Cohort 24, week 1. Kickoff recorded 5 August 2026.

The lock-in session: Cohort 24 kickoff and the rapid-fire rulebook

Oren John, Colin Landforce, and Alex Garcia, the three Cut30 founders, running the Cohort 24 kickoff

The one idea

The tide has gone to the person on camera.

More context

Oren’s rule is to take the personal-brand route even when you are posting on a brand account, and Colin’s version is aimed at us specifically: agency and services businesses should become the expert and let the expertise pull leads. That is the case for Dom Mazzone’s own account over another clinic reel, for Alan Aaron hosting Horizon’s episodes, and for johnny’s founder brand. A brand feed with no face is now the harder road. Cohort 24 opened as what Oren called ‘the lock-in session’: July sign-ups drift, August people show up to work. The shape is new this round (the first two Zooms are coach-led workshopping; guests only in the back two), the vlog and green-screen modules were rebuilt the day before, and the second half of the call was a rapid-fire FAQ blitz: which account to use, creator vs business, which networks, why never to schedule a post, how geography decides who sees you, when a collab helps and when it hurts. The mindset material (content-market fit, the three-part hook) repeats from the Cohort 23 kickoff; the operating rules below are the new material, and most of them apply directly to how JI posts for clients.

If you have a small retail store somewhere, if you have a local business that sells locally, tag where you’re in, mention where you’re in, do tour guides in places around you. Algorithms love local content and content around places.

Oren

What this means for our clients

Read against the current client list. Check the dates before acting on one.

Dom Mazzone (Vos Collection / MSP)this weekRun Dom’s feed on the S24 rulebook from post one

Robyn posts natively from the phone at a fixed slot, 3×/week; no scheduler, not even Instagram’s own
No collab tags with @thevoscollection or the clinics until his account has a following and the post has a reason
The May LinkedIn-first plan was reversed to Instagram-first; Oren’s sequencing (get the videos good, then add LinkedIn) endorses that and names the next step: cross-post the keepers to his LinkedIn after the first month

Dom is the founder going personal-brand rather than hiding behind the Vos feed, which is the exact route Oren and Colin prescribed. Posting is about to start (calendar built, Robyn’s posting-logistics walkthrough booked for Sept 8, SOW at $3,750/mo drafted and unsent), so the hygiene rules cost nothing to set now and plenty to retrofit.

Marmur Medicalretainer add-onMake the Hamptons lane a local-algo play

Every Ellen self-shot reel names the town on camera and carries the geotag; the caption doc gets a location line
Same for the clinic pieces: tag the neighbourhood on treatment-room and MM Skincare content
@thisdermsays collab-tags the clinic account only when the post is about the clinic; otherwise Allie posts solo

The Hamptons self-shoot lane already exists (brief sent Aug 3; about 14 of 20 ideas are event-independent) and JI drafts the captions, so place-tagging is a line in the tracker rather than new production. Oren’s point: travel content performs because it gets shown to the place you talk about.

Horizon Legacythis weekPut Alan’s episodes on LinkedIn, from Alan

Episodes 1 to 5 and the Aug 4 material go up manually from Alan Aaron’s own LinkedIn profile, alongside wherever Horizon posts today
Judge it on inbound conversations, not likes; Oren’s claim is that LinkedIn viewers are buyers
Tag the site: Eh Ni Da Se and Gananoque are local-algo content on every network

Alan hosting the lo-fi episodes is the employee-as-expert model Cut30 now recommends for brands, and Horizon’s counterparties are institutions (the Gananoque sizzle was a CMHC recap). The recuts are delivered and Claire reviews the new footage from the week of Aug 31, so distribution is the live conversation.

Dabon Brothersthis weekCut the three social pieces as local one-shots

The Jul 23 shoot is 155 clips of pure visuals with no speech: exactly what a one-shot needs (text over a strong clip, no mic)
Write the copy Cut30-style: a title hook with a stake or a stat, a curiosity gap the caption closes
Tag the build site and the service area; a local trade that sells locally is the case Oren named for the local algo

The barter (about $3K equivalence: hero film, headshots, three social cuts) is in delivery with the first edit still to come, and the footage has no dialogue. One-shots turn that constraint into the format. Chris, who drives the calls, is the natural on-camera expert for a later round.

‘Don’t batch’ is advice for a solo creator learning the craft

JI’s model is batch capture: Marmur runs seven edit batches off a kickoff shoot, Dom gets a 30-minute directed session every two weeks. Keep the shoot day. Apply Colin’s point downstream instead: release one piece at a time, read the response, and let it change the next edit before it goes out.

Manual native posting collides with institutional approval chains

A symphony, a foundation or a medical clinic cannot hand the founder’s phone to a coach. The workable version is approve-then-post-by-hand at a fixed slot with the scheduler removed from the chain. Read the collab and account-type rules for an established brand too: Oren himself says a collab with a visible reason is fine above a few thousand followers, which is where an established clinic account sits.

The tactics

Go personal-brand, even on the brand account

Everything is moving to a person on camera; agencies and service firms should be the expert and let that drive leads.

Cut30 still offers two tracks (expert/personal brand vs brand/business), but the recommendation has hardened since Cohort 23. Oren’s read: nearly every brand doing well is doing it as an expert, with a personality talking to camera or overdubbing the footage. Colin called it the clearest path there is: build personal brand, then use the attention to shine a light on the business. He singled out agencies and services businesses (which is us) and told them to take that route outright. For a client with no natural face the brand-track curriculum exists, but the coaches are telling the room which side of the spectrum wins.

Oren, in the session

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Colin: Yo, I just want to restate that. I made a video about Bandon, Oregon, which is a very small town in the southern Oregon coast earlier this week. It got like 5,000 views and like 20 people commenting, yo, this is right down the road from me. And obviously I preached this, but it was a good reminder how strong the local algos are. Sorry for interrupting you, Warren, go for it.

Oren: No, no problem. It's completely correct. So this also goes for when you're traveling or you go to a place. You see, I make a ton of travel content. The reason it does well is because it shows it to the place that you talk about. So just a little cheat code there. Teleprompters and talking to camera. Inside the CapCut app, which is the app we recommend for this, you can also use the Edits app, which is free. CapCut is superior in a number of ways, but not by much, so it doesn't quite matter, but most of the tutorials are centered around CapCut. We also have a couple of tutorials for other software in the editing section you can check out if you like. But in CapCut, there is a teleprompter function where you can paste your script and adjust the speed. It makes it really easy to record your videos. But most people do not do this. You will notice that Colin, Alex, myself, most people you see what they do is they'll have a laptop here or they'll have their phone there, whatever it is. And you'll have where you're recording to here and you will read line by line. So you'll see this in our Yaps, in our green screen tutorial, people will go, let me say my first line of my script, stop, look over, memorize it. Let me say the second line of my script and then they will go cut out the pauses. That is the most effective way to record. We cover this in depth inside recording and editing, but just a quick note that there is a teleprompter if that is helpful for you. And then the line by line method is what most people end up using. Um, well, inevitably we have some questions like, what if I'm software? What if I'm a lawyer? I, you know, I have a hard time coming up with whatever, go and idea workshopping, put your ideas in there. We will spit ball with you. Literally anything you can do can win. We love making obscure stuff popular. So please, uh, there is no such thing as a, as a bad niche. We can workshop that with you. Um, should I choose brand or personal brand? People are asking me like the question we have around tracks. Look, almost every brand that exists out as any good as an expert. Everything is moving to experts, getting a personality that talks on camera or overdubs content that's on camera. We would recommend if at all possible to basically go the personal brand route, even if it's on your brand account. If you don't want to do that, we have a great curriculum for brand stuff set out, but basically the tide continues to shift towards the person on camera, just outperforming basically everything. So I want to note that there. Collab posts. Inevitably, we see people on Instagram who will have like, they've got like three accounts and they post a post, they collab with their other account and their cousin. And none of it makes any sense. Do not do any collab posts, especially if you are small and starting out. Zero collabs. If you are new, you do not need two accounts. You do not need to collab with your business. Do not do that. It hurts the post. Now, if you are a bigger established creator and you have a reason to collab, you are doing a post with a brand about the brand. Great. You will see a lot of people in Cut30 collab with each other. I've done collab posts with Colin and Alex and other creators. Amazing. But it has to be from an established account, let's say even over 2,000, 3,000 followers. And it has to be a collaboration that exists for a reason. It makes sense that it's there or else it often hurts more than it helps. Just a reminder, any issues at all, info at cut30.co. Any questions I missed in there?

