My First Million - The Formula To Break 100 Million Views On Shorts (ft/ Jenny Hoyos)

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Episode 580:  Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) talks to Jenny Hoyos, the 18-year-old who has mastered the recipe of viral shorts. They break down her step-by-step process for creating content that pulls in over a 100M views.  Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (2:14) How to build charisma (6:35) The 4 criteria of a great idea (jumpcut) (8:48) Make it personal (14:45) Mastering the hook (17:29) Metrics  (18:52) The first frame (21:09) Foreshadowing (22:37) Storytelling in one word is “change” (25:06) The But & Therefore Rule (27:21) Building the stakes (30:43) Craft the close (32:14) Steal like an artist (33:52) Figure out who's watching (36:46) Study the channel for outliers (39:28) Where is the puck going? — Links: • Jenny Hoyos YouTube - ​​https://www.youtube.com/@JennyHoyosLOL • Charisma on Command - https://www.youtube.com/@Charismaoncommand • Miss Excel - https://www.miss-excel.com/ • Infinite Ratatouille Glitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tskvmb0HPDU • Steal Like An Artist - https://austinkleon.com/steal/ • Get HubSpot's Free AI-Powered Sales Hub: enhance support, retention, and revenue all in one place https://clickhubspot.com/sym — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

All right, today we're going to get smarter about short form video. Short form video is something I am mega, mega long on. Why? Well, I don't know. Have you ever seen TikTok, Instagram Reels? Have you seen YouTube shorts? These things are taken over the world. So today's guest is Jenny Hoyos.

She is a short form video genius, to be honest. I mean, every single short she does gets like 10 million views, every single one. And it's not because she was famous before. It's not because she's doing crazy, crazy stuff. She has just figured out how to make viral. short form video. So I wanted to ask her every question I could. This is an episode of me learning from her. The tricks. So how does she come up with ideas? Like how do you figure out a good idea versus a bad idea? How does she structure the video? How does she script it? How does she

film it? What are the elements and the hooks that make the video more viral versus medium viral versus low viral? Like what is that knob? So this interview is me talking to Jenny Hoyos, a 18 year old short form genius who is going super viral. And she's going to teach us. So in the next hour, we're going to get really smart about short book. All right, let's do it. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days on. On the road, let's travel never let's jump in. What we're going to do is in the next, I don't know, 45 minutes, you are going to tell us the specifics, the tactical, the breakdown of how you've cracked the viral code. You know how to go viral, TikTok, YouTube. Yeah. But you are 18 years old.

You live at home in your parents' house. It's only been two years since you started doing a lot of the content that you're doing. I went scrolled all the way back and it started off not so great. But then now you're getting like 10 million views per video. You've had a hundred million view short. That's kind of incredible. Is that you? Is that what your life is like?

Give people a sense. Who are you? Yeah. I mean, you nailed it right at the head. Yeah. So I'm Jenny Hoyos. I'm a YouTuber who makes videos. around the life of a cheapskate, I guess you can say.

I guess you can call me the anti-Mr. Beast. You know, people call me Mr. Least. Yes, which is amazing branding. We've had Mr. Beast on here, and he's like, I spent $3 million per video. And I'm curious also, when you record, do you, like, you know, we talk about Hollywood, if you ever see an actor in their van or their truck before they're going to go do a scene, they'll kind of get themselves into character, they'll get themselves into state of mind. nobody can bother them.

Nobody should go talk to them. They are getting in the zone. I'm curious, do you do anything to kind of get yourself into a certain state of mind? I remember there's a creator called Miss Excel that I love this story. I pulled this many times, but she creates content of all things about Microsoft Excel, how to use it better. But she's super high energy. She's like dancing and doing other stuff.

It's like dancing plus Excel. It's a weird combo, but it works. And she said something like, before I go record, I'm not like, you know, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say. I just get myself into a state where I, she said, I feel magnetic. Like, I just get my charisma, my, my energy up so high. And when I feel like I'm there, I run to my camera. I turn it on and I start recording because I believe, she said,

I believe that all content is just energy transmission. It's me pushing my energy through the phone to you. The way I feel, I'm going to push it through and then you're going to feel that way, too. I love the way she described that. That's very much how I do this podcast. I'm just curious, not everybody does things that way. Is that similar to what you do? Or how do you approach kind of getting in the right state of mind before you create a piece of content?

Oh my gosh. I love this question because I used to struggle with this so much as like, honestly, an introvert. Most people wouldn't like the CBS one, but like, yeah. The introvert with a billion views. Yeah. I don't know. I used to do what Miss Excel did. Basically what you said.

I used to like try to bump up my energy. So when I film, I have like the highest energy. But now I try to have like consistently high energy throughout my day every day. And I actually built that model. by doing this thing for like a month, I would set up my camera for an hour and I would do a stand-up comedy show to myself. Like, improvised or? Yeah, improvised.

