cut30. Congratulations for jumping in to the deep end with us and locking in on content this summer. Let's run it. Look, there's almost always some sort of technical difficulty.

And today's was I have a brand new MacBook, which I set up Zoom on the correct account with. And then I opened it and logged into Zoom and it said, waiting for the host to let you in. And I was like, wait a second. So I went and got the old laptop and fired it up.

There we are. And then you got to give your webcam permission and fucking restart. Hard restart. I tried to prepare, but.

Set you up in safety mode. Look, it's the thought that counts. Amen. Basically, you have to restart your computer like four times. Zoom makes you deal with it.

and i'm just crazy all right we talking shit yeah uh probably all right all right down if you want to you want to kind of jump into it oran the all right perfect and we got and we're all on slack and all that too everything's all in there all right perfect all right amazing welcome to cut 30 in the next 30 days we are going to turn as many of you who want to add into monsters at short form content.

We're gonna help you make banger videos, carousels, and get into this. I know a lot of you have context on this, but we, people make hits coming out of this. We've generated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of awesome creators, and we've done it by basically giving you a proven system to run through.

So we are going to make about 15 videos, maybe a little more throughout this process. They're going to build on each other. We're going to start with simple ones.

That skill is going to help you level up to get to slightly more complicated ones. If you are an experienced creator, we've got a bunch of you in here as well. We help you kind of strip it back to basics, try new things. And then we work through everything from how to film your first basic videos to script writing to hooks to eventually later on.

We don't start it at the beginning. We get into analytics, setting up pillars, thinking about series, all the more complicated stuff.

So it really builds over 30 days. But to kick it off, we're going to introduce everyone that we have here because we have both Colin, Alex, and myself, and we have some coaches that you will see in there. Colin, want to kick it off? Yeah, absolutely.

Guys, my name is Colin Landforce. Landforce is my real last name. It's not just a weird superhero name that I try and convince everyone to call me. I'm a lifelong marketing guy. Spent a lot of time. I think a similar story is in here is making content for brands or projects or clients or whatever the case may be.

Always having that itch to like, I think I could do this. That started on Twitter with writing. And then my friend Oren kind of bullied me into starting on video a couple of years after that. And the rest is history. My content is kind of classic expert and journey content. It's a little bit personality focused.

And I've found my niche around product and brand building, specifically in golf and in the golf world. We'll get into that a little bit more as we get into some of the lecture, if you will, today. Alex, what's up with you?

What's up, y'all? I'm Alex. I'm the founder of House of Distribution, one of the co-hosts for Sweat Equity, and then one of the co-founders for Cut30.

Very similar to Orin and Colin, where I've spent my entire career after football, basically, in the marketing space, in the content space. Picked up a camera roughly 11 years ago when the social media game was early on in an advanced past, just like friends posting pictures and you following friends and businesses were like, OK, it's time for us to start thinking about this thing.

But at that time, you're getting paid 500 bucks to like run an entire social account, do community strategy, run the ads account, like the whole nine, right?

Like edit every piece of content. Everything was a hype video. I remember my first video was like a hype video for a fucking taco. It was the craziest thing. It was like to an edit of Chainsmokers.

And looking back at it now, I'm like, this shit's crazy. But it was. This is new lore. How do I know this? I don't know.

It's coming to me as I'm talking about this. It's like the pillars in the background just reminded me of what I was chasing. And so did that for a ton. I've spent the last 10 years basically working with brands on content strategy, creative direction, and then execution of that content.

And now with House of Distribution, we work with mostly eight to nine figure brands in the performance or like luxury kind of fashion space, develop their content strategy, executing all of their content, whether it's evergreen, campaign. campaigns, events, shows, et cetera.

Like those are really the buckets that we play within and then really made the transition, I think like a year and a half ago to creating my content, right? Like taking everything I've learned and applying it to myself and wanting to build that entire engine around my personal brand. And so obviously with Colin and Oren, I've been able to do that.

So pass it to Oren. All right, perfect. So yes, my name is Oren at Oren Meets World on social media, I started to make content because I was working in marketing and the brand I was at sucked at it. And I was bad at managing it and helped getting the best out of the social media managers.

I wanted to figure it out myself and started making TikToks. They were terrible. The first 50 were bad. Colin was worried about my health. My wife was worried about my health. But then it started to turn around and ended up going pretty well.

My first video got those views, but three videos later, I think I got my first offer for a brand deal from Timberland. And then we were off to the races.

And so now I have been basically full-time creating for the last two years. And we are working on in and out on this stuff, both myself and with brands and with y'all here every day. But we also have three coaches in here. So you will see Colin, they have like an insignia now or something, right?

Yeah, this is actually perfect. I have a slide for this too. If you've done Cut 30 multiple times, here's your... That guy's got that beautiful Portland light just yeah yeah wreaking havoc yeah sorry i'm in the backyard um you know if it look if sun's shining for one time in portland like you gotta flex yeah yeah it's true let it shine um guys these are the three other folks besides the three of us that you're going to see in slack we have gabe alexandra and victor i wanted to do a better job of formally introducing them um to you guys here they have a wide um array of backgrounds um they're kind of all over the board and all of them have a big um Content is a big part of what they're doing.

Gabe is a musician. Victor is a DJ. Alexandria also does brand strategy and has an agency. And they all have kind of bring a unique perspective to the feedback, the questions, so on and so forth that you will be serving up.

So you will see all six of us rampantly in the Slack constantly. Do not be shy. And then like the guys mentioned, we all have the coach insignia. Our usernames will say coach and them just to be clear that it's just not some maniac yapping at you about your video.

Yeah, not someone just feedbacking all your videos for unknown reasons, but that's all right. And just a quick note, that is a bit of how this works. So let's go through what we're actually going to talk about on this Zoom here today.

So we are going to show you what we have. This is a pretty comprehensive program. So it includes Kajabi, which you should have an email invite for. Colin, they would have gotten that a while ago, correct?

Yep. Logistically, guys, around three o'clock today, all that went out.

If for any reason you don't have it, we'll say this several more times, email info at cut30.co, whether it's a Slack thing, Kajabi thing, or anything in between.