Coach: I was going to ask about timing of the content when they post.

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Post by hand. Schedulers hurt, and the coaches tested it

No scheduling software, not even the native schedulers. Seven minutes to post everywhere manually.

Stated as black and white: scheduling won’t ruin an account, but it measurably hurts performance, and Cut30 says it has tested this thoroughly enough to stop hedging. The Cohort 23 version of the advice leaned on grainy exports; this time the claim is about reach. Oren’s answer to the workload objection is a stopwatch: caption, copy, upload, post across networks takes seven minutes, and if it takes longer the problem is motivation. For JI this is a workflow question for the client-side posting teams (Robyn for Dom, in-house staff at the clinics) more than a creative one.

Oren, in the session

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Colin: all right so now we're going to go through homework for this week and then we're going to get into this rapid fire Q&A that we, oh, let me mute Mario. Thank you, Mario. You beat me to it. So we're going to roll through homework really quick. Or are you still here to pull up a couple of these as I do it? Okay, cool. It just wasn't showing me. Cool. I'm going to roll through homework and then we'll get into Q&A. So But first and foremost, you are going to pick a track channel. There's more on each track in the course curriculum. And once you pick that track, you're going to join a track channel. This is going to just give you a little click of people who are making similar stuff to you. All right. If you have questions about which you should do, we've already told you a pretty good path most times. But you can also post those in the workshopping channel if you would like. All right. The rest of the homework for the week is to make three videos. and we really walk into it. These are very intentionally ordered. So let me go through it. The first is going to be the one shot. We're making one shots to practice writing some compelling copy and just to do something really simple and straightforward. We want you to follow exactly what we have laid out in the content, right? The framing, the fonts, the colors of the fonts, everything. You can find examples of one shots that use brand fonts and that deviate and get interesting. Time and time again, the basics outperform the fancy stuff. So do it exactly as we have laid out here. There's a bunch of examples. And critically for all this homework, we want you to go and look at all these references and then figure out which one you're going to make and make one just like that. We're going to talk a little bit more about the idea of copy work, but that's what we want to do here. Find a video that you like, treat it like a template and make your content into it. You'll notice with these, these are not elaborate videos shot on your iPhone. The more compelling the visual, the better. But the point here is to write good copy. And in a lot of cases, you can find some random video that was sitting in your camera roll or like that shot, like set the tripod down at the gym or what have you, and then write strong text for the copy. This is due on Friday. We want to see you guys getting rolling on those first thing tomorrow. The next one is the yap. We're doing a yap video to practice a verbal hook, some basic script writing, and then some basic chops. I want to call out here, the brief on a yap is not to write a 40 or 50 second video and then nail the entire thing in one take. That is not what we're doing here. We show you in the curriculum exactly how to use CapCut to record a sentence at a time so that you don't have to nail it. We want you to do the framing, the titles, basic captions, exactly as laid out here on the screen. Again, don't try and reinvent the wheel here. Do the basic gap. There's going to be a great little run through of just making basic cuts and cap cut, adding titles, adding captions, so on and so forth. And if any of that sounds foreign, don't worry. We go through it in the curriculum. This is due over the weekend. The script format that we encourage you to follow is really simple. Hook, intro, point one, point two. That's it. Don't get too long with it. These are 35 or 40 second videos. Again, there's a bunch of great references. Use one as inspo. Make your version of it around your topic with your takes on it. And do not go crazy here. The third video for week one is to copy work a winning video. This is a pick your own adventure, but the concept of copy work is taking another piece of work and then breaking it down into pieces and treating each of those like a template. So we're not telling you to copy a video by any means, but once you go and watch a video that you like, that makes sense to use for your content and go and shoot the same shots, write the same script, write your story into the script, make it about your topic, so on and so forth. Again, do not copy, but use these existing patterns and structures to give yourself a leg up and make it a little bit less of an uphill battle here. We want to see this be each of these ascend up and be a little bit harder than the last, right? Don't do a one-shot for your copywork. Take it up a few notches past the app. And that is your third video. We want to see it before we meet here next Wednesday. For all of these, if you have questions, if you're stuck on the hook, so on and so forth, throw them in Slack, get some feedback, get some ideas, and keep it moving. And with that, Oren, you ready to rapid fire through those FAQs?