I've never, like, I've never done stand-up comedy. I don't know comedy. That's amazing. And I did that just to like learn to not be scared to like tell bad jokes and just like be myself and natural. Then after that, I would like record my entire day almost. And like, it wouldn't even go online. That is fascinating.

You actually do that. You would, in the morning, you would turn on the camera and you would just do a stand-up routine just to get yourself to feel confident, to be okay in the awkwardness, and to get your kind of like charisma reps in. Is that what you were doing? Yes. You were doing that? Actually, okay, here's what I would actually do.

This actually sounds cringe because I've never said it before. There's this YouTube channel called charisma on command. So in the morning, I'd watch that, right? And then, like, throughout the day. day, like, I would repeat, like, the things I learned in my head. And then at night, I would do the stand-up comedy show. Like, throughout the day, I would try to record as well, just to, like, get my reps in. But that's essentially what I did. I tried to, like, build up my charisma and personality just by, like, recording videos that no one's going to see. I don't think that's

cringe at all. I think that makes total sense. Whenever I see somebody who's good at something, I don't assume they're just good at it. I assume they've worked at this. And when you see somebody who's good on camera or somebody who's got a personality that's really, you know, charismatic, I assume it's because they practiced being charismatic. Maybe they did it informally, just in school all the time, cracking jokes at the lunch table and whatnot, and that's where they got their 10,000 reps. But if you don't have that or you're starting as an introvert

or somebody's bad at it, there is a deliberate way to get better, just like any skill, just like building muscles, just like becoming good at tennis or whatever else it is. And I actually feel, I actually look for this. I look for things that are really valuable

to have, but nobody wants to practice it. And even worse, people would find it cringe or lame if you said I'm practicing this. Because I'm like, that's a gold mine. That is, we agreed it's valuable. Nobody really works on it. So I don't even have to work that hard to get great at it to become better than most people at it because most people are not practicing. And even worse, even if people want it to practice, they'd feel so lame or it's taboo or it sounds cringe or it sounds awkward to do it, that's a barrier to entry. Most people are not willing to do that. I hunt down those skills and I develop them.

And it's really great to hear you at age 18 doing that same thing. That's really amazing. So you've said before there's four criteria for an idea. Novelty, uncertainty, knowledge gaps, and complexity. Can you explain what this means? Knowledge gaps is basically telling the viewer, I know something that you don't, which is why you have to watch. or similar to we were talking about before,

how it's like, I did X so you don't have to. And then uncertainty is basically telling the viewer that you're doing something crazy that you don't know what the outcome could possibly be. Such as, like, I recently made a video where I sold everything my family owns. There's so much uncertainty and how is her family going to react? We need to see their reaction to her telling everything.

You know, I'm not so much of a TikTok or a YouTuber just yet. We'll be soon. But when I write even a blog post or a Twitter, thread or something like that, I will often put like the central curiosity gap, which is basically what is the person curious about that I can put up front where they're going to want to read to the end to see the payoff? Mr. Peace does this in his videos too, right? He did a video recently, which was like, I have people age one to a hundred trapped in

these rooms and the last person out is going to win. And the curiosity is, who's going to win? Is it going to be the old person? Is it going to be the young kid? That actually is something that comes down to the video idea itself, because when I'm brainstorming an idea, we want the idea itself to have so many questions that need answered. Because at the end of the day, like content creation on YouTube, what peaks people's curiosity is a problem that needs to be resolved at the end of the video or a question that's going to get answered at the end of the video. And that's what I try to do in all of my videos. So let's look at one of them.

So 23 million views you have, what does $1 get you at Starbucks? Like literally the title is the question, the unresolved question. Yes. I don't know. What can you get? And I guess it's more like, what's the most you can get for the buck, for the buck, right? How do you get the most bang for your buck? That's kind of brilliant.

Okay. Who has the best dollar menu? 3.1 million views also unresolved, which which place is it going to be? And you can see literally the first frame is like you holding a dollar bill with Burger King behind you. And it's kind of like, you know, you can see what you're going to do. You're about to test visually. You can see you're going to test.

What can I buy with this dollar at the? this place. So the unresolved question is kind of interesting. The other thing I like that you do that, I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but like it seems like you weave in your personal life or your personal stories. So it's not just like, I'm going to do this crazy thing. It's like, it's my mom's birthday and I want to get her a gift. And then you do the crazy thing, but at least the video is more like, I don't know, I kind of connect with you more. I see your mom. I like that you're buying your mom a gift. You're kind of earnest about it. Is that a tactic that You think about, you know, kind of a personal story versus just a generic stunt?

Totally. I think that's what makes the videos. Like, quite frankly, there's so many people who can do the same idea and it just doesn't go as viral because they're not telling a story. And that's why I try to weave in like my personal life because it's more relatable, more people comments about it. That's how we get that returning viewership. So what's an example of a video you did with a story that you could have done without?