Sorry, Oren, go for it. You should have that invite from it. No, that's perfect. And I also just put that in the Slack. So you will see that in Kajabi, we have all of the coursework and we're going to go through that here today.

I'm going to give you a brief tutorial of what is in there and how to access it. Then we also have Slack. Slack is a huge part of what we have going on in Cut30. Alex is going to dive into that and why it is so important because you will notice one of our coaches, if not two, basically between us and then Gabe, Alexandra, and Victor are going to feedback every single video that you put in here. So you are going to get response to me. How do you improve this?

What could we do better? Or just revving you up if it is awesome. So we will have the Slack component. We're going to walk through how homework works because we do have homework due on specific days. And then we're going to go through some really commonly asked questions about getting started with content.

There's a lot to cover inside this Zoom and the future Zooms, so we'll get into it here in a second. Actually, a quick note on the Zooms as well. This is the first of our live calls. We have four of these Tuesday Zooms.

This one is just us because we're trying to give you a ton of information. And then the next where they will all have a training and then you'll have a guest. We have a series of guests on here from different backgrounds, brands, creators, etc.

so that you can kind of learn from some people who are really in it. We also have what's called office hours. Those are on Fridays. They're in the opposite time because we know not everyone loves this nighttime.

We have those up there. Sorry, Wednesday Zooms. My bad. It used to be Tuesdays. Thank you, Ashley. And on Fridays, we have what's called office hours, which is just they're not recorded.

They're an open time where you can come workshop. One of us will be there every week and ask questions. And then you will be able to actually go if you want to feedback a video. You just have one work on strategy.

They're kind of like smaller sessions there. On that note, anything we need to hit before I hop into Kajabi? Nope. Let's do it.

Good. All right. Perfect. All right. So when you log in to Kajabi, you are going to see this.

So what we have here, it's basically pretty straightforward website. You can navigate. Navigation is on the left side of this. And it has a syllabus.

So anytime you are wondering, what should I be doing? What was my homework? What link is the Zoom? What should I be working on week to week?

That is all here. Week one, week two, what the curriculum is, et cetera. So let's break that down a little bit.

So each week, you're going to have some curriculum. So for instance, there are different pages in here. Here.

here corresponding over here that we would like you to look at if you'll notice going down this left side we have a ton of curriculum in here we do not cover the entire curriculum in that 30 days we have a lot of extras for you. You have access to this even after the course, but we cover all kinds of weird oddball stuff in here as well.

Content GPTs, B-roll swipe files. If you ever want to post on Snapchat because you're young and are into that, then we have a whole section in there. There's a whole bunch of these extra pieces that I encourage you to take a look at that are above and beyond what we touch.

But every week we have some mandatory stuff to look at. So for instance, this week in week one, we want you to do the basics. The basics is like, what is a video? How do you record it?

What is the software? We know some of you are starting from zero. We are here to support that as you've never opened the app. We have videos and walkthrough tutorials for all that. Same thing with like buzzwords and content types.

All in here, don't worry about it. We will cover it. And then we actually have the homework. So you'll notice first week we hit the ground running.

We're going to pump this shit three videos right away. They are not particularly hard videos. So Get you in the flow of making recurring content. We break down what they are and what they are doing.

They are due all in here. You'll see this week. We'll follow. We do it in a very particular order. You can feel free to jump ahead if you want, but you're just fine if you just follow where we're at.

And they all have these videos and break down. You can just search Kajabi K-A-J-A-B-I in your email. You'll likely find it. If you do not, info at cut30.co, and we will get you squared away.

With that, I'll pass it to Alex to talk about Slack. Awesome. Cool. So let's dive in. What I'll start is if you want to be extremely successful with Cut30 over the next 30 days, being very active in Slack is going to be the best route there.

And what I mean by that is if you look at all the competent nominators via all the different successful creators that we've had run through this, the majority of their success has been from getting a ton of feedback in Slack and spending as much time possible in Slack. Either A, posting their content, getting feedback, iterating on that, or B, based off of somebody posting a piece of content, they look at the things that we're telling them to change and do, and then they make iterations to their content based off that feedback.

All of that is how you're going to get better at this. So it's not really just from looking at the information we put in Kajabi, doing a rep and posting in there and then really never looking at it and never looking at the feedback that somebody else is getting. You have to think if 50 of you are posting in Slack tomorrow and then you're posting your video after those have all gone out and you look at all the feedback and you're able to see all these notes. It's like we're giving feedback on people's, on the hooks, on the way you cut it up, on the sound design, whatever.

Like we're giving feedback on all that, telling you everything to change and why you should change it. You should take that information and make changes to your content based off of that. So that's my spiel on Slack. What you'll notice is there's a bunch of different channels and there's a bunch of different goals and reasons for those channels.

I'll wait for Orin to pull it up. Yep. So session 23, this is where you're going to see myself, Colin, or Oren publishing really updates.

Right now, we're doing the intros, but the majority of content that you're going to see or announcements that you're going to see in this is like myself going in there on a Wednesday being like, hey, we have office hours that are starting in 15 minutes or 30 minutes.

Sometimes we'll put other updates. If we work on something, if we update something, we'll put those in session 23. But that's the main thing. It's the majority of the time is just for updates from the team.

In the next one, we have troubleshooting. Very self-explanatory. This is troubleshooting that you're dealing with potentially in Kajabi and or if you're dealing with some troubleshooting in like CapCut or edits or, yeah, your microphone doesn't work.

Something along those lines. That is where you want to start asking these questions. So you got to hold the button on the right side, hold it for five seconds. And, and that is, I mean, again, like self-explanatory, but the majority of all that should happen here.

Like don't go into general, don't go into a video sharing and like drop those, those questions because sometimes that happens and it just breaks the, the, the feel of the channel and it could easily get messy.

We want to keep these as clear as possible. So the next one, I'll, we'll do a relay, like, or pick whichever one you want and I'll talk, I'll talk about it. So next one, we got question and answer.

This is a perfect situation for that. I'm guessing this is about a recording, but this is Q&A, right? Any question that you have around anything, drop it right in here.

We'll get to it as Orin is doing right now. Idea workshop is another really good one. Think of this as the group chat that you have with your friends, like Colin and Orin and I. We have a group chat where we drop all of our ideas.

