The Startup Ideas Podcast - This YouTube expert made creators $100M+ (Not clickbait)

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Join me as I chat with Paddy Galloway, a veteran YouTube strategist who has worked with major creators like MrBeast, where he shares a comprehensive blueprint for YouTube success. The discussion covers everything from initial channel strategy to advanced content packaging techniques, emphasizing the importance of consistent posting, strategic ideation, and effective thumbnail design. Galloway presents a structured approach to growing a YouTube channel over 12 months, with specific benchmarks and goals for each phase.Growth guides to turn your startup into a money printerGet access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/growth-guidesTimestamps:00:00 - Intro03:41 - Why YouTube09:26 - Evergreen Content vs Timely Content11:54 - The Value of Comments and Engagement14:44 - YouTube's Unique Position in Content Consumption15:26 - Monetization Potential on YouTube17:14 - The Challenge of Mastering YouTube19:36 - YouTube's Popularity Among Younger Audiences20:35 - Algorithm Stability on YouTube30:27 - Depth vs. Discovery on YouTube36:51 - The 12-month growth strategy breakdown1:17:38 - Content ideation framework discussion1:32:26 - Thumbnail and packaging strategiesKey Points:• Success requires a 12-month commitment with specific phases: establishment (months 1-4), improvement (months 5-8), and optimization (months 9-12)• Content ideation should follow a 0-100-10-1 framework: start with zero, generate 100+ ideas, filter to 10 strong ones, develop 1 final concept• Thumbnails and packaging are crucial, with recommendation to create 3 distinct thumbnails per video and follow the "three focus area rule"1) First, understand what YouTube really is:• It's NOT social media - it's a streaming platform• 60-70% of views come from TV screens• It's the biggest streaming service worldwide• Videos = digital real estate that appreciates over time2)The 12-Month YouTube Growth Plan:Months 1-4 (Establishment Phase):• Find your niche using triple Venn diagram:1. What you love2. What you're good at3. What people want to watch• Post 2x per week consistently• Don't overthink quality yet3) Months 5-8 (Improvement Phase):• Generate 100 video ideas weekly• Make 3 thumbnails per video• Study outlier content in your niche• Switch to 1 high-quality video per week• Focus on packaging (title + thumbnail)4) Months 9-12 (Optimization Phase):• Analyze your top 10% performing videos• Double down on what works• Spend 4 hrs/week studying YouTube• Make small 1% improvements each video• Build systems for consistent output5) The Golden Rule of Audience Overlap:Each video should have 80%+ audience overlap with your other content. If someone watches one of your videos, they should want to watch MOST of your other videos too.6) Thumbnail Psychology:• Use the "3 Focus Areas" rule• Pass the "Glance Test" (1-second viewability)• Max 4-5 words of text• Make it bright and clear• Being good at graphic design ≠ good at thumbnails7) Smart Title Strategy:• Keep under 60 characters• Use simple, universal language• Include superlatives when possible• Write for humans, not algorithms• Grade A readability score (7-8 year old level)8) The CCN Framework for Ideas:Every video should appeal to:• Core audience• Casual viewers• New viewers9) The Video Idea Pipeline:Start with 100 ideas → Filter to 10 strong ones → Pick the best one10) The ROI reality:• Expect 12 months minimum before seeing real returns• Need 50+ videos to find your groove• Success = Volume + Quality + Consistency• Best converting platform after email• Worth the long-term investmentRemember: YouTube is a game of marginal gains.Notable Quotes:"YouTube is not a video platform... before making a video, you need to understand what video to make, the strategy behind choosing ideas, packaging." - Paddy Galloway"If you're going to do something for 12 months on YouTube, you have to be willing to eat shit for a long time before it might pay off." - Paddy GallowayLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND PADDY ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/PaddyG96Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@paddygalloway8780YouTube Job Board: https://ytjobs.co

Patty Galloway. This is the guy that's worked with everyone from Mr. Beast to Red Bull on their YouTube strategy. And in this episode, he walks through in about 90 minutes, a 12-month plan for you to kickstart and build your very own YouTube channel that can scale to millions of subscribers. Now, this is important, not just if you want to create a personal brand. This is also, if you're creating a business, YouTube is an incredible. place to have an audience and he walks through this whole, whole YouTube cheat sheet, which he prepared for everyone on the Startup Ideas podcast. You're going to love this episode. It's long, I will say, but if you stick through to the end, you'll know more about YouTube than 99% of people. Patty Galloway on the pod. What are we learning today, Patty? I'd love to

to give your audience a bit of a cheat sheet into YouTube strategy, because this is what I do all day every day. This is what I focus my life on. And I think if by the end of this podcast, I can sort of dispel a few myths and give people some good ideas of how to tackle what is, in my opinion, the best platform to grow an audience on, I think that would be a great use of time. I mean, I'd be honored.