Okay. The best example I have was I have a video where I made a garage. garden on a budget. And if you search up other people's videos making a garden, they were averaging like 20,000 views. Like people who make gardening videos don't average high views. So what was the difference? How did you get, if a normal garden video, 20,000 views, your garden video, 20 million views, what did you do to juice that video up? I told the story of how Ratatoui is my favorite food, but it's so expensive to buy it. But technically speaking, I could just make a garden to have infinite ratatooee for life. And it's my favorite food. So it just works out. And then also my mom,

my grandma were helping me for a portion of the garden. It just interweave so many things that the people can insert themselves into. Right. So you took a normal thing with medium to low stakes. You added your why, why I care about this. And the why doesn't have to be life or death. I think that's kind of important. I think, you know, a lot of the YouTubers did it as life or death. It's like, this is, you know, the craziest stunt you've ever seen. And I think Ryan Trahan and you, I think you guys are very, very likable because it's almost like low stakes stakes. Oh, 1,000 percent. Especially like now on YouTube, people are so used to like these high stakes.

Like seeing $10,000 in a title anymore, people don't even know what that even means because they're seeing people like Mr. B spend a million dollars. So it's like, you know, people are just so numb to these numbers or these stakes where almost these low stakes are high stakes. Right. Okay. So let's take it. Let's do an example.

Here's an idea and let's try to make it better using some of the techniques. We'll just riff on this and see where it goes. Live improv here. Okay, so let's say I want to make a video about me making dinner. So I'm cooking dinner. One out of 10 video concept. It's not going to be the most exciting. Let's use show me how you would make it better.

So let's use either novelty, complexity, knowledge gaps or uncertainty. How would you kind of make that idea more interesting? I love this. So for me, if I was to make that, idea, making dinner, right? Intrinsically not intriguing at all. But what's relevant to me is how much of a struggle it is as someone who has like health condition. Right. So like that's one angle, right? Then there's also the angle of like you're doing it on a budget, which is what I usually do. So now that that's even more of an intriguing angle, like trying to make a healthy

meal on a budget because healthy is supposed to be expensive. Right. Or it could be it could be, I'm trying to make a fancy dinner, but I don't know how to cook. That too. Or I'm a total beginner, but I'm going for gourmet. Yes, exactly. And then, like, there's so many different layers. And I also love to do juxtaposition where it's like, okay, I want to make a gourmet dinner with leftovers from last night.

Or like a lunchable or something like that, right? Exactly, turning a lunchable into gourmet. Then, you know, all of these are great ideas. And then at the end of the day, it's like which one makes you most excited? Gotcha. Okay, cool. And then the personal story part would be, why am I making the dinner in the first place? Why does this matter to me? What are the stakes? So we made the idea more interesting by adding the contrast, the juxtaposition, the complexity, the novelty. But then the personal story might be, I invited my mom over for dinner. She's cooked for me in my whole life. I told her I was going to cook her an amazing meal. The only problem is I've never, you know, I'm an adult now. I moved out of the house, but I've never cooked dinner for anybody. I've never hosted guests. I got to do it. The story is even better now because there's even an angle where what if the video is something along the lines of like, you're going to turn a lunche bowls into a dinnerables because lunche bowls, they don't have a dinner option. It's just lunchable.

And then what's even better is your mom would always, would never cook for you, but she would always give you luncheful for lunch. So now for dinner, you're going to give her luncheer bowls. I mean, it sounds a bit complex. But like as you script it, you don't remember. Like with complexity, the goal is to like add layers to get. people more reasons to watch, but you don't want to actually confuse the viewer. And that kind of comes back in with the way you copyright it because you want to say it in a way that's, you know, easy to digest and drip feed that context. Right. Yeah, when we were hanging out with

Mr. Beast, and he was telling us about some of his video ideas, what I realized was I was like, man, the reason his videos can get 100 million, 200 million views is because it's a concept so simple. You could literally just draw it with a stick figure drawing and people would get it. two people who don't know each other, trapped in a room for a hundred days. If they make it the whole way, they get a million dollars, right? These are like simple,

universal, easy to understand ideas. What you just did with the luncheables, dinnerables thing is both the kind of like that amusement. Like, I'm doing this just for my own amusement. I'm not doing this to impress you. I'm doing this to scratch my own itch.

Can I do this? And like, I think that's very likable and also very simple to understand. Yeah. I turned lunchable. into dinnerables, visually, you can imagine that. Yeah.

Okay, that's great. All right. I'm excited for you to go make that video someday. All right, so we got ideas and how to basically brainstorm to turn any kind of mundane idea into a better idea using those techniques. Now, actually pulling it off, so delivering on it. So what is the most important part? What's the first thing you do when you have the idea? Now, the first thing you've got to get right in order for a video to pop off.