We drop feedback. We send inspo. We curate things, et cetera. Think of idea workshopping as that.

you want to go in there, you want to jam on a headlight or a hook, you want to jam on an idea, you want to jam on a specific concept, throw that in there. You know, there's so many times that videos have popped in the past, but it started as just a quick message in idea workshopping.

And then imagine from there, like you have all of these different minds going in and saying, hey, like, what if, what if you change this? What if you wear a bigger hat? Like, What if you do X, Y, Z thing?

That can a lot of times be the result of a good piece of content being a great piece of content. So go in there, jam with everybody, and take advantage of the fact that you basically have a lot of people trying to go towards this same goal right now. The other one that we have is the Content Wins channel. So Content Wins, very self-explanatory.

This is where you're going to see a bunch of dubs. If in, in what I will say is like, like what we're seeing here, you know, somebody just got to 3000 followers on IgE. Like that is, that's a win.

A win is not just a million views. A win is not 500,000 views. If it's, if it's your first 3000 view video, cause you've never passed the 300, um, the 300 like view jail.

Cool. Like put it in there. I mean, there's, there's an extreme example in here of, of Katie who actually went literally like 5,000 followers to look at that. three days ago i had 5600 followers she now has i actually just looked she has 197 000 followers which is just madness from like four videos which is this is the hook the just amazing hook this door hasn't been opened in 20 years i was looking at around my house being like can i what doors haven't been opened i was like i've never opened my little harry potter door under the stairs like i haven't i've lived in this house yeah yeah i was thinking about shit you know um and i have it and so content wins is sorry say that again nothing nothing i'm joking okay um content wins is that just drop your dubs like again 400 view or five uh 5,000 view video that's a win.

Getting your first thousand followers, that's a win. Of course, there's going to be extreme examples and a lot of outliers. And the goal is for you to be an outlier or for all of you to be an outlier.

But different topics have different ability to reach specific amounts of people. Not everybody could get a 10 million view video on specific topics just because the topic doesn't have the potential for that. And so understand that your win is your win. Post it in here.

The other one that we have that is the most important is the video sharing channel. I'm going to be posting and publishing my first unboxing video. I felt like a completely different creator today recording one of those. I'm going to drop it in here to get it completely ripped apart by everybody because that's a new lane for me. I've never done the unboxing scene. So we're going to see how that does. But that is what this is for.

Drop all of your videos in here. We're going to rip it apart. And so what all the caveat there, though, is don't get offended when when we give you our feedback.

Like a lot of times we're going in there early, early in the morning or between meetings or at night, like we're, we're spending a lot of time going in there and trying to give you as much feedback as possible.

But we're sometimes going through, you know, 30 videos. And so we're just being like, very straightforward, like, hey, change this.

This isn't good. Alter it to this. It's not we're not trying to get you. We're not trying to tell you you suck. We're not you have no potential to be a good creator. None of that jazz.

Like we are just trying to give you the most important information possible. One of the things that we'll probably talk about today is writing with your eraser. We do that with our, with Slack, like we write as concrete as possible so that you know exactly what you need to do when you go back to, to the, to the piece of content.

So, and some, and a quick note on that, um, this is look, a lot of people aren't used to getting super honest feedback. We're here to help you win. We are honestly feedbacking everything. all we want you to do is win that is the only motivation behind that and look honestly we don't even know sometimes i've i've given up um there's some people that ran cut 30 like three times like this isn't going to work and then they popped off like three months later and like so sometimes like it just comes down to you continue to do it you continue to refine never take it personally all we want you to do is make banger videos amen with that uh we got some content market fit to talk about. But first, actually, we want to take a second to congratulate all you.

I'm being serious on taking this plunge. I know there are some existing creators in here, but I know that a lot of you are brand new to this. And I cannot overstate how big of a deal it is to decide to pick up your phone and talk into the camera and publish it on the internet.

Most of the people you know are totally afraid to do this. It doesn't matter if you ever get a thousand followers or a million view video, like by doing what we're about to do these next 30 days, you are a badder motherfucker than most people you know.

It's a big deal. It is modern communication. And I'm super excited for all y'all to embark on it. What we're about to do here is publish our thoughts on the internet clearly in a modern communication style. And that has infinite upside.

Again, whether you ever go viral or not. So congratulations. And with that, we are going to talk about content market fit, which is like ultimately the journey that we are all on here. As I'm pulling this up, if you are familiar, hang on.

If you are familiar with the term product market fit, right? This is common in like tech and software spaces. I think it's a fancy way to say like people want to buy your shit. People are here for what you are making, right?

Your job in cut 30 and forever is to find content market it fit to figure out the content that that i can make that other people are interested in watching that the algorithms will pick up so on and so forth okay um this is the famous colin landforce venn diagram is my screen sharing i can't see it can you guys see it no i thought it was just me but all right nah that's what i want to check colin's uh i may want to hey hey there we go we got it we got it new computers it takes a while to load it's like loading like we call him magnet hands, which is a problem because he's also the CTO, but, um, but this is a really simple way to think about it that has, has lasted the test of time.

This applies, whether you're doing business or brand content or personal brand content, what you make here and forever will be at the intersection of what you can talk about, or in the case of a business show off forever, what you can execute on reliably and what people will actually watch, right?

You have to be able to go on this, talk about it, show it off at scale because making videos, especially early on every day or close to every day is critical just for the sake of getting reps. Okay. It has to be something you can execute on reliably because like Mr. Beast can spend a hundred grand on a video and have it go viral eight times out of 10, right?

We don't get to spend a hundred grand per video. If we're making a video every day, right? It has to be something that we can actually do and execute on. If you can make an amazing video, but it takes you a hundred hours of work.

Like maybe that's do a few times a month or once a month, but it can't be the videos that are going to help you find content market fit, help you find your way. All right. And then finally, of course, what people will watch, right?

This is also like what the algorithms grab ahold of. This is absolutely critical. We see a lot of people on, especially on threads, complaining about the algos aren't pushing their content. No, the algos just only push good content.

And that shifts over time. Absolutely. But if we're not making content to get picked up, what are we doing? Right?