Oren: Yeah, I am. All right. So in this section, we are basically going to go through notes. Some of you have already started putting questions in the chat. We have accumulated a kind of massive amount of just questions that everyone has around this kind of stuff that we are going to just roll through. So you can keep asking questions as we go. But no, I'm probably going to hit a lot of this naturally anyway. So let's go through it. All right. So first, new account or old account? Should I use my personal account? What does that look like? So for most people, if you have an account that already exists on Instagram and TikTok, I would just use that account unless you have you are really afraid of people seeing your content. If that is the case, there's also never been a better time in history to start an account from scratch. So if you do want to start an account from scratch, I would just do that on TikTok or Instagram. You'll see old people tweet about or post about warming or this or that. We don't do any of that and have never had an issue. You can start a new account, search a couple things, browse for a little bit, and post. You don't need to have any real thought into it. You can just go ahead and be posting content. But our general rule is the only reason we wouldn't use an existing account is if you have a completely different audience. So, for instance, if you were a doctor and you made content about being a doctor three years ago and got 4,000 followers, and now you are training for a triathlon and want to make content about running, that's a little too different. We would basically say start something from scratch. Same thing if you were like a nature photographer and got big and now you want to talk about being a dentist. Too wide. But if you've never really posted content or you've posted content about a similar thing, just keep your account. What if I'm established? People ask, okay, what if I have like a big account in whatever area? This is, we, Cut30 is for people that have made a lot of content too. Don't worry about it. We would highly encourage you in these initial exercises. The goal of this homework is to get you to try new formats and to execute new formats right. So this is going to be some good experimental content for you. Business account or creator account. If you are on TikTok, a creator account, no business account. I'll talk about networks here in a second. But if you are not selling on TikTok shop as a brand, do not have a business account. Switch it to a creator account right away. If you're setting up a new account, go to a creator account. It is without a doubt, unequivocally, you want a creator. On Instagram, it doesn't really matter. If you have the choice, I would choose the creator account. If you're like, don't have any compelling reason to, but it makes way less of a difference than on TikTok. Social networks. What are we doing here? We would encourage every single person here to post on TikTok and Instagram. Absolutely. Post every single thing you do to both TikTok and Instagram. Whether you think your audience is there or not, I guarantee you it is. Every single niche, you've had all kinds of people blow up on both. Instagram, what we typically find is that people will more easily get their first views and first successful videos on TikTok, and they'll end up growing better and having a better time over time on Instagram. Now we have secondary social networks. We're talking about LinkedIn, we're going to talk about YouTube shorts, and we are going to talk about things like X. So LinkedIn is an amazing place to post content when you're ready for it. Don't rush into it, but as soon as you your videos, I would post them on LinkedIn too, especially if you have a brand or an expert or trying to sell any kind of service. What's amazing about LinkedIn is that you'll get seven likes or two likes or 50 likes, doesn't matter. People that are viewing your content are buyers and business consumers. And what you'll notice is a lot of people get a lot of work off there without having to actually get a lot of views or have a really popular video. So could not recommend more if you are comfortable with it posting over there. Now, quick note, there are some people who are like, I am terrified of anyone I've ever met seeing my content. Amazing. TikTok exists. No matter who you are, if you post on Meta, even if you start a new account from a third-party phone number or whatever, it's going to find out who you are and show it to your high school friends and worst enemies. It just is what it is. It's going to happen. Meta is excellent at this. TikTok has a function in settings that we describe inside networks that lets you basically not show your content to your contacts. And then the only time they'll see it is when you actually get big enough that they will be seeing it naturally. So if you are really scared of that for whatever reason, A, I would just get over it. But B, TikTok is an excellent place to start, refine, and then branch out, which is what I did when I first started. I didn't go on Instagram for like six months. We talked about LinkedIn, YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts is great to cross post. You're going to get some views. You're going to get some interest. It's not going to make a huge difference. Is it worth the extra five or 10 minutes to see if your content resonates there? Absolutely. But it's not like going to make or break it and would not look at it as a primary network unless you are also making YouTube long form, which we don't talk about in here. And then last, if you are under 30 and want to post on Snapchat, not a bad idea. Honestly, Snapchat creator fund pays really well. There's pretty good, decent views on there, but I would not be trying to do it if you are not young and on there already and understand how it works. If you are, if you do not understand how you use Snapchat, do not even attempt it. Not worth it at all. X, if you are on X already, so X aka Twitter, excellent place to post video. If you have not, if you've never been on X, I will not invite you to join the cursed shitshow that it is. But if you're on there already, you know what it's for, excellent place to cross post your videos and will work pretty well for you. All of us post videos successfully on there. Post manually or with software and scheduling. So we encourage everyone to post manually. That means you take your stuff, you upload it on your phone or on your desktop, and you post. We do not recommend using any scheduling software, including the native schedulers. We have pretty thoroughly tested this. It won't ruin your account or anything, but it definitely does not. It definitely hurts. Just black and white. It will hurt your account to do it and your performance. So we would be posting everything manually. People always are like, oh man, so much work. I've timed it. It's seven minutes to post to multiple networks. You make your caption, you copy it, you upload the video, you post it. If this takes more time than that, then you may have a bigger, what's the right term? Yeah. It may be something, I don't know what it is, but you have a motivational issue. All right. There are all kinds of hacks you're going to see. People talk about trial reels. People talk about short clips or trends or whatever. Don't think for a second about any of those. Post the videos that we make here on your main account. 99% of people who use those things are basically just getting their mind all wrapped up in the wrong stuff, learning the long lessons and wasting their time trying to find a hack when the only real way to do this is just post the stuff on main, get the feedback and return to it. If you are an experienced creator and you're doing really well, we talk about things like trial and stuff. We could talk about it in office hours. But for anyone who is new, don't think about it for a second. AI tools, same stuff. Oh, AI can edit my video. AI can write my video. You'll see, you start posting AI scripts in here, they're going to get torn apart, right? It's blatantly obvious. It's a bad look. All the tools that will auto-do your videos or clip your podcast or whatever all suck. You've probably seen a bunch of viral reels, but Claw can edit your video. Claw can't edit your video. It's trash. So again, there is no easy way out. We're here to just tell you the truth, but you know what the best part of that is? It's doing the actual work isn't really that hard once you've done it a few times. So would not be heavily relying on AI tools. We will at the end of this talk a bit about like custom GPTs and projects. We have a section in there. But let's cover that once you've gotten some success. Location. Location is a couple of things about that. So one is if you are based outside of the US and you're trying to reach a US audience, we want to talk about that for a second. If you are in Australia or Canada or the UK, like English speaking big countries, you don't really have to do anything. you can reach the U.S. pretty well. If you are anywhere else, if you started your account in Singapore, Taiwan, someone started with you and they're in the Philippines or in India or wherever, and you want to reach the U.S., it's not going to work. So what you're going to have to do is set up a new account. It basically starts where you started. So if you started it in Mexico, but you live in the U.S., it's going to be showing your content to Mexico and it's going to over-index on it. And that is a bad thing. Now, if you are in a country and you want to reach that country, so you're in Mexico and you want to reach Mexico, we inevitably have people in Europe the European country they're in, it's a superpower for that. It's actually easier to make content. We have a lot of creators that crush from here from like Denmark, Norway, Germany. It's actually really easy to dominate your local region if you want to do that. But we have instructions about using a VPN and setting up a new account if you want to, if you are, have one of those issues. Just want to throw that out there. The other thing is if you make content locally about the places you are, that is a superpower. So if you are in Portland, Oregon, you make content about Portland, Oregon. If you have a small retail store somewhere, if you have a local business that sells locally, tag where you're in, mention where you're in, do tour guides in places around you. Algorithms love local content and content around places. So we'll talk more about that inside the curriculum, but just worth noting, you will have an easy time.

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LinkedIn: ignore the likes, the viewers are buyers

Cross-post finished videos to LinkedIn once they’re decent, especially if you sell a service. Low views, real work.

New to the kickoff this round: a network-by-network verdict. TikTok and Instagram for everything, no exceptions (first wins come faster on TikTok, long-term growth is better on Instagram). LinkedIn is the one Oren singled out for brands, experts and anyone selling a service: seven likes or fifty doesn’t matter, because the people watching are business buyers, and plenty of people get work off it without ever having a popular video. Don’t rush it; add it once the videos are good. YouTube Shorts is a five-minute cross-post that won’t make or break anything; Snapchat only if you’re under 30 and already fluent; X only if you already live there. For a B2B or institutional client, LinkedIn is where the same short video turns into a lead.

Oren, in the session

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Geography decides who sees you. Use it

An account is anchored to where it was started; local content is a cheat code the algorithms reward.

Two mechanics most people never hear. First, the account remembers where it was born: start it in Mexico and live in the US and it keeps over-indexing on Mexico. Cut30 keeps VPN-and-fresh-account instructions for creators outside the big English-speaking countries who want a US audience; Canada needs nothing. Second, the algorithms love content about places. Tag the location, say the town, do the tour-guide video; travel content works because it gets shown to the place you talk about. Colin’s live proof: a video about Bandon, a tiny town on the Oregon coast, pulled about 5,000 views and twenty ‘this is right down the road from me’ comments that week. For a clinic, a symphony or a chimney company, the neighbourhood is a distribution asset.

Oren, in the session

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Zero collabs until the account is established

Under a couple of thousand followers a collab tag hurts the post. Above it, only collab when there’s a visible reason.

The pattern the coaches see every cohort: someone with three accounts collab-tags their business, their cousin and themselves, and none of it makes sense to a viewer. Oren’s rule is zero collabs for new or small accounts, and no second account at all. Collabs from established accounts (his floor is roughly 2,000 to 3,000 followers) that exist for a reason, a post with a brand about that brand or two creators genuinely working together, are fine, and he does them with Colin and Alex. The test: does this collaboration exist for a reason the viewer can see?

Oren, in the session

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Coach: I was going to ask about timing of the content when they post.

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Skip the roadmap and the batch day

The 30-60-90 plan dies by your third post. Make one video a day and make each one better than the last.

Alex confessed his own mistake: crafting the perfect strategy and roadmap before publishing anything, all of which went out the door by the third post. Strategy, in the Cut30 model, gets assembled from evidence: one format hits, that becomes a pillar, now the plan is ten percent written. Colin added the batching corollary: don’t make three videos tomorrow, because you will be so much better at this in a week that batched videos are wasted reps. Funnels and strategy arrive in weeks three and four, on top of posting data. Editing time follows the same curve; a video that takes a painful evening in week one takes Colin fifteen minutes now.