The hook. And the hook is so important. that sometimes I figure out the most viral hook isn't the most viral idea. So then I have to come back to the idea and change the idea based on the hook. When do you think about hooks, I guess like what is the big picture advice when it comes to hooks? And then what is the tactical process you take? Power words should be the first thing that starts the video. What's a power word?

What do you mean? Power words are things that will instantly hook people that are very strong words such as free, zero dollars stole or any like crazy word. And the reason I say that is because I see a lot of people, like way too many people start their videos with, this is, I'm out. This is, is not telling me anything about the video. Like, I actually scroll because it's like, it's bad.

As opposed to someone says, free chicken sandwiches all weekend. I'm in. Where are these free chicken sandwiches? I was in the moment you said free. So that's the number one thing. You want your hooks to start with power words. The second thing is you want it to be progressing the video. The reason why this is is also bad is because it is just saying a statement.

It is not doing anything. This is blank. Doesn't tell me what you're going to do. It's just telling me a statement as opposed to preaching sandwiches this weekend. You're already telling me the whole story. Or I'm building a secret room. You're already telling me the action. Even though the power words aren't until three words in secret, it still works because

it's starting with the action. I'm doing blank. I'm going to do blank. The story is progressing as opposed to a statement being stale. That's the second thing. And another thing that's very crucial for hooks or in your general introduction of your video is to foreshadow the end. Your hook has to be so clear what the video is going to be about.

You're not only setting up the video, but you're also saying what the conflict is and what's going to be at the end of the video all in one sentence, which is very hard. That's what a really good hook has. So I have an example here of one of yours. You have one that says, movie theaters are overpriced. You said, that's the hook. And then the foreshadow is,

so I'm going to make a movie theater at home on a budget of only $5. Exactly. Yep, exactly. You nailed it. You want your hooks to have the set up conflict and what the resolution is going to be all in one. What metrics in a video map to that? So, like, for example, you know, on YouTube,

but in a normal YouTube video, the thumbnail and the title matter, and you know that because you can see the click to rate, how many people actually choose to try to watch your video. When it comes to short form video, what metrics are the top two that are related to idea and hook? Yeah, so the idea slash hook metric would be the view versus swipe away percentage.

View versus swipe away. And what is like good and then what's like amazing for that percentage, that number? Yeah, so I've heard the average is 70, where pretty good for me is 80% plus, and excellent would be 85% plus. But for my channel, we average around 80, 85%, which is very uncommon.

Like, I think Beasts is like at 75%. So I've heard. And then the second one is like the, so you have the viewer swipe away and then what's the next most important metric? Retention? Retention overall. Yes, retention, I'd say.

Because it just shows how much the viewer enjoyed the video. What do you shoot for with retention? It depends on the video length, but generally you want to be at at least 90%. My team, we usually go for 95 plus. Wow. And again, I think for most people, it's like 15% or something crazy. Oh, no. Okay, so the hook and the first frame, what about the visual?

What works in the actual visual? Because with short form, there's no thumbnail. And people aren't really reading the title, I don't think. So what's your philosophy on what to put on screen, what that first frame should look like? Yeah, I try to keep it as simple as possible. It's very similar philosophy to like a title and thumbnail, same psychology in a way where I try to keep it like little to no focus points,

high brightness, high saturation. And we like, we'll go through so many lengths and measures and after effects and VFX just to make it like pop out just that much more. such as like sometimes we'll add artificial fire just to make it look crazier. Like in one of our shorts, I went to Hell's Kitchen, but you don't really get that message across unless you actually add the restaurant on fire. You know? And it's like something as little as that.

You're pointing up at the logo of the restaurant. It looks like there's a fire. Is that not real? That's not real. That's not real. People think it's real. Yeah. So we try to make like things really stand out.

Even with the secret room, when I first hit the wall, I just dented the wall. I didn't even break a hole. And we actually had to make a VFX where it would look like I made this giant hole. Like I broke a giant hole. When reality, it wasn't a giant hole that broke. It was like a little teeny tiny hole because I had like a little small hammer. So it's like little stuff like that. We try to make, we try to enhance things to look even crazier in post.

Interesting. And so what was the first thing you said? No little to no focus points? Oh, yeah. So what I mean by that is we don't want any busyness to go on. I think, you know, it's a really good example. if you can show who has the best dollar menu, like in the first frame, just pause it

and notice that that is not a real environment. Like we actually took myself, we rotoscoped myself, and then we found a image of McDonald's on Google that was so much cleaner that had no cars, the logo was clean, there was no trees, just so it could be perfectly, like, just look perfect for the viewer, if that makes sense. That's what we try to do.

We want the environment to look as clean as possible. So there's no busy points. So, all right, so great. So we've done idea, how to go from meh to good to great. We've done to hook, how to grab them by the throat, get that 80, 80 plus percent view rate. Now you said foreshadowing is the next part. What is foreshadowing? And how do you do it?