That is key. Your content will land at the intersection. And the thing I like to close here with is this will always be a process. Like Cut30 is all about experimentation. And if you come in here as a marketing guy or a marketing gal or whatever it may be, this process is going to be about finding the unique viewpoints, the unique lenses, and the blends of your interests or thing that make this novel and interesting.

And the same applies for a brand. If you are a cosmetics brand, we have to find the way that you are going to be different from every other one in your content. We have to find the content that only you can make. A lot of the feedback you guys are going to get over the next several weeks is like, okay, this is clean, but anybody could make this, right?

Everything we're thinking about, every script you write, every video you make has to be under the lens of like, how can I make this uniquely mine and uniquely Colin? all right with that we're going to talk for a second about tracks and then alex is going to get into hooks briefly um i've got the tracks content right here actually i got to share my screen again um my bad guys i should just left it up i was too busy yapping um so look yeah as one does story um so look when we were about 500 i think this group is like encroaching on the 3 000 student mark when we were about 500 in you guys see that yeah we got we got you when we were about um we're about 500 in uh we started to notice like some very clear buckets that people we're falling into, right?

We've kind of organized certain sections of the content around these things. We call them tracks. The basic tracks are expert or personal brand and then brand or business, right? And this is all obviously a spectrum.

A lot of creators kind of like mold or meld over time. There's of course brands that are very like founder personality centric that have a lot of content that is more traditionally expert. We don't want you to think about this too much, part of your homework is going to be to pick a track because that's going to help steer you, especially through these first few assignments.

But it's a helpful lens. And again, do not get too stuck on it because this will evolve over time. And literally part of your homework in Cut30 is to do a format that is more traditionally the other track, right? So expert or personal brand is obvious, right? This is a creator making content about a topic, something they care about. They're sharing resources, tools, news, commentary, opinions, their journey through the thing, so on and so forth, right? You follow a lot of these folks. This is your traditional creator.

Again, there's a wide spectrum from personality driven to like pure raw value and expert. You will fall somewhere in there. The other track is the brand and business track. This is a business promoting their brand, product, and or community.

Customers sometimes are sharing products, lifestyle, story, characters. Oftentimes this gets more art directed and visually interesting, higher production value in some cases, certainly.

This is probably pretty straightforward. One thing we do want to call out before we're gone is that if you are here to promote your business, but you're a service provider or an agency or similar, the clearest playbook here is to build your personal brand and then use that attention to shine it on the service your business or so on and so forth.

Right. A lot of people get hung up on this. That is the clearest playbook there is. There is no right answer to this, but I would highly recommend and we're happy to answer questions in Slack about what you should do in your personal case. But nine times out of 10, if you're not sure, if you don't have a really good reason to have a brand or a business account, we're going to say, yo, build the Colin account and let Colin do whatever with that as it grows.

right um that is the clearest playbook um there is alex you want to talk to the people about hooks let's run it you see are y'all looking at that i feel like i'm i'm calling it right now got too many damn tabs open wow that i mean it's been a while since i since my tabs looked like Did y'all see the tabs or did y'all see?

We saw the tabs, right? We'll have an intervention a little bit later. Call me later. I just want to say I've reeled it in. Thank you.

Damn, I knew the comments. We've had a lot of screen share snafus here over the years. This is by far the least bad of them. All right.

Yeah, this is the least bad. All right. Y'all can see this all right? yeah we got you cool cool all right so we got to start with what is a hook aka the most important part of the video aka the part that we're going to rip apart the most in video sharing aka the thing that you need to spend the most time on okay so when we think about a hook there's really three elements that we want to talk about and that we want to think about the first one is the visual hook the second one is the verbal hook the third is the title hook in no particular order we just want to think about in your first three seconds and in reality like the first second the first frame think about all these things in the first three seconds of your video these three uh elements coming together to to develop your hook now the mistake that the majority of people make is they think a hook is just the thing that you say right they'll spend all this time uh trying to come up with like the wittiest thing to say or the the thing that that's just like the most um like contrast or contrarian take etc that is is just part of the hook and you'll get so much more out of what you say if what you show and in the visuals that you add complement what you say on top of give context to the people that are scrolling and that only see the title hook in the visual right because they don't have sound on and so all of that combined is a hook there's a lot of people that will not watch with sound on there's people that are going to watch with sound on not read the title hook and only watch look at the visual right we all consume content differently And that's why it's imperative to have all of these elements working together to get someone's attention.

So to, again, look at some examples, the three hooks are verbal, visual, title.

When you look at the first one over here on the left, the verbal hook is what you say. So in this case, I say this is good content versus bad content running brands. If you pay attention to what I'm saying there, I'm being crystal clear about what I'm doing.

I'm introducing contrast and comparisons, right? Good versus bad. And then I'm giving context about the type of. Brands that I'll be talking about by saying running brands.

A really good hook is, is covering or sorry, introducing clarity context and then creating a curiosity gap. If you can do that, then in your hook, you have a, you, you just have a much higher percentage of succeeding than someone who's, who's only being crystal clear or someone who's only trying to like be witty and sound cool. Cause that's another thing.

A lot of times like some of you are going to try to sound cool and like sound all smart in your hook versus just fucking saying what it is, right? Like that's, you have to think about those variables as well when, when we're, when you're developing the verbal hook for the visual, hook you want to think about what you show right and we're going to the title hook in a second but if you look at oran's video here where it says wild materials that's his title it's still on the week one slide you may have to move forward i don't know yeah i think it's because i got all these tabs open no that's how that works no that couldn't be it i don't yeah because i got i got the week one open on three different that was the that's the problem that's a problem situation that's tragic that that happened are y'all seeing three hugs perfect okay well let me just just so y'all could see this this is what I was referencing earlier.

This is now what I'm referencing. So we could go back a little bit. The visual hook that Orin has here, right? So title hook says wild materials. The visual hook is then Orin using kind of like this, this heat machine to show that these fabrics change color.

I think when he is then transferred onto the material. So he is taking that title hook and then supporting it with a visual. If he would have just said wild materials and he's just like, and he's just walking and there's just clothes behind him, that is a five out of 10 hook.