Alex, in the session

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Oren: well yeah but it is an amazing part to to add that personality to it don't be afraid we are here to tell you to to use the frameworks we have but be yourself and experiment inside of it um don't we are going to talk about things like funnels later on

Alex: i was just saying don't don't think that this first week second week you have to think about building out like this perfect content strategy etc that is going to come the more you post content like and that's such a mistake i made at the end i was like let me let me craft this perfect content strategy with the best ideas and i'm gonna create this 30 or 30 60 90 roadmap before i start publishing content all that shit goes out the door by like your third post by your third post you're like, oh, I know nothing and I need to change everything. And that's what you're going to run into. So literally just start posting the content now. And then as you go, you'll be like, okay, like this works. What if I do this? And if it works better, cool. Now that's going to be a pillar within a strategy. Now your strategy is like 10% completed. And it kind of gets built as you go. And then you get the knowledge to understand that now I can start trying new things. Now I can start testing new formats. And now I can start doing XYZ thing. That's when you can start building out a strategy, but don't think about that now. Don't think you, you have to have like this perfect roadmap before you start having million view videos. You do not.

Colin: And to that end, a lot of folks that are worried about time immediately go to, should I batch content? Look, you're going to be so much better at content a week from now. So like, no, do not, absolutely do not make three videos tomorrow, make one video tomorrow and then do it again the next day or do it, do it this weekend and make every single one better. Do not batch in the early days. It's a bad call. You just it so much better so fast.

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Keep the account you have, unless the audience is different

Only start fresh for a genuinely different audience. On TikTok, creator account, never business.

Most people should post from the account they already have. The exception is a hard audience mismatch: a doctor with 4,000 followers from doctor content who now wants to talk about triathlons should start over. If you do start fresh, do it now: browse a little and post. The coaches say there has never been a better time to start from scratch and none of the ‘warm the account’ folklore has ever mattered for them. On TikTok the account type matters a lot: creator account, unequivocally, unless you are a brand selling through TikTok Shop. On Instagram it barely matters, but pick creator if you have no reason not to. For the camera-shy, TikTok has a setting to hide your content from your contacts; Meta will find your high-school friends no matter what you do.

Oren, in the session

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Follow the brief exactly. The basics beat the fancy version

Week 1: a one-shot by Friday, a yap over the weekend, a copywork video before Zoom 2, each built to spec.

The three assignments ascend on purpose. The one-shot (seven seconds, strong text over a phone clip that might already be in your camera roll, no mic, no recording) trains copy. The yap (35 to 40 seconds; hook, intro, point one, point two; recorded a line at a time in CapCut) trains the verbal hook and basic cuts. Copywork takes a proven video apart and writes your story into its structure. Colin’s standing observation: people who deviate into brand fonts and clever framing get out-performed by the plain version. Alex’s closer said the same: don’t add graphics or effects to a one-shot, follow the brief and it will work. The AI-tool version of the warning: auto-editors and AI-written scripts get torn apart in Slack; custom GPTs come later, after some success.

Colin, in the session

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Coach: all right kevin know all the creators he's covering are not alumni though they could be probably at this point

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Who this is

Three founders run the call and, they say, live in the Slack every day. Oren John (@orenmeetsworld) spent years in consumer-electronics and outdoors marketing, knew retail and Meta ads and admitted he was bad at organic, so about four years ago he started making a video roughly every day; he is past a thousand. Colin Landforce (@landforce), Portland, serial entrepreneur and self-described chronic marketing guy, started with written content five years ago (basketball cards on Twitter as the vehicle to find a voice), was talked into video by Oren on a group chat three years ago, and is 500 to 600 videos deep, niched around product and brand building with a golf lens. Alex Garcia (@house.of.ag) started as the $500-a-month do-everything head of social, built House of Distribution into a content studio for eight- to ten-figure brands, co-hosts Sweat Equity, and now makes content about content. Behind them: coaches Alexandra (personal, motivational and spiritual content), Victor (DJ, documenting the journey) and Gabe (musician who came through Cut30 making stop motion), plus Monique on info@cut30.co. This is Cut30’s 24th cohort; about 75 were on the call when it started, roughly 100 per cohort.

Accounts they pointed at

Oren JohnCoach and co-founder; his ‘wild materials’ reel (steamer over colour-changing fabric) is the visual-hook example, and his travel content is the local-algo example.
Colin LandforceCoach and co-founder; the ‘200K diamond machine’ title hook, the police-auction Escalade flip, and the Bandon, Oregon video that proved the local algo the same week.
Alex Garcia / House of DistributionCoach and co-founder; taught the hook section. His ‘good content versus bad content running brands’ video is the verbal-hook example. Founder of House of Distribution, co-host of Sweat Equity.
Bad HambresCut30 favourite (MacWhisper mangled it to ‘Bad Ombedas’): the ‘eight months ago I quit my nine to five to start a frozen bean and cheese burrito company’ hook, shown for clarity, context and curiosity gap.
Mid-Day SquaresCut30 favourite: the ‘we finally got into Costco, but we’re going to need your help if we want to stay here’ hook, shown for stakes plus an open story loop.
MrBeastColin’s counter-example on content-market fit: goes viral every video and spends about a hundred grand on each, so not a useful model for what you can reliably execute.

The vocabulary

Lock-in: Oren’s frame for an August cohort: July drifts, August shows up to work
Content-market fit: What you can talk about forever, what you can execute reliably, what people actually watch
Only-you content: Colin’s golf lens: the cross-section you alone can talk about, so the content can’t be generic
Three hooks: Visual, verbal, title, working together in the first frame; clarity, context, curiosity gap
One-shot: Seven seconds, strong text over a clip, no mic; the week-1 copy exercise
Yap: 35 to 40 seconds: hook, intro, point one, point two, recorded a line at a time
Copywork: Take a winning video apart and write your story into its template
Post on main: No trial reels, no hacks, no schedulers; manual posts at a consistent time
Creator account: On TikTok, non-negotiable unless you sell on TikTok Shop
Local algo: Tag the place, say the town; the account keeps favouring where it was born
The third: Off-topic posts are welcome, up to about a third of the feed; it’s how people get to know you
Office hours: Fridays, 8am Pacific, unrecorded, ad hoc workshopping on whatever you bring

The source

Streams from johnny’s own Drive copy, about an hour. If it asks you to sign in, ask him to share the folder.

Read the full transcript (49 passages, auto-transcribed)

Coach: I'll do it tonight.

Oren: Yo, we got to get better at this. Bro, one in the chat if you have a small dog in your lap right now that no one can see. All right. Landforce has the one. All right. Yeah. Let us know in the chat where you're from and coming in from. If you got any random countries, fun facts, limericks, haikus, jokes, favorite animal. we'll take it all so the universal icebreaker let's show and tell cincinnati scottsdale la let's go third time here love all our repeats so we got a lot of repeaters you know july is interesting july um you know no one wants to do this shit july we have everyone signs up and then they like you know people it gets too hot things get too nice outside and in august they august they lock in you know august like man i really gotta get back to it before of september um so welcome to the lock-in session nigeria samuel what's good man let's go my new york mexico london we're gonna give people a couple minutes to roll in here they're still rolling in heavy uh we'll give you a brief itinerary of what's gonna come before they come in but we will uh start off with motivational chat uh then we'll walk through exactly how all this works. And then we will go into some rapid fire Q&A. Basically every question we've ever gotten frequently asked about like networks and what should I do with this account or that account or how do I start? We're going to blitz through all that. Typically how we do these just so you know for the future is the first two of these are, and if you're repeating, this is different than it's been any previous times for what's worth. We are the first two of these is just us group talking, Colin, Alex and I, who are the main people running this. We are leading workshopping for the entire first two sessions where we'll do some training and we'll do some kind of Q&A testing. And then we have guests for the back two sessions who are creators who have specific things worth digesting and learning from. We'll break down some of the other things we do in here once we've got everybody in a minute or so.