This is one that I've heard, obviously I've thought about the ideas. I've thought about hooks. This is not something I do in my process. What is foreshadowing? Foreshadowing is when you give a viewer at the expectation of the end of the video. And the way I've coined it is you basically want to tell the viewer that there's an Amazon gift card at the end of the video, essentially. Like, they need to watch the end. Sometimes you'll have to explicitly tell the viewer, oh, you'll get blank at the end of the video.

Usually a lot of my foreshadowing is implied. So who has the best dollar menu? It's very implied that by the end of the video, I'm going to tell you who has the best dollar menu, essentially. And that's usually the best foreshadowing, one that's like so obvious because it's within the hook and it's implied. But an even better, even stronger foreshadow and hook is when you have a mechanism. So an example of that is, what does $10 get you in Miami? Now, not only do you know by the end of the video what $10 gets you in Miami, but you also know how I spent the $10.

Now, the mechanism is actually seeing the money being spent because in the first second, you see, oh, she spent $2, we're at an $8 budget. And then a couple seconds later, oh, now she's at five. And we have a sense of progression of where the video is going. because otherwise, if the viewer does not feel like the video is constantly progressing, then they're going to leave because they don't feel like even though you said that there's something at the end, they don't know where the end is. So it's also very important to make it clear. Let's talk about storytelling. You have a great quote. You said, what is storytelling? Storytelling in one word is change. Yes. Unpacked that. What does that mean? I think the biggest thing is progression. I guess when I say change, I mean progression. So similar to what I was just saying, The viewer wants to feel like they're constantly either learning or laughing even more or they are building towards something. They don't want to feel like they're watching something stagnant, like they're just watching paint dry. The best storytelling is when there's character development change in the actual character, where at the beginning of the video, the character started at one point and is now at a new point at the end.

So I subtly did that in my short that hit 100 million views. So basically, I built a secret room with $0.00. and my goal was to have a secret spot to watch YouTube. And in the beginning of the video, my mom was yelling at me for destroying the house and how there's nothing under there, like, I'm crazy, what am I doing? And then at the end of the video,

she ended up having the secret room and pretending like it was hers now. It was very subtle, but change like that is what actually made the viewers not only watched till the end to see how that gets resolved, but also rewatch the video again knowing that. Yeah, that's interesting. And rewatching, that's a, that's like a big part of your strategy, right?

Yes, it's number three. Number one is Hulk. Number two is overall retention, which is video progression. And number three is rewatchability. What gets somebody to rewatch? There's not that many things I get people to rewatch. So it's probably the toughest thing to do. So you could do Easter eggs, which is essentially like hiding little things in the video that people are going to comment about and potentially watch again to see like, did that actually happen?

Yeah, I do that. the time. I like a video. I open the comments. Then they reference something that I didn't see the first time. So I end up watching it again. Yes. And then I go back to the comments and it's still looping in the background and I probably end up watching the video three times. Exactly. So that's one way. Another very easy way to do it is just tutorial videos in itself are rewatchable because people aren't, especially if it's on shorts, people are not going to watch a tutorial once and automatically know all the steps. So usually when you have specific steps or lists or listicles is what it's called. It makes it very easy to rewatch. And then my favorite method is actually having

twists in your videos. Because when you have a twist, now the viewer is going to want to rewatch the video with that new knowledge knowing what the twist is. That's interesting. I like that. What about storytelling mechanically? So, you know, what are some techniques? I know you've talked about this, I think the but therefore method, which I don't know, did you get that from the South Park guys? Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Explain what that. that is. Yeah, so Bustle storytelling is basically adding conflict throughout the video so that it makes it more intriguing as the video continues. So an easy example is if I made a video going on a walk, let's say, very bad idea. But, you know, I went on a walk and then it started raining,

and then I kept walking, and then I kept walking. And then like, like, there's nothing, there's nothing new that's like really happening because it's just, you just keep doing things. It's like, and then this and then that. Like, that's such a boring story as opposed to constant conflict being created when you say but so. So, for example, I was walking, but then it started raining. So I had to find an umbrella, but I'm in the middle of nowhere and don't know where I am. So I went to pull out my phone, but my phone is dead. So I started running and you see what I mean?

Like the story feels more intriguing because of your instant. adding more conflict and you're instantly finding that conflict much easier by simply saying but so yeah there's a great clip of the south park guys doing this where they have a story written on a whiteboard and they just cross out all of the ands they're like this is how toddlers tell stories when they came from from school it's like and then and then this happened and then this and then she gave me this and then i got candy and then this and he's like just cross out all the ands and just try to replace them with but and you know but so right so but this i want to this or I was doing this, but then this happened. So then I was forced to do this,

but then I encountered another obstacle. So then I tried this other technique. And all of a sudden, like any story can become interesting just using that. Like that's probably one of the highest leverage techniques that just changes the interestingness of a story. Another one is stakes. Do you use stakes in your story? I know like, you know, basically what's on the line? Why does it matter that you do this? I know a short is so, so small and lengths. You know, you can't build it up in the same way you can build up a movie or a documentary. But have you used that or do you play with that idea? Yeah, I love using stakes.