But because he has that title hook and then he uses the visual hook to literally bring that to life and demonstrate what wild materials look like, that is how you take this to a 10 out of 10 hook. Right. And then in the title hook, again, you want to provide context for the people who are just scrolling.

In this case, I have good content versus bad content running brands. Orin has wild materials. And then Colin on this one has 200K diamond machine. Right.

And again, when we go through this, you want to look at how everything supports the other element. In this case, 200K diamond machine is supported by the visual in the back where you have this giant machine.

And so again, as you just go into these videos, you want to be thinking about all three hooks. So when you plan out this video or when, you know, we're going to talk about one shots, When we talk about one shots and you think about, which I won't dive too deep into it, you're going to think about text. You're going to think about a visual.

Don't think about them as separate things. Think about them as two things working together to tell one story or to bring a story to life. That is how you need to be able to think about this, which should have gave you all the fair warning. A great hook when we're talking about, I mean, we could look at Bad Ombedness, which is a, not, they haven't gone through Cut30, but they're a close friend of everybody, Cut30, Midday Squares.

I'm going to play these so we can kind of break them down. But great hook achieves three things. So first one, establishes clarity. The goal is really specificity over simplicity, right?

The viewer's brain is making a split decision of and asking itself, is this for me? So you have to establish clarity to be to basically be able to answer that question. Right. I'll give you an example.

If I'm doing this as good content versus bad content, but I just go off the deep end on on my verbal hook and I'll try to spitball here. If I'm like, nobody ever knows how to actually make good content because all they're thinking about is bad content.

It's like, that's not super clear as to what I'm going to actually talk about. There's a big difference between saying that and then me saying this is good content versus bad content. You know I'm just going to compare things the entire time within a category.

Then you want to provide context. Context, a lot of times, is usually taking the form of different constraints, stakes, or relatable situations, right?

It depends on the type of content that you're creating here. The last thing is opening a curiosity gap. So this is some kind of missing information. And that gap has to be really opened by the hook. And I'll give you another example in a second.

You don't want to close it. So you don't want to give them the information. So an example would be like, this is good content versus bad content running brands. But there's one brand in the running space that I think is going to be bigger than Nike.

Right? Like that's a curiosity gap that I just opened because I'm giving a little bit of information. you're then curious about, okay, who, who, what is that brand?

I've never heard of that brand. Have I heard of that brand? What are they doing? That's so special that they're going to be bigger than Nike, right? So you want to open that curiosity gap.

We'll run through these hooks. I'm hanging. I'm hanging. And we'll, and we'll break it down. Eight months ago, I quit my nine to five job to start a frozen bean and cheese burrito company with my wife, Sam.

So first off, there's like seven different clips in this hook it's a little longer because it's a it is a longer vlog but there's six or seven different clips they establish clarity about what hank is doing and what they're basically embarking to into they they add different constraints they uh they add different stakes into this and then they open a curiosity gap i didn't put it in this clip but after they say this part they say and here's how it's going right like they're basically opening this story so that you you're curious like wow you you quit your your nine to five you started this business with your with your wife i'm sure things are are hitting the the the fan at some point like how's it going right so that's that's how they did this if you pay attention to bad omnis which you're gonna go we're gonna have homework for you if you uh as you go through it look at bad omnis transcribe their content and and break it down piece by piece because what you'll know is or you'll notice is um they actually don't publish that often they publish probably once a month once every six six weeks they've been publishing a little bit more but they grew to 150 160 000 followers following that because sam who's the the genius behind all of their vlogs she would sometimes spend like two three weeks writing a single and i'm not encouraging you to do this we're all about getting reps it's cut 30 for a reason i feel like i'm i'm I'm changing it here, but this cut there for a reason.

You're publishing. You're not doing this. You're not going to spend these four weeks writing one script. But she'll spend a ton of time writing a single script and putting all this time and effort into that.

A lot of times those videos will get millions of views, right? And so they've been able to build the brand off that. All right. Midday Squares is the next one.

They're OGs in the space. They've done a lot of amazing things. Let's watch this. Basically see how they create a great hook. you see how all they basically and this is another video that got a million plus views or maybe like seven eight hundred thousand uh they established clarity they're very specific about what happened we got into costco awesome um but then they raised the stakes you know but if we're going to stay here we're going to need your help and then they and they basically add the other element of like, let me explain, right?

They're established, they're establishing the clarity, they're providing context, and then they're opening the curiosity gap. So we're going to go into one-shot videos.

And Colin will go through the homework and explain what a one-shot video is. But all of these, and the reason I'm bringing this up is because one-shot videos are, they're not 45 seconds.

They're not a minute and 20 seconds. They're seven seconds at max, like 10 seconds, depending on, on what you're filming. All of the rules that I'm, I just went through still apply.

You know, you're probably not going to be using a verbal hook, but you're basically going to be using a title hook, which is really going to be your text on screen. And you're going to be using a visual hook, like to tell a comprehensive story.

All of these videos do a very good job of that. And there's a ton, a ton in Kajabi that you can go through to be able to see how many or how good people are at matching visuals with text to tell a story. Here's a quick one. You're more likely to become a millionaire than accomplish these things, right?

Has them ending a race as a true hybrid athlete does. And then there's text in the caption, right? That kind of supports it. My biggest flex is I'm not scared to go broke again, because if I lost everything today, this is what I do to make another 5k in 30 days.

This is like a relatable situation. It also has some aspirational elements to it. This one is two parts where the text flips. 178,000 people died from drinking raw milk last year. Just kidding.

That was alcohol. This is from a brand account. Like this video got, I think three, 4 million views. Like these are all great examples of just having simple, simple visuals that match the text on screen to be able to make a significant, like a very, very good and engaging video.

So ran over, I've been going for a minute. If Colin, you want to hit the next part. You're good. So guys, for the next 15 minutes here, we're basically going to run through a bunch of FAQs.

I would imagine y'all have a million questions. We're probably going to touch on them over the next 10 minutes as we sprint through them. As we're doing that, if you have related questions to them, feel free to throw them in the chat and we'll kind of pick them up as we're going.