Coach: Guys, I'd love to see if you guys throw in the chat, biggest goal out of the next 30 days. Is it to shift up then? Is it to make, is it to start growing an account, et cetera? What's the biggest goal here?

Coach: All right. Love it. Retire my husband. Let's go. Amber coming in. I love it.

Coach: Yeah. Got the sense of humor. Matter of fact. Unlock. Matter of fact, let me, I'll send you on my wife's email. We got to put her in.

Oren: While you guys are throwing stuff in there, we'll say it several times here tonight, but if you have any access issues at all today, tomorrow, or the next with Slack or the course or any of these things, Email info at cut30.co and our team will, we'll get it sorted out. It inevitably happens. We will get you taken care of very quickly. Info at cut30.co. We'll get you taken care of. If that doesn't work, we'll give you Colin's phone number.

Colin: Oh man. Yeah, exactly. My joke's getting off. It's 541. I'm just kidding.

Oren: All right. So yeah, I think, I think we've got 75. I think we're, that's pretty good for what we got here. All right. So we're going to dive into it. We'll start with some intros and then move around. But look, first, welcome to Cut30. In the next 30 days, you are going to either learn how to make videos if you've never made them or get way better at it if you already make it. We will introduce all of ourselves in a second, but we are here with the singular focus to get you really good at this. And we are also good at that. We have done this now. This is our 24th time. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of winners that have come out of this of every age background niche gender type whatever we've covered the gambit i have workshops rare art videos architecture transportation bricklaying you name it it has come out of cut 30 and so we are stoked to do that with you um but with that there is two groups of people that help facilitate that we're an intro all about here so first we have the three of us that are founded and operate this that's myself alex and colin we'll we'll hit some intros uh alex you want to start

Alex: Yep. What's up, y'all? I'm one of the co-founders for Cut30. Some of y'all may know me on social. I'm founder of House of Distribution, co-host of Sweat Equity, etc. But a little bit about my journey is I started off as a creative roughly 10, 11 years ago when you were the head of social for somebody and you were getting paid $500 a month to basically do everything and anything for a brand. Like you were the photographer, videographer, editor, content strategist, creative director, whatever. The whole thing, they threw in some breakfast tacos into your retainer and you were squared away. That was my life for a few years. But from that, I got to really like just create my toolkit as a creator, understanding content, understanding, editing, understanding kind of like the whole entire game. And so from there, built an agency that's worked with some eight, nine, ten figure brands. for you old guy sorry let me get him muted um like from building out content strategy series shows etc for a lot of eight to ten ten figure brands um and and then uh roughly a good portion into that it was like okay it's time to to start doing it for myself every apply everything that i've done for to these brands to myself and have been able to build up a following mostly centered around very meta but like talking about content content about talking about content um and and yeah that's the the main gist of it and and during this next 30 days i'm same as y'all get more consistent test more formats try new shit um we like to all of us like to to go through this 30 days with you so that's what you'll see from mine

Oren: if it doesn't big up himself enough alex was just flying drones through notre dame alex is on motor speedways filming content for brands he's taking You know, he's at the Masters doing dinners with Dwayne Wade and shit. He is making content at the highest level. So I just want to remind you all that. Shout out to Connor, though. Connor is actually in here. We got to give a shout out to Connor, who used to be at Malvin. Now it's just at Jordan, who helped us do a lot of that. All right, Connor.

Colin: Yeah, my name is Colin, also known as Landforce. This is my real last name, not my superhero name, as sometimes people assume. I'm based in Portland. Like Oren and Alex mentioned, I'm one of the co-founders of Cut30. I am a serial entrepreneur and a chronic marketing guy. So similar to Alex and Oren, been around or content adjacent forever and ever. And at some point five years ago, starting with written stuff, decided it was finally time for me to make content. And then three years ago or so, on a group chat with Oren and Alex, Oren convinced both of us to finally start doing video. He was a few months in at that point. And I've been making videos ever since for the last three years. I think I'm 500 or 600 deep. And I'm super excited to help y'all figure this out. This is an exciting time for all this stuff. And I can't wait to see y'all win. That's my spiel.

Oren: Perfect. I dropped their links in the chat, too, so if anyone who doesn't know any of us can come check them out. I also dropped my favorite Land Force video where he flips a police auction Escalade for profit and documents it. But, yeah, so my name is Oren. at Oram meets world on social media. I worked in marketing forever in consumer electronics, in the outdoors. I eventually realized I was bad at organic social as it was changing. I knew a lot about retail and meta ads. So I said, I'm going to learn it myself. That ended up going a lot better than expected. That was about four years ago now. And I have made a video roughly every day since then. And I'm now, you know, thousand plus videos in and it changed my life. And somewhere along the way we started sharing how we can do that with other people and have met all kinds of interesting people across the globe doing it. So you will see us three are in the chats all the time every day. And you will also see us on these Zooms where we will lead these trainings. And we're going to explain how all that works here in a second. But there's also a few other people. So as you'll notice, we have usually about 100 people every cut 30. And we are workshopping, we will respond to every single video that you post for workshopping. And we will usually do at least one of us. But there will sometimes be two of us. And that comes from the team of our coaches we have in here. So there's a few of them. We'll drop their links in the chat in a second, who do different styles of content than us, right? Because we want to make sure we can feedback from a bunch of different angles. So Alexandra, who is in here, she makes kind of interesting, more personal, motivational and spiritual content and is an awesome creator and coach. So she's in there as well. You will see we have little buttons. You'll know who's a coach or not. Victor is a musician. So he is, you also see him in there and he makes awesome content documenting his journey as a DJ. And Gabe is also a musician. It's really interesting. He came in Cut30 and was making stop motion content and really creative and interesting stuff. So you will see them in here workshopping with us as well. All that is the Cut30 team. In addition to Monique's, whenever you email info at cut30.co, whenever you have a problem, you'll be dealing with Monique, who will help you get that sorted. And she is awesome. So without further ado, we are going to walk through what is in the actual coursework. We are going to walk through how Slack works. And then we're going to get into a bunch of these, like what the homework looks like and how this works in general. And we're going to get into the frequently asked questions. Colin, that'll sound about right?

Colin: Yes, it does. And I just want to encourage y'all to throw any questions as they come in the chat. If it's something that we're going to hit on in the FAQ, then we will just tell you that. But treat this like an open chat with us as we're rolling through this stuff.

Oren: um and so i think first up is me of course yep yeah all right so there's a couple components to this that we'll explain one by one so first we have a big training curriculum in addition to explaining stuff here we have a wealth of videos and a portal online you will have gotten access to this in an email check your spam if you don't have it is to a platform called kajabi that has this if you don't have access you have any problems info at cut30.co can help in that same email you also have access to Slack, which Alex will walk through after this. And then we have a series of calls and stuff like that. That's kind of the other component that we have here. Real quick on those calls, we do this one every Wednesday, where we will have either us or us and a guest, and we will kind of do training and Q&A. And then we have what's called office hours every Friday. They are usually in the morning. They're a little more ad hoc, and we're a little like maybe we're 10 minutes this way or an hour that way. We will post them beforehand. There are some invites out for those as well, where we are just going through, these aren't recorded, and we just go through your questions and workshop, whatever it is you want to workshop. So you've got two opportunities every week to go through those. The first office hours is going to be at, I believe it's 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. Pacific this week, right, Colin? And that is with me.

Colin: Yeah. Sorry, I was muted. They're at 8 a.m.