And the way I see stakes is also like including a why, right? And usually with stakes, it's either like artificial or just like a personal why. But for the most part, I usually try to make like real stakes. I kid you not. Like we always default to like what, what's actually happening in my real life that we can actually include as real stakes. So for example, in that secret room video, it's like the initial, why and the initial stakes are you want to watch YouTube. Your mom's, your mom's yelling at you saying

you're watching too much YouTube, so you're trying to build a secret room. Exactly. But then by the time you take the sledgehammer to the wall, the stakes have actually elevated. It's like, oh my God, she's breaking down her house. She better pull this off or else, you know, now you thought YouTube was a problem. Breaking the wall is going to make her mom even more mad, right? So you, you know, the best stories actually increase the stakes over time. Yes. And we want the viewers to be at the edge of their seats all time. I know this conversation is like primarily on shorts, but like even on like my recent long form, the stakes were incredibly high where I sold everything my family owns.

And the stakes were basically like, this is what kept the viewer at the edge of their seat where it's, I'm selling everything without my family knowing. And I'm going to keep selling bigger and bigger items until they notice. But when they do, I'm going to give them all the money I make to prove that cash is better than trash, essentially. So now, like, it's like, it's a crazy idea. Stakes are high because she can get in big trouble with her parents. And then it's like, you know, when is she going to get caught? How far is she going to get? And while I'm saying all this, I'm showing clips of like me taking the microwave and a bunch of decor and moving furniture out of the house. And like, it's like,

oh my gosh, this is legit. Like, this is crazy. Right. Things are getting messy now. Exactly. Yeah, like the, you know, even great TV shows, Breaking Bad, for example. So what's the change? He's the high school teacher, kind of a push over, pretty boring life. Then he gets diagnosed with cancer. He knows he's going to die and that his family's going to be left with no money. So big stakes all of a sudden. Okay, but he's high school teacher. So where is he going to get money?

So he decides to deal drugs, basically to sell drugs in order to get money. But he doesn't know anything about making drugs. So he goes and he meets his high school, you know, former high school student. But that guy's a druggie. So he doesn't know anything. So this guy takes over and actually creates a proper lab out of it. But the cops come after him, right? That's the story.

And along the way, the stakes get bigger and bigger. At first, it was he needs a little bit of money. Then it's, oh, the dealer that he's working with tries to rob them. Then it's the DEA's after him. But the DEA is his brother-in-law. And it just goes on and on. And eventually he's running this empire and the stakes have gotten even bigger. Now it's life or death.

And, you know, he's sitting on millions of dollars. And so the stakes escalated, which is why. A lot of people consider Breaking Bad, one of the greatest shows because it did that so well. Yeah. I want to recap. We started off saying, let's build the perfect short. We did idea and how you could tag the idea to make it take a bad idea and make it more interesting. Then we have the hook, the first frame.

How do you grab their attention and get 80% of people to actually watch versus just swipe away? You have foreshadowing, which is hinting at what's to come, the payoff, the promise of what might come at the end. And then you have the retention, the storytelling. What keeps you hooked? What keeps you engaged, that sense of progress as the video is going on? Last thing is the ending. So what's the end of this perfect short that we were creating? How do you think about an ending and what do you do in your ending?

So I noticed some of them are kind of like abrupt. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not. Yeah. So a lot of people on short form content will sometimes not even give a payoff because their retention will be like crazy high because they would have no drop-offs. But at the end of the day, there is no viewer. satisfaction if you just like don't give a proper payoff. So my intention with endings is to keep it as short as possible while giving some sort of payoff, even if we have some sort of retention drop.

Because our goal is to ensure viewer satisfaction. So the next time the viewer knows, oh, she's at least going to complete the story at the end of the video. So not frustrating. Exactly. So we want the payoff to feel so good. And the way it's called is Pekin. There's a theory called Pekin theory where essentially you dictate your emotions or feeling or opinion towards something based on the ending. So like just like you would watch a movie, you can be bored for the whole thing. And then like the last 30 minutes was really good. And those 30 minutes will dictate your feelings throughout the entire movie. You would say that was the best movie I've ever watched, even if the first half you hated it.

Right. Just because the ending is the last thing that you remember. So that's why we want the endings to feel intense emotion. So just close it off with either strong wholesomeness or like just like just a, the funniest moment in the entire video. And a lot of the times we like to do twist just because they'll have great rewatchability, essentially. Interesting.

Interesting. So that's the perfect short. Now let's talk about the process. So, you know, you've done some interesting things. I've heard you talk about getting ideas. You're like, I got thousands of ideas for shorts. You know, steal like an artist. What does it mean to steal like an artist?