First one is, should I use a new account or an old account or your personal account? In most cases, you should just use the personal account that you have. If you're a business and you already have an account that you've like done some shitty posts on over the years, but nothing's really happened, just use that account.

All right. If you're experiencing like zero engagement, like you post a video and you get 12 views, then we're going to tell you to just start a fresh one. Because why not? If you have an account from a previous endeavor, right?

Like you were like a car photographer in a past life. And now you want to talk about your, your, uh, I don't know what, um, if you have an audience big or small from something totally unrelated, you're probably best off just starting a fresh account.

Um, again, for most people, if you've got like some friends from college, um, or, or whatever it may be, I would just use that personal account.

The first hundred followers, the first thousand views, these are the hardest. And if you've got some friends on there that don't hate you and aren't going to hate the content that you're uploading, um, take that to your, use that to your advantage and use that account.

Uh, next, um, uh, should I use a business or a creator account?

So TikTok and Instagram vary slightly with this in terms of the language. We want to always use creator accounts. In Instagram, it's like a creator account is like a type of professional account. Again, the nomenclature, the wording is a little bit different, but use a creator account.

If you have a brand or a business that uses TikTok shop, the typical approach is to let that, let the account that runs TikTok shop be a business account, which it has to be, and create and actually push content out from a secondary account.

In all cases, use the creator account. These are favored in the algo. They get to use trending audios that business accounts or commercial accounts can't use, so on and so forth.

Use creator. Let's see, next we've got networks. Should I post to just TikTok or just Instagram? Or what should I do? Our general approach is you should be distributing your content everywhere.

Big picture, like of course, the biggest creators in the world TikTok strategy, an Instagram strategy.

That's certainly the case for big brands. We're not worried about that here. We're going to make content and publish it everywhere. If you're on X, like video, short form video had more of a moment on X a while ago. It's not anymore.

Normal videos, longer form videos are doing well. They're still at any rate, we're shipping it. On LinkedIn, they were pushing video hard for a while. They're not anymore.

Text is in general, a better approach on LinkedIn. But if you're making a good video that's relevant to your audience there, we're posting on LinkedIn, all right? We're going to post everywhere. Time and time again, I have a very good sense, like I do this, I have a very good sense of like what might work on Instagram versus TikTok.

And time and time again, the banger I thought I had on Instagram is a dud over there and then rips on TikTok, right? There are many such cases and we're not going to get into the nitty gritty of trying to have platform specific strategies when we're just shipping and getting reps and, and making content.

Um, guess, sir, John. Um, all right. Should I post manually or with software and scheduling guys?

Everybody who's ever tried to sell you a piece of scheduling software has also had data as a support that it doesn't fuck with the algorithms, right? We are posting everything natively in the apps.

It, the, The idea that it takes two minutes to get on each app and copy and paste your text in, maybe tweak it if you want to, and then hit upload. Anecdotally, I've had time and time again, I've had problems with the draft and schedule feature on Instagram.

I had a run where every time I drafted and then published, it was grainy every single time. So like every single time, our recommendation is post natively and upload when you're doing it.

If there's anybody out here that has like a VA or team overseas, like you need to be posting from the United States if you're in the United States. Do not have your VA in the Philippines uploading. That's going to go to a Philippines audience. It's never going to do what you want it to.

Any insights on using a computer versus phone? So on TikTok and Instagram, I don't think you can post natively. Maybe you can these days, but do it from your phone.

On X, on LinkedIn, doesn't matter. um but but all of these things are like you know so much of this is like you're making social content the key to that is being social so that means we're going to do stuff like we're going to get into the platform to post it like it's like like there's nothing tangible or real there but like jump into the community before you share it it will be worthwhile you might tweak your caption you might add something you hadn't thought of when you're drafting it before all of that little stuff will help.

I'm going to come back to Nico's question here. What if an older account has 100,000 followers, users are start fresh? Again, if it's like the same brand, business, or expert account, then yeah, it's absolutely worth a go.

And I think you'll know within a few posts if you should start from ground zero or not. If it's irrelevant, if it's like, again, like you used to do something else, then you should just start from scratch.

Brand new accounts get some juice in the algo. So it is not a thing. Like the first thousand followers are absolutely the hardest, but it's a not, not a bad thing to start, um, from to start fresh there.

Um, yeah, Reen, uh, I'm Australian with an account I've had for a decade. I've been posting on it for 12 months currently in NYC.

Um, so I think this, this boils down to what you like the audience you want to hit. So if you are in New York and you've got Australian followers who think what you're doing in New York is interesting and you want to push stuff out to people stateside, then you're good to go. And generally, if you're doing something organic, I wouldn't overthink it.

It's like, it's if you have a VA doing it or you're in the UK, but you're running three accounts to US audiences. That's when you need to think about this stuff and do it. If you're traveling, especially if you're sharing content about traveling or something similar to that, then don't overthink this.

I'm going to get through our FAQ list and then we'll come back to some of these in the chats. Instagram Trials. Instagram Trials is an incredible tool. If you are new to this, every reel is a trial reel.

Like we are not going to focus on A-B testing minutiae. We are shipping on main. We are posting videos to main. Once you get 20,000 followers and have a nuanced social strategy where you need to be A-B testing hooks, then you can mess around with trials.

All of the alpha around trials is people teaching you how to game the system. And there are some cool tactics there. We're here to learn how to make good content, not game the system or jump on a trials hack.

So we're not going to worry about it. AI tools. We obviously love a good tool, especially some of the stuff that has come to light with AI tools.

We have some of our tools that we're going to share with you guys. If you jump into this and have ChatGPT write your script, every time we've seen that, first of all, we can tell.

And second of all, you are never going to find your voice if you're using Sam Altman's large language model to try and have a personality. Okay. These tools are all much more useful after you find your voice, after you find your niche and figure out your stuff.

Right. And then at any rate, I use Claude for writing. I am not having Claude write things. Right. if you get a really tuned in project, maybe that's something you can pull off.

But again, our goal here is to learn how to write good hooks, learn how to write good scripts, find our voice. And then in doing that, a lot of these tools get extremely useful and valuable.

Do not go have ChatGPT write a script. We will not feedback it if detected. And hopefully no one takes that as a challenge. Okay, notes on location.