Oren: 8 a.m. 8 a.m. Pacific. And that first one is with me. And so you'll see an invite you will have for that as well. But to kick off, we have this curriculum in Kajabi. When you log into Kajabi, you will see this. On here on the left is your navigation. And in here under the syllabus is what we are covering. So quick note, if you ever worry, wonder where the link is for a Zoom, or if you want to find a recording from a Zoom you weren't able to get on, we all link it in the syllabus. In addition, we go through what we're actually covering that week. So for instance, week one, we link here all the different modules that we expect you to do. This is basically the minimum viable. If you want to complete the week, you do those. You'll note we have way more content in here than we list out in this syllabus. So we basically cover all what you exactly need, but there's much more if you want to dive in and go deeper on that. And we also cover what the homework is each week with the notes around it and when it is due. And we do this week by week. you can actually see what the expectations are at any given time. If you fall behind a few days or whatever it looks like, totally fine. At the end of this, we have a big catch-up period. But when you actually go into all these sections, we recover everything. We have added content again and again to this over time. Like I mentioned on the call earlier, if you've been here before and there's a lot of repeats, we have some new stuff I'll get to in a sec. We cover getting started. What gear do you have? What social network? What a hook is? How to make ideas for your videos? equipment. How do you set up your profile? We have extensive, we have videos and written text for basically all of this. And any question you might have likely is in here. We got recording, editing, all the apps you recommend, all is inside there. And then we have playbooks at the bottom. These are all extras. So if you have questions, you're like, what do I do with Instagram stories? I'm a musician. I am under 30 and want to post on Snapchat. We cover all of that. I will pass it to Alex to talk about Slack.

Alex: Awesome. So to start, the one thing that I'll stress over and over, and you'll hear me, Colin, and Oren, I'll stress it over and over again. And anybody that's been through Cut30 will probably say the same as the biggest thing that you can leverage throughout this next 30 days is the fact that you have a ridiculous amount of access and feedback from all of us over those next 30 days. And that means be very, very active in Slack. Every single thought, idea, piece of content that you create, put it into Slack. We've created all these different channels strategically to allow you to get feedback, to brainstorm, to ideate, et cetera, over the next 30 days. right and anybody that's been successful that's come through um cut 30 has has essentially did that and they took advantage of that you know they would and not only specifically for that for themselves right they were looking at everybody else's content and looking at all the feedback that they those individuals were getting right like you can you can solve so many of uh your questions and your problems if somebody else is posting a piece of content you look at the feedback that we give them, you're like, okay, I'm not going to do X, Y, Z thing. So that's my spiel on Slack. We have a bunch of channels that are, you know, that we created strategically for you guys, that you guys are going to join. And then obviously that all have different reasons. So the first one, the ideal workshopping channel, this is very straightforward, right? Like think of this as that group chat that you have with your friends. You want to brainstorm, you want to think about content ideas, you want to jam on, on, you know, I'm thinking about this series. I'm thinking about testing this angle, et cetera. That is, and you can see the one that Orin shows here, like this is the archived one. But again, like somebody's in there, hey, I'm playing around with this idea. I wanna mess with this, et cetera. Should I do it? What would you change, et cetera? Like that is this channel. Think of it just as a brainstorm channel. Think of it as your ability to almost like have a text group or a group chat with a bunch of us and we're gonna jam on everything content related. The next one's a session 24 channel. This is right now, you know, you guys are all dropping your intros in there. But at the same time, this is where we're going to be dropping all of our announcements, right? As we do things throughout the next four weeks, as we have office hours, if we change something within the course, if we if something's extremely relevant in culture or something that we're seeing that's working very well. and we're like, hey, like this is something to pay attention to. All of those announcements are going to happen within this channel really after the next two days after everybody's like finished putting their intros within the channel. The next one is troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is mostly relevant to one or two things, either a troubleshooting anything that that's, you know, you're dealing with, with Kajabi, anything related to, you know, Slack, et cetera, but also troubleshooting when it comes to the actual platform. You know, like if you're on Instagram and you can't figure out how to do something, you don't know what the safe zone is, your text keeps getting cut off, you can't figure out captions, etc. Like you can put a lot of that troubleshooting within there. We also have the question and answer channel. Again, very straightforward. You have questions, we're going to answer them. It's as simple as that. The main channel and the most important channel is the video sharing channel. Video sharing channel is where you're going to publish every single video and ask for feedback. Orin's putting it up. But like if you all those replies that you see, like that one has 10 replies, like that is all different feedback that we are given a single video. Right. And that's what's going to happen with every single piece of content. And my advice, again, is like to note all of the things that we tell you and then make those changes, you know, within the next few videos that you create. And then we'll call and we'll go over this in a bit, but we have these different tracks that you're able to go down and kind of jam with other people that are doing similar things. And then lastly, we have the content wins channel. Content wins is where we all have different size wins. You know, if you have a video that gets your first video that gets a thousand views or 5000 views or you get a video like this, it says got around 500,000 views, 1300 followers. And now, you know, none of our we send a lot of emails. None of our emails are fake. We're just screenshotting from from the content wins. But again, like everybody's everybody's content win is different. And so when you know, when you have your first video, like when you get your first hundred follows from from a video, like drop that in the content wins channel. You know, we want to see that we want to share it. We need to turn it into a sales email for for our sake. So please throw that in there. but content wins again it's it's for all of you that are gonna gonna be making amazing content and sharing victories across the board and i'll continue to stress it every single week like this is how you're gonna succeed is publish is at least two parts it's really as simple as this publish content get feedback make the next iteration of content better if you do that over the next 30 days and you don't hesitate to publish content you're not scared about what your friend's gonna think or your friend uh people you went to high school are gonna think you will be in a completely different spot 30 days from now and then 90 days from now it will be a completely different world that you're playing within a lot of that is going to happen because of what you put in slack the feedback you get in slack and and that's honestly like the the biggest benefit of the next 30 days is just having people that have like made all the mistakes have failed have flopped have done all the shit that you you know you're you're scared of happening we've done it at a large scale and we've all, you know, we basically had a group chat. It's like, Oh, I'm dealing with it. Like a few days ago, I texted Colin and I'm like, Hey, but this video for me flopped, you know, like, what would y'all change? You know, like, what, what would y'all change to make this better? That's what we're doing in here for, for y'all. You know, that's what, that's what we want you guys to get out of this. So take, take the next 30 days series, take the next 30 days in Slack, very serious. Cause it'll, it'll make your content significantly better.

Oren: And so quick note on that, you will have that invite to Slack in your email. You can just search Slack or you can search Cut30 and it will get there. Again, info at cut30.co if you have any access there. And then that pinned post I have in there, you have to click those individual video sharing, question and answer, and it will take you to those for you to join them. So please take a moment now, get in Slack, go click those links to join them so you can make sure everybody is in there. And like last word on that is don't hesitate to use this. Like y'all paid to be here, use it. We want you to ask questions. We want to solve this with you. Never feel bad or like it's too stupid or too entry level. There are some people here that have never even like, we've had people that have never even opened TikTok come into this, right? We will work with you through it. We also have people who are super experienced and have hard questions. We will work with you on that too. So again, do not hesitate to drop stuff in there. The only stuff we will ask you not to do is things you could basically very easily find with a search inside the curriculum or like, you know, stupid stuff, but you get the point. I think 99% of people don't do anything like that. Colin, you want to talk about tracks and homework and whatnot?

Colin: Yes. So first up, we got content market fit. But as a lead into that, we want to take a quick motivational moment here. We will have plenty of these. But I think first and foremost, it is a congratulations to y'all for making this jump, particularly if you are brand new to this. We can't say it enough. It's a really, really, really big deal to make the decision to record yourself and publish it on the internet. It's a huge deal. And that's especially the case if, like me, you're a 30-something when you started this or you're a 40-something when you started this or we've had 50 and 60-year-olds and people of all backgrounds doing this. It's a huge deal. It will not be pretty at all times. And it's still a huge deal. We had a lawyer in here who all of his colleagues were making fun of him. They do not make fun of him anymore now that he gets millions and millions of views and has blown up his business off of it, right?

Oren: Quick, quick answer. My favorite video from him is he's, he goes, you know, like, he's like, I like dogs. That's his hook. Then he's like, but you never should have this beware of dogs on. Like I was in front of your property and it breaks it down. Excellent lawyer video. Sorry.