And what have you done to kind of steal like an artist to generate lots of great ideas? Yeah. Stealing like an artist is essentially taking inspiration rather than actually recreating video ideas. So for the most part, what I mean by that is I usually steal from like topics or like different movie techniques as opposed to like taking actual ideas. Because I don't know, I feel a little icky doing that. Well, it's steal like an artist, not a steal like a thief.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Still like a thief is you take the exact idea from something directly in your lane and you just copy it. Yeah, exactly. You copy it word for word, frame for frame. There's people that are doing that. Still like an artist, I think, is you find inspiration from things direct, but also indirect, adjacent spaces, right? And then you put your remix on it. You have to find a way to add your twist to that same base idea. Yeah, I think the easiest example where I stole like an artist is I'm very inspired by like what Mr. B. does. Like, he genuinely is like changing people's lives. He's philanthropic. You know, he's making people happy. And it's like, how could I do that with the Jenny Hoyos twist?

And it's quite literally doing what he does, but on a budget. I think that's like the best example. Just like, whenever like I want to take inspiration from someone, I try to find what's my unique perspective that I can add to it. That's great. You've also done, like, built some tools. I think you like scrape, you know, you scrape, uh, data. off these platforms so that you're able to analyze a bunch of videos and you're looking for some kind of outlier, I would assume, or you're looking for something at that data. Can you describe what you did and what you look for? So, like you said, my team has built a bunch of tools, and the goal for that is to understand our viewer psychology. So recently our number one goal is to

increase subscriber conversions, because we have over a billion views and two million subscribers where the average person would have like 10 million subscribers. So we're like, okay, let's increase our subscriber conversions. And essentially what we did was we created a tool where we took all my videos and I manually labeled what I did in each of those videos. So some of them were labeled as had my family in it. Other videos were labeled as malicious content. So me pranking.

Others were labeled as like wholesome and et cetera. Like I just labeled every video with any. possible thing the video could be about and a bunch of different like things we did for example if I mentioned YouTube or if I said subscribe or literally anything that could have happened I labeled them manually and then we put them in a graph and a chart to see the subscriber conversions on that specific video to find how I can maximize subscriber conversions and doing something like that we found that I double my conversions when I have my family in the videos and specifically when I'm making wholesome content where I surprise them such as like you know

giving my mom a birthday present, for example, would have twice the amount of subscriber conversions. But then because we have these tools, actually, what's interesting, though, is, you know,

if you don't have this tool, the average person would see, they'll be like on my YouTube studio, they could be like, oh, you got double the amount of subscribers, so you should do that. But that's not necessarily the case. Because what we found was

I got double the subscriber conversion, but 10x less the views when I do that. I actually get my regular conversions when I do malicious content, but 10x the views, which actually means I'm getting 5x more subscribers, which in theory means that's actually what's going to get me more subscribers. It's basically little things like this that we're building tools for to find how we can maximize views, retention, viewer satisfaction, and et cetera.

One of the other things that I really liked was when you described, you were studying the platform and you're like, I will go look at a channel and I look at a short. And, you know, if I see a short that has 10 million views, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best concept if the person on average gets 10 million views. Exactly. But if they on average get 10 and this video gets 30, it's an outlier concept for their baseline. And then you looked at all those outliers to figure out the differences between great ideas versus just normal ideas. Was that right? Correct.

Yeah, it's all relative. How did you do that? What did you do? Does that manual? Did you just go channel by channel? and just try to look at their view, their view counts? What did you do? Yeah, unfortunately, that was all manual.

So usually the way I find these outliers is by going to trending every single morning. Every morning, I will go on to the trending page and I'll watch every single trending short. That's like your morning routine? Yeah, and my nighttime routine. Because it's like, they change it. And my lunch routine, I'm always doing that.

Exactly. What's crazy is to, once you get used to it, you actually don't have to like just rely on trending because now my short speed is just a bit. a bunch of trending shorts because I watch trending every morning and night. Now when I go on the shorts feed, I find trending like content as well. And then I have a swipe file, which is what I actually learned from the books, steal like an artist. And then I have a swipe file that I'll put all these things in if I want to steal like an artist. I want to ask you a couple more questions,

tactical questions. One audience. So do you, you know, there's different theories in marketing. They're like, you need to have a persona or a target avatar. There's other people who say, I'm just making for me. There's other people who say, you know, you should. do a market analysis and find the biggest market possible, and then a psychographic analysis, what they care about, blah, blah, blah. All right, that's, you know, what do you do? You're actually winning.

What do you do when it comes to audience? Yeah, so I used to have my younger self as my avatars. And, you know, I think you can go pretty far doing that, but I realized if I want to get to 100 million subscribers, like I need to have multiple avatars. And now at this point, like, I don't necessarily talk to one specific person. I'm just trying to cater to every audience. Which is like, I guess long story short, I used to do all that market analysis, but now I don't.