You know, Patty, you work with the biggest career. in the game, you've worked with Mr. Beast, you've worked with small creators who become big creators, the Noah Kagan's of the world. I see you out there. So I'm excited to hear what you've got in this cheat sheet. By the end of this pod, what's someone going to be able to take away? I think the main thing for me when it comes to the sort of basis of what I teach with YouTube is that YouTube is not a video platform. Like everyone thinks YouTube is like YouTube videos, obviously. And, you know, I'm being a bit silly.

But realistically, most people look at YouTube and say, I need to make a video. What I love for people to think about by the end of this call is I need to make a video. But before that, I need to understand what video to make, the strategy behind choosing ideas, packaging. So when a YouTuber says packaging, they're referring to title, thumbnail, basically like the packaging of a product. Just in how when you're building a startup or a consumer product or whatever it might be, you have to think about your marketing, your branding, your packaging. The same is true for a YouTube video. And that's a big difference when it comes to other platforms,

like even something like a TikTok where content is served to you. YouTube, there is still that decision made by the user of clicking on a video. So I'd love for people just to have a really good understanding of how to think about that. And I also have a bit of a month-by-month plan. So if anyone is watching this podcast and is like, hey, next 12 months, I want to like build a channel maybe for their personal brand, for their company to just like learn the game of YouTube. I have a month by month, really simple plan that people can follow. So yeah, if we've kind of changed some hearts and minds about how this platform works and give you a plan, I think that's a really good use of time. Before we get into that, why should a founder or someone building a business even care about YouTube?

I mean, that's just a really good segue to start screen sharing because I actually put together a little sheets with some points on why I think YouTube is so important. Let me just start sharing my screen and I can actually get straight into this. Nothing gets people on this podcast more excited than when when the guest starts sharing the screen. Oh, like dopamine just let's go. All right. Patty's sharing the screen. What do you got? Amazing. Amazing. So I'll talk a little bit about this graph in just a second, but this is a viewership graph for long-form views for one of our clients. And there's a point here we want to make. But I think when it comes to why YouTube, which is literally the question of the top of

this page, like, why YouTube? Why should I put focus on YouTube? One of the first things that comes to mind for me is I think people put YouTube in the same bracket as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, even maybe X to an extent and look at it like a social media platform. But when you look at who YouTube are competing with and when you look at what YouTube is becoming, to me, it's much more like a streaming service. It's much more comparable to a Netflix or an Amazon Prime in how people actually consume content nowadays. Like, for example, this might shock some people in the audience, but for a lot of our biggest clients in my company,

we're getting 60, 70, sometimes as high as 90% of our viewership from TV. So from people watching on TV as their primary device type. So I think there is this kind of perception that YouTube is like this, oh, you're on your phone, you're flicking through cat videos or whatever. But in more recent years, I think that's changed to being, hey, this is actually a streaming service. This is TV. This is TV in 2025 and beyond.

And so I was like to sort of start with that point of like, no, this isn't just Instagram or TikTok. This is its own streaming platform. And the interesting thing, if you look at data, Nielsen actually put data together. YouTube, when you look at the total time spent streaming content on YouTube, it's the biggest streaming service in the world. So more people stream content on YouTube than on Netflix or any of these other big streaming platforms. So it's the biggest streaming platform. One of the reasons I think YouTube is so useful for founders or just entrepreneurs in general

is the fact that it's not just a, I post a video and then that video does okay and then I post another video and that does okay, I almost like to look at YouTube content, like digital assets. And people might have heard that term before of like, oh, you know, create digital assets online. But I think every YouTube video I post, I try to view it through the lens of this is almost like real estate on the internet forever. And to kind of back up this point of like evergreen content, so I'll bring us to this graph here. Let me just zoom in a little bit so people can see it quite clearly. but this is just month over a month viewership again for long form no short form included on this graph for one of our clients and you can see in the month this is a viewership from videos we posted