Colin: I love dogs. Classic. I love dogs. It's a legendary, legendary hook. So again, congrats. It's a huge deal. It's not going to be pretty. And with that, let's get into content market fit because the experimentation and everything we're going to be doing here is really the core of this. So if you are familiar with the term product market fit, that is obviously where we derive this. Content market fit means literally just finding content that your audience is interested in watching, right? It's pretty straightforward. For you as a content creator, this never ends, right? You may find it tomorrow, you ride away for a while, and it ends up morphing and revolving over time. Your business may change, Your own interest may change and then your content changes accordingly. Finding content market fit is the never-ending job. You are going to do that with this fancy Venn diagram, this legendary Venn diagram. We're going to do this by finding a combination of what you can talk about forever. If your brand or business is going to be like what you can show off forever, what stories can you tell forever, right? what you can reliably execute on frequently, right? Mr. Beast goes mega viral with every single video he makes. He also spends like 100 grand on everyone. That's not helpful for us. It's not helpful to know we can go viral if we spend 100 grand, right? We need to be focused on stuff that we can repeat over and over again or certainly do in a sustainable way. And then of course, the third circle here is what people will actually watch, what the algorithm will actually grab a hold of. This is really, really important. It is not critical that you get all of these things right out of the gate, but it's going to be crucial towards your path here. When I first got started with content before video, I was on Twitter and I didn't know what I was going to make content about, but I was obsessed with basketball cards. And so I got on Twitter and I just started talking about basketball cards and I use basketball cards as my vehicle to find a voice, figure out how to write and start to build a following, right? It was just something I knew I could ship all the time. So as you're going through this journey, it may not always be super obvious. I'm going to use myself as an example again. I make product brand business building content. I'm just kind of a nut about the way things work and how things come together. I've been making that kind of content for a long time. I also grew up golfing. And through my content journey, I was making videos. They're kind of working. It was cool. And then I started thinking about golfing because I started golfing again. And I made one of the videos that I was making with kind of this golf cross section added to it, right? And immediately I could tell that it felt different. And that's like really that first video ended up shaping the course of my content because it is this unique lens that I'm uniquely prepared to talk about that others aren't. your unique experiences, your experience level, all are a critical part of you finding your own voice and figuring out how to make novel content. Your number one goal in here is going to be to not make generic content and instead to make content that only you can make. We will certainly tell you this over and over again in the feedback. And with that, we're going to get into tracks. This is part of your homework, but around the 500 mark, which is like forever ago at this point, we found that people joining Cut30 really are in a couple of different buckets, right? They really fall into expert and personal brand or brand and business or local business and so on and so forth, right? This is a spectrum. A lot of accounts end up being a little bit of a mix of the two. There's a lot of overlap. Some of your homework in here is going to be to mix and match these. But part of the homework you're going to do today is to pick a track and that's going to inform some of the content you see, some of the people you're talking with, so on and so forth. The expert and personal brand track is for creators making content about a topic or a thing that they care about. You're sharing resources, tools, news, commentary, opinions, your journey on a thing, so on and so forth. The brand and business track is a business promoting their brand, their product, their community. We see more and more people doing employee-generated content, so on and so forth. They're sharing product, lifestyle, the backstory, the characters around, right? The employees, the customers, so on and so forth. These are the two directions. Like I said, you're going to have homework to do stuff that leans more the other direction, but there is no right answer to what you choose here, okay? We will tell you that the clearest path with content is to build personal brand and then use the attention you can get with personal brand to shine light on your business. Like that is as simple as it gets. And anything can work. Like I said, there's no right answer. That is as clear cut as it gets. This kind of fits into the FAQ category, but if you're doing agency and services businesses, we highly recommend taking this route. Become an expert. Use that expertise to drive leads for your business. And with that, we are going to get into hooks with Alex. And real quick for you, if you have never heard of what a hook is, a hook is the first few seconds of the video that you use to catch attention. It's the most important thing that you talk about in every piece of content. Alex is a master working on these with brands, but if you've never heard that term, sometimes we kind of gloss over it. We're referring to what happens at the immediate start of your content. Alex, you're muted, my friend. still

Oren: you look good though you don't look good actually it's really dark and kind of dingy

Coach: we can see that there we go awesome flow all right you're good now

Alex: y'all missed my joke which sucks i don't need to present orange just did my whole spiel for me yeah that's it so i guess it's i really last time i have my notes from last time like did not define hook awesome so what is a hook i guess we can skip through this part um but great hook is composed of three elements and this is something that you're going to stress um us talking through a ton and it's going to be like probably the majority of our feedback at the beginning of a lot of your videos is you guys have to master hook and so you know when we think about where it was five years ago it was so often to just think a hook is only what you say, right? It is just a verbal hook. And then as we get really deep and TikTok comes in and all of a sudden you're adding in like more text on screen, et cetera. And like all of a sudden a hook just changes based on how behavior has changed over the last few years. And so a hook is no longer just what you say. It is these three components coming together to get someone's attention, which is the visual hook, which is what you show, the verbal hook, which is what you say. And then the title hook, which is the text that you put on screen. Okay. Those three combined is now a hook. A hook is no longer, again, just what you say. It is all these three elements working together to get someone's attention within that first frame. You know, back in the day, it'd be like, oh, you have three to five seconds to get someone's attention. It's like, no, like you really have like the first frame and like the first second to really get someone's attention. And all of this plays together for that. And so again, when we look at what this is, what it looks like, these are the three hooks broken down. So you have right here on the left, the verbal hook, which is what you say in this video. I say this is good content versus bad content running brands. The visual hook, again, which is what you show in this video that Orin has. He says, or the title hook says wild materials. And then he has like a, I think it's like almost like heat getting.

Oren: Yeah, I'm using a steamer over a color changing fabric. So as good of a visual hook as I've ever done.

Alex: Yeah. And like the, and the fabrics are changing colors as he does that. Right. And it's supporting the title hook of wild material. Um, in, in this one of Colin title hook, 200 K diamond machine, this is what people scan. Right. And so when you look at all of what, you know, if you actually watch all of these, these are all viral, uh, like very well, good performing videos on mine, you have, you have all those components working together to, to hook someone. This is one of my, uh, best videos. This is one of Orin's best videos. This is, uh, one of, one of Colin, Well, Colin's had a lot of million view videos, but this is one of his best performing videos as my bad, Colin. I recovered there. You do have a lot of million view videos. You know what I mean?

Oren: But once he starts posting consistently again, we'll bring them up. We'll bring the better examples up.