That kind of ties into what I was answering earlier with Reen's question, Ryan's question. again if you are making content for the location you are in then you don't need to think about it there is a thing in the course content about how to spoof tiktok into the united states that gets harder every day yeah there's some there's some content on that though teleprompters a common question nine out of the 10 videos that cut 30 students make every video I've ever made, it's certainly true for all of Alex and Oren's videos, are generally recorded a line at a time.

There's this misconception that you need to write a script and then nail it for 45 seconds straight or 60 seconds straight, get every single word right.

That is not the workflow that we're gonna teach you to use in the content and that is not the easiest way to make a video. So there's a good teleprompter in CapCut. I've never used it, okay?

When you are recording and doing your delivery a line at a time, that means that you get to focus 100% on your delivery and you don't have to worry about if you got the next line right.

And that makes life better. And you also don't need to do 20 takes to get everything right. You can just go a sentence at a time, much easier.

Let's see, what if I already use an editing software? We teach CapCut because it is incredibly powerful for how simple it is. I have used Final Cut Pro in the past. I know Alex is an Adobe Premiere guy.

We are very savvy to real video editing software. If you are too, that's great. You should do that. We highly recommend you do some of these first homework assignments with the pure mobile workflows that we lay out in the content because it will be a huge unlock for you.

There is serious power in the simplicity of the cap cuts and in the edits of the world. Edits is the Instagram editing software, if you're not familiar. Okay, what if I should do two tracks or what if I want to do a personal brand for me and then do a brand track for my business?

We have never had someone who embarked on doing two different tracks or two different accounts be successful out of this, right? And that's because the value that you're going to get in here is in focusing and getting reps is about getting better at content and understanding what makes content better, not getting 15 posts up on each of your accounts, right?

So if you're having that thought, pick one, focus on that for your time and cut 30, that will give you the skills to do whatever you need to with your other account or with your business account or whatever it may be in the future.

And then my last one here before we get to the chat is collab posts. Again, we'll have people come in here and every video they post is like they're a coach and they're collabing with their business account and then they're collabing with the gym that they're a personal trainer at also, okay?

The collabs tool will almost always delete your reach. It should be used when it is an organic collab, when it is truly a video that you are making with another account. Do not overdo it with this.

Do not always tag your business account if you're doing a personal brand, but you wanna be promoting the business. All that does is dilute the signal and the algo about what kind of audience the video should be shown to.

With that, I'm going to jump into some of these questions here. Let's see here. Is there a hierarchy of formats that you're seeing? Jules, we give you very tactical, very specific homework for these first two weeks.

And so that's what we want to focus on. Everything that you covered here is part of that. Green screen is cold in the spectrum of green screen's life right now. It's still a great tool. It's still probably a video that you're going to make in Cut30 if it applies to you.

So on and so forth. We're not, again, we're focused on like skills and understanding how this stuff moves more than like what is hot right now.

That being said, our homework is obviously tailored to help you find success. Mark asked on the biz, switch to creator. Yeah, switch to creator. In Instagram, it's professional account.

Creator is the type, I believe. They're always changing it. Get in there and you will see what I mean. Again, Roshan, I don't schedule because every time I've done it, it's turned out grainy.

That is anecdotal, but it is every damn time. Just do it natively is my advice. Something we didn't mention in the FAQ somehow is posting time. This is another thing that people chronically overthink.

The best thing you can do for yourself is just be consistent and post at the same time every day. Mornings are generally best. If it's not mornings, I would go for evenings. But again, like posting every day and generally on the same time is what matters.

When I look at my analytics, my audience is most active, like middle of day, late morning into middle of day. So I'm posting in the morning so that my video is sitting there in their feed when they're logging in.

Right. Don't overthink it. Caption strategy. Captions are very straightforward. We we cover especially for these first homework assignments.

We tell you exactly what you should do caption wise in the content. let's see here. Edits. Yeah, so touched on this, but again, might as well mention it.

Edits is much simpler than CapCut. It's less powerful. It's totally great for like doing a lot of basic stuff. CapCut though is like this incredible blend of powerful and simple.

It's really an excellent piece of software, especially with the mobile workflows. Do you need to constantly warm up account after the seven day ramp? So warm up is a term often used by people that are like hacking out algorithms, but it kind of ties back to we are making content on social media platforms.

We should be social. Right. So you should absolutely get in there and engage with the community you're making content for. Like videos, watch videos, leave comments, so on and so forth.

I think if you're thinking about it as warming up, you're not as you're not as well off. If that makes sense, Nico. So like we're making content for community, whatever it is, whatever your thing is, right?

Whether you're a local business or you're making golf content, I'm doing this for a community. Like go be a part of it. It's critical. Both for the apps, knowing you're a real person and just for vibes.

All right, Moby. I'm going to, I'm trying to rip through these guys. Oh, good. We're close to the end here.

My team has been posting my shorts from overseas. Yeah. Yes. Bad idea. Like get that shit in the United States, upload it on your iPhone.

And if you're doing that, like if you got that completely delegated, good for you. Like just do it yourself and watch what happens. And then figure out how to like, you know, get somebody stateside that's, that's, they can, they can handle it for you. But honest to God, like you guys, Oren, Oren's like my best friend, has a million followers, just crossed 700,000 on Instagram.

That motherfucker uploads every single video and types every caption natively when he wants to post it. Like you can too. That is not a blocker, right? Making good content is the hard part, not like hitting upload.

All right. I've had a personal account for 10 years. Would you start over? If you've got friends on there, take advantage of it. If they love you for something that is completely alien to the content you're making about, then start fresh.

Nicole, if I have an existing brand account with only 300 followers tied to our TikTok shop. Yeah. So the TikTok shop account has to be a business account. At least last time I was in there on my wife's account, it did. And so you should do a separate account. And whether that's like, whether it is like a pure brand account that just looks different, or whether it's like you as the founder posting about the brand, or whatever it may be, doesn't really matter.

But definitely get it on an independent account. TikTok loves a new account. So like, I mean, I'm sure, you know, there's all kinds of like a hundred account strategies there to run.