inside the month so inside the month of June we did 2.6 million last year in 2023 and on the bottom is catalog so videos posted before the month and you can kind of see that in the month viewership is very up and down we usually have like quite slow stats of the year you see like 1 million in 2024 January and whatnot because we just don't really have a consistent schedule all the time and things can happen. Somebody who's performs, somebody who's don't. So you see this very up and down sort of cycle of in the month viewership. Then you look at your catalogue. You see like in the month of December, we did 27.9 million views. So this is just the December that went by, 27.9 million views from

videos posted outside of the month of December. So older videos. So we kind of have nearly 30 million long form views coming in every month. from the catalog. And you can see this number is a lot more consistent than it's growing over time versus in the month being a bit more up and down. So I really like to look at YouTube like, hey, this is a platform where you can make content that lives forever. And I don't think that's necessarily true of a lot of other platforms.

It's true for things like search, like Google Search. You know, you make a blog post. It might be very evergreen. But we do look at like X and, you know, we both love Twitter X and use it very heavily for promoting ourselves. but I could make a bangor tweet. It could get 600,000 impressions in 24 hours, but after that point, it's pretty dead.

I think Instagram is pretty similar. TikTok has some like Evergreen longevity of content, but by the time we launch this podcast, actually it'll be January 15, so it'll still be live. But yes, I hear you. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about startup empire. So startup empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas.

Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what startup empire is.

And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup empire.com in the description. My question to, I'm just looking at this. I'm like, yeah, I buy that videos are digital assets. but when I think about making content for myself, one of the things I've noticed is if I news jack, meaning if I create a video that is based on some news event,

like TikTok is shutting down, here's the five things you need to do, those videos end up outperforming by 2, 3, 4, 5x. So how should people think about, you know, news jacking, timely content? versus what you call evergreen content, and could news jack content become evergreen content? Totally.

Yeah. So I think that's a really good point because a great example you'll see is sometimes like a YouTube strategist like myself will be like, you should spend more time making videos. You should make really quality videos so they become evergreen. But if a channel that's audience is news based, you know, covers the California wildfires, you know, three, four weeks after it's happened, no one cares. the news has moved on. So I think that's a really good point. I think I always like to think of channels.

If you are a channel that covers a lot of news events, you're either all in on news and then you have to sort of admit that you're not going to see good catalog viewership, at least compared to what you could do with other formats. But for most channels, I don't think, you know, even in your case, I don't think you're all in on like being super time-specific all the time. So I think it's just about having a nice mix and balance of yes i make time specific videos but i also make videos that are have a longer tail and that aren't just as focused on right now the difficult thing that i notice is even when you're thinking about this for your content you say you know it's performance three or four times better that might be true for sure but the timeline over which you're measuring might

be quite short because of how just naturally youtube shows you oh this is doing really well and it's like first 24 hours when you zoom out a bit maybe those other videos that don't start as well do pick up a a bit. Have you noticed that with like videos that aren't just fine specific, having a bit of a longer tail on your channel? Yeah. Yeah. And also sometimes I've noticed that there'd be these videos that actually I thought were timely at the time, weren't timely. And then like six months later, and just become timely or become more timely. You know what I mean? And it's just like I think of a YouTube video

and I'm curious your perspective on this I think of a YouTube video is like a bet and I'm just like okay I'm putting this out there and the timescale for me is two years like I need to think about will this video get and for me my metric is comments and likes

if I see like I care about views way less than comments and likes because the comments and likes to me tell me am I pulling on the heartstrings of people am I actually creating value am I actually getting them to think and if I do that then to me it's worth reinvesting in content in video content because it yeah I was worried where you were going to go at that point for a second but I love where you ended up because I thought you were going to say you care about comments and likes because algorithmically that's important. But it sounds like it's purely sentiment.

Like it's a good indication of, hey, how much my viewers actually really enjoyed this versus, yeah, like for example, comments have no algorithmic waiting. Like you don't look at comments for video performance. But it's a great indication of, hey, like especially with an audience like you have here that is quite like a tribe of people into similar things. I guess that's a really good like noise indicator of how well you've done. Well, I think for me like what gets me really excited is when people use the comment section as like a social network. I think that's a good milestone for any creator. So when you when people, for example, a startup