Alex: I also like to use this example of Colin because, as you can see, he's a visual hook in here. He looks a little toasty. But again, all of these components working together is the hook. Okay. And we're going to go through some examples. Sorry. Canva has this autoplay feature. It's terrible. But a great hook achieves three things. I saw your face, Amber. I know that was loud. I'm very sorry. There's three things that a great hook achieves. It establishes, number one, clarity, right? The goal here is specificity over simplicity. The viewer's brain, as they're scrolling, they're making a split decision, right? They're trying to answer the question, is this for me? And so therefore your video has to be able to answer that. A lot of times that is the title hook and then being able to get their attention with the visual hook before they turn on the audio, maybe listen to the clip. The second thing is it needs to provide context, right? You want to be crystal clear about what the video is going to be, and then you want to give them context. And a lot of times that context comes in the form of constraints, stakes, or some shared or relatable situation. And then the third element is you want to open some curiosity gap. You don't want to close that loop in your first three to five seconds of the video because then they're getting all the information that they don't need to stick around for. And we're going to go through these examples real quick from Bad Ombedness, which is a cut 30 favorite. Midday Squares was another cut 30 favorite because they both have done an amazing job of doing this with their hooks. And really doing this, which one of the hardest things is doing this about your brand and what you're building. It's very hard to do that. They both amassed big, big followings off the back end of that. Okay. But into the answer real quick, curiosity gap, this is missing information, right? If I say something like this is good content versus bad content, but there's one brand that you guys have never heard of that's absolutely crushing it. That missing information is a curiosity gap because you want to know who essentially is that brand, right? Okay. So let's watch these real quick. This one here is Bad Ombedas. And eight months ago, I quit my nine to five job to start a frozen bean and cheese burrito company with my wife, Sam. Right. So when we look at these established clarity, provides context, opens curiosity gap, it's nailing all three elements. They're crystal clear about what the video is going to be about. You obviously know it's going to be basically a vlog documenting their journey. There gives context that he quit his job eight months ago to start this company with his wife, Sam. And then here's how it's going is the curiosity gap right there where you're obviously curious to know where they're at, what they're going through, and how it's all unfolding. Now, if we look at Midday Squares. Now, your help to stay here. Right. So same thing. Establishes clarity. She's very specific. We finally got into Costco. But we're going to need your help if we want to stay here. let me explain right she introduced the stakes um that that are now occurring and then she opens up the the curiosity gap by introducing the story this is how you this is how you create and format and and craft these good hooks and what you'll see with what we have um this week which i won't jump the gun on but we're going to have one-shot videos that you guys are going to create which are these seven second videos with really good text on screen, very good visuals, all of the same rules that apply to, sorry, to, to, um, to these videos applies to a one shot, right? One shot is all about how, how, uh, can you get someone's attention and tell a story, both your text and your visual, and can they support each other? Right. And so when we look at these videos, these are all videos that have gone um these are all videos that have gone extremely viral right this one right here on the left you're more likely to become a millionaire than accomplish these things and then it hits you with a list like that is an amazing one-shot video you have an action and you have uh basically your entire hook is a curiosity gap this other one 178 000 people died from drinking raw milk last year and then it you know switches to another stat that's like just kidding so they're matched with an action like these are all great one-shot videos and we have a whole slew of one-shot videos that you're you're going to be able to go through but all of the same rules all the same tactics apply to uh these videos and and the biggest thing that you're going to be practicing with these one-shot videos is great hooks by nailing the title hook and and more so like the text on screen nailing the visual hook and being able to either a share something uh create something that's very shareable relatable putting yourself in somebody's shoes with these videos that is everything on on hooks for mind if you guys have questions about that drop them in here and i can i can start answering them or we'll answer them in a bit

Coach: all right kevin know all the creators he's covering are not alumni though they could be probably at this point

Coach: I was going to ask about timing of the content when they post.

Oren: So we recommend here to establish a relatively consistent time. You'll notice I post almost always in the morning and sometimes at night. Alex posts almost always at night and occasionally in the morning. Get a roundabout rough time and stay consistent is our biggest recommendation. So it'd be like, yeah, I'm a morning poster. I post eight to nine 30 in my time zone. That's good. The only other recommendation is I wouldn't just like post serious business content in like the middle of the night, right? Think about the basics of how this works. You post, It shows your content to a small group of people. If those small group of people like it, it shows it to more and more of those people. From your first post, you can get 100,000. We have someone who's first posted here got a million views two cohorts ago. It was a skit. It will show you to an infinite amount of people, but those first few views matter, right? So if you were posting a super dense video about the legal ethics of some rare court case, people will probably be bored if you post that at 2 a.m., right? So just the only thing I would consider is establish a basic time and use some common sense. And other than that, it doesn't matter. You will see 90% of the things people bring up in here. They're like, what should we not do? Do I do this collab? What's the time? None of it matter. You are overthinking it. We are here to tell you every single day, us and the coaches, that you're overthinking it. And you should post this content because that is the number one thing that will help you actually achieve your goals.

Colin: We had a handful of questions about timing. We just got one about how much time you usually spend editing. it's obviously a very broad question. Something we haven't really touched on enough here today is the entire point of doing Cut30 is that you're going to make 15 or 20 videos in the next four weeks. And then what a video takes today is going to be just like materially different from what it takes a month from now. Right? So the first few are going to be brutally long. You're going to be like, how am I ever going to do this? Right? And then you're going to do another one the next day and another one the next day. And a few weeks from now, it's totally doable. And then like now for me, Like I'll edit a video where it takes 15 minutes, like a real video. Right. And so like, do not worry too much about how, how much it takes every day. It's going to be hard and long. The point of this, the point of making videos every day, which is how we end end this. And hopefully it was what you do off into the future is getting reps and getting better rapidly. And you will, it's going to be painful getting there though.

Oren: Yeah. And so questions we had in here related to that. Okay. I don't know what my niche is. That's fine. Just try stuff. The whole point of this, you're going to see these sessions build on each other. You learn a one-shot, then you learn a yap, then you learn a graphic yap, then you learn a green screen, then you learn a vlog, then you learn a carousel, and they all help you build up the toolkit. If you've done this before, if you are a repeat cut 30, the vlog section is new and the green screen section is new because those are kind of actively changing in the zeitgeist right now. So I would definitely check those out. They are updated for you as of literally like 24 hours ago. So someone else asked, If I post on multiple topics, basically, absolutely. To Colin's point about that Venn diagram, what will I talk about? What will people listen to? Try stuff. This is the, you do not need to limit yourself to one topic, one whatever. If you have, if you are really focused on one thing, you're like, I'm a lawyer. I need to see them legal. I wouldn't post more than like a third about like other stuff, but I would 100% add those other stuff in there. It's what makes it your content interesting, right? I have a branding and marketing channel, but I post all the time about travel or stuff I bought or whatever it looks like. it helps people get to know me and my personality um alex posts a ton about his workouts and like lifting and how seriously he takes being a hybrid athlete and that like helps people understand him and like and people bring it up to me all the time when like i meet them and then alex they're like i was training for something you know this is alex really

Coach: yeah did alex really invent the hybrid athlete yeah he was really in shape

Oren: You'll see, we've built this to go through this. So in these first weeks, we hit here's some basic formats. Then we start layering on some more info about kind of finding your personality. Then we start talking about strategy. Then we start talking about funnels. So by the end of this, we've covered a wide swath. So don't worry if not everything is covered. This is built to get you out here and posting. So anyway, I want to be conscious of everyone's time. Look, you're going to be posting right away. First homework, the one shot doesn't require you to record, doesn't need a microphone, doesn't need any of that. We want that in Slack here literally by Friday. And then we want the other post over the weekend. Get those in there. Do that first one. People who post the first one are people who then complete more of this. We want you to win. We want you to post this. Do not give up. You have any issues. You feel stupid. You don't like it. It does not matter. Post in Slack. Ask us questions. Let us feedback it. We will cheerlead you into getting something done. Again, I want nothing more than the most people coming out of this to be winning so we can have even more amazing testimonials to talk about it. So on that note, 99% of the questions you have are answered in Kajabi. I will go in there, take a look, walk through the first week's content, look at a few others. Anything else that comes up, drop in the channels on Slack. I cannot wait to see what y'all create. Let's go. Info at cut30.co if you need anything. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you on Slack, guys.

Alex: Last thing I'll say on my end, follow exactly the briefs and like the directions that we

Oren: Yes, yes, yes.

Alex: Don't make a one shot and be like, shit, I'm going to add these graphics. I'm going to teleport into screen. I'm going to add these crazy effects to my text. Just follow exactly what we say in it. And I promise you it will work. Do not try to get fancy with it. Don't try to try to get insanely creative. Just follow the brief, follow the instructions. It will work. Promise.

Oren: But if you do deviate from the brief, just tag Alex, all right.

Coach: Yeah. All right, see you in there guys.

Oren: He won't be mad at all.

Coach: All right, appreciate it. Peace boys. Peace.

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Cohort 24, week 1. Kickoff recorded 5 August 2026. Open the owned video