So you're good. Okay. For IG does removing video from the main grid or just leaving it. It doesn't matter. I don't know how old you are, Ryan, but there's, there's a common trope among millennial marketers that the grid matters.

It does not. If you hate a video, then get it out of there. Otherwise, like, who cares?

Like nobody is coming to your profile and then like studying it to make sure that like it's perfectly curated. Right. Last one here and then we're going to cover homework and I want to be respectful of you all this time. I have a product based business and currently use a creator account instead of a business account. Should I keep using the creator account? Yes.

Stay like creator account, creator account, creator account. It is favored in the algo. You get to use audios. You get to do the, you know, like a remix or not. that's not the word. Yes. There's features that are available to you.

It is a much better foot forward. Um, there's one more here. I only upload nine videos at a time. So my grid looks good.

Yes. Don't worry about your good though. Um, youans, are you the same youans from a couple sessions ago?

You don't have to answer that, but I think I recognize your name. Um, all right. To wrap up here without further ado, I'm going to go through homework.

Um, awesome. Great to Youn's had a banger, like a couple million view one shot for, I think, your first homework a few times ago.

No pressure. No pressure at all. So, guys, our homework for the first week, this is in the course, so don't worry.

You don't need to write this down. So your very first homework is a one shot. For this, you're going to do exactly as we have listed in Kajabi. The purpose of the one shot is to work on your text hooks and a compelling visual hook to go along with it. This is typically a single shot with text overlaid.

There's a ton of references in there. We're going to tell you where to put the text. We're going to tell you what fonts to use. You are not going to use your brand's fonts if you're a brand or a business account. You are going to do exactly as we tell you to in there.

They are six, maybe seven seconds long. You're going to make this and you're going to share it in video sharing for feedback before Friday. You are not required to post this before feedback. It is highly encouraged.

After this week, you're not allowed to upload videos anymore. You can only share published links. All right. The second homework is the yapper. This is to practice your verbal hooks.

The yap is a, I mean, we're all familiar with a yap at this point, but a yap is you talking into your camera in the course content. We show, we tell you exactly how to frame it up. We tell you where to put the captions. And then we give you a very basic structure for how to write this.

Right. Like a simple formula is all we need here. We need to hook, give an intro and more context that leaves an open loop, hit a point, hit a second point, and then call it a day.

Right. This is probably 130 word script. Do not overdo it. And do not try and get cute with this.

Again, the point of this is to write a good hook, execute the workflow that we recommend, and then do the basics of chopping that down.

This is like just to do the absolute basics. If you're a video pro, a good opportunity to pull out CapCut and do those cuts and cut it down in a new app that you're not used to. This is due over the weekend. And again, posting is encouraged.

Share it in video sharing when you've got it. And then our third homework for week three, which is due before we meet here next Tuesday, is to copy work a winning video. This is where you get to just pick your own adventure, right?

So you're going to pick, find a video that works for your account from somebody else that's a banger. And you're not going to copy it. You're going to treat the script and the shots that they use like a template. And you're going to write your content, your story, your brand, your product into that video.

All right. The point of this is to get you another rep without worrying about if the script is any good. Right. If you pick a banger, it's going to have a good structure.

The script is going to generally work. The hook will probably be all right. And this gives us another good rip without all the question marks and without having to shoot from scratch. That is your first three pieces of homework. They intentionally build on themselves. We start simple.

We rapidly escalate things. And that is all I got. To reiterate, your course content, your course invite, your Slack invite, your calendar invites, all of that should be in your inbox at this point.

If it is not, go double check for me, but then email info at cut30.co or reply to one of the emails that you have gotten, and we'll make sure that you get that in there. This is being recorded along with all of our other Zooms.

It'll be uploaded in the next hour here, and it'll be available if you want to come back to it. It'll be available if you joined us late. And the first one is always a doozy. We just covered a lot. I just want to, I don't know if Alex, you got anything else, but again, this is a huge deal.

Congrats to all of you. I'm excited for what's next. Not to be overly cliche, but I'm literally like looking at some of our next like case studies and testimonials coming out of this.

That's the way this works. You guys are going to crush this and I'm excited to watch it all happen. Alex, you got any parting jokes? Not jokes.

What I will say though is the next 30 days are going to be uncomfortable. You signed up for this to get a little uncomfortable and ship some videos, right? There's a lot of you that have probably watched from the sidelines.

You've seen a friend take off. You've seen a creator that you're like, man, I wish I was doing that in this space. like there is no difference between you and that individual other than reps and getting going. Right. And this is that that time in the next 30 days to build that momentum and to chase that outcome, chase that goal, chase that dream and have a bunch of people on your side trying to help you hit that that same goal and that same kind of moment for you. And so use these next 30 days to be obsessive over the content that you create and to get extremely uncomfortable because the reality is like it's going to suck making your first green screen video it's going to suck making your first yap video like somebody's going to just have the it factor when it comes to yapping and they're going to you know they're going to get a million view videos and yours may get a thousand views right and that's perfectly fine it may take you three hours to edit a video and again perfectly fine that's part of the game it's happened to me it's happened to call and it's happened to or and i've spent i spent eight years working on the brand side before i started making my own videos and I still overthought everything over edited everything didn't think it was going to work and was like maybe I should I should go back to SEO and blogs and try to grow that way because this video shit maybe isn't going to work for me and guess what like we're here now doing doing this thing so just know all of that and don't over complicate or overthink the things that you're not you don't like right now you're going to go from a video taking three hours to one hour You're going to take, uh, it's going to go from being really hard to think about ideas, to be able to look at everything and being like, shit, I have too many ideas and I don't know what to execute.

So, uh, take advantage of the next 30 days. Um, uh, be very bold, be extremely bold with the content you put out for feedback.

Um, the, the, just with, uh, jamming with everybody else in, in Slack, be very bold, um, and, and take a lot of chances and don't give a shit.

If somebody talks, uh, shit in the comments, they're not the ones making, content at all so let's do our thing we got 30 days to fucking hit home runs um and i'm excited for it like colin said this is case studies just uh in the making and a bunch of goals in in in aspirations that are in the making so let's do it all right y'all noah info at cut 30.co if you don't see slack uh we'll see you in slack guys giddy up