So, yeah. So what do you use as the guiding principle now? Just like kind of what would anybody be interested in? Is that the different question? Yeah, the guiding principle is making content that's intriguing for kids. Because at the end of the day, like, that's the biggest audience on YouTube while making it mature enough for adults to also watch. So, you know, there's a lot of kids content where people are screaming. It's like, how do I make kids-centered content that isn't screaming and is a little more like natural.

Yeah, like, you know, Pixar did this amazingly, right? Exactly. Yeah. Made movies that an eight-year-old and an 80-year-old can both go and enjoy and maybe for different reasons, but it's one product. It's one piece of content that just appealed to such a, to totally different age groups. Exactly. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. And I think it helps having my mom in the videos too.

Like, I try to have her as much as possible because people can relate to me coming from a young perspective or people also watch us because they see my mom and they're like, oh, you know, I watch the videos because it's like, it kind of reminds me of me and my daughter. You know, it's like it gives the viewers multiple reasons. Give me your take on where you think this is all is going. So it's amazing that every platform is now short form video. It's amazing that people are getting millions and million. You've gotten a video with 100 million views. That number is bananas. But also, I think people are trying to figure out how to switch to long form. And a lot of people are kind of, you know, using their shorts to try to get to that because maybe they sense that the shorts is not building as much loyalty or trust. The algorithm picks what you see, not you going and seeing the people you've chosen to follow necessarily. So where do you think this all goes? Like five years from now, what does this look like?

Where do you think the puck is heading? Or what are your kind of predictions for what you think, where you think the value is or what you think there may be some misconceptions other people have? Take any of that of like, where do you think this all is going? I'm just curious to hear your takes. I feel like it's going to be like the extremes that do well in the sense of like I think either short-front content is going to be continuing to grow or really long form content 20 minutes plus is going to continue to grow. Really deep or really quick value. Yes. Really deep or really quick value. I don't want to be in between. Exactly. That's genuinely like where I think it's going to go. Yeah, I think I think social media is going to kill Hollywood, honestly.

So let me ask you about you now. So you're obsessed. Is that fair to say? Yes, I have a very obsessive personality. It's scary. Do you get obsessed about other things? Is this the first thing you've become obsessive about? Or did you, like, get obsessed with some video game before that? I'm obsessed with, I get obsessed with everything.

It's a problem. It's a problem or it's a benefit? It's both. It's both, yeah. And what is your, what's your goal with this? Like, I guess, you know, people ask me this all the time. They're like, so when people get like a million views or 10 million views, do they get money from that?

Is that the, are you getting rich off this? Is that the goal with this? You're 18. What do you want out of this? What's your goal? Yeah. So I'm basically living to fulfill my childhood dreams. So as funny as it sounds, like I started my YouTube channel when I was eight years old. Like I am literally living the dream. And like I just want to keep like achieving my childhood goals, which is like it's kind of cringe probably to say. But like quite frankly, like that that is the goal. And ideally like honestly like I really do want to inspire people to understand the value of money and to not be so spoiled. Because, you know, when I was a kid, I didn't understand the value of money.

And I would always ask my family for things. And, you know, like my parents being nice, like, it would give me these things. And it's like, it wasn't until I got older when I realized, like, oh, my gosh, like, they're working so hard to make money. And I would be asking for these things. Like, that's not right. I don't know. And you wouldn't even need it.

And I want to inspire people to, like, live a happy, fun life without needing that much money, which is why, like, my content is centered around having fun on a low budget. See, that's interesting because I thought you were saying, I want to inspire. people, because I want to be the biggest YouTuber and I want to inspire people who, you know, that you can make it as a YouTuber and blah, blah, blah. What you said was very different, though. You were like, your thing that you do in these videos is about having great experiences, either, you know, giving a great gift or having a, creating a friend project or eating your favorite

food, but without having to spend a ton of money, being more resourceful, being more a handy, being, being more sort of self-reliant versus, you know, money reliance. and that's kind of cool. I didn't realize that that was your goal. I'm glad you told me that. That makes me kind of think about what you're doing in a different perspective. And I think it could be a lot bigger if that's the perspective versus I want to be the biggest star I can be. Totally.

And it's kind of tough though because I'm going to be completely transparent. I genuinely want to be the next Mr. Beast. Like I want to be the female Mr. Beast, like over 100 million subscribers. But I still want to stay true to that message, which is going to be kind of tough. is it's like, you know, Mr. V spends a lot of money to be where he is. Can I do that without? I don't know. Well, that's your premise. That's your whole thing. Yeah.

All right. That's kind of amazing. Jenny, thanks for doing this. Thanks for coming on. Where should people find you? And what's the shout out? What do you want people to do from here? If you want to work directly with me, feel free to email team at jennyhoios.com. We can have a one-hour consultation call together and I will review your videos, your business. you know, let's blow up on social media. Love it. Thank you, Jenny. Thanks for doing this. Yeah, no, this is so much fun. I love this. Thank you so much for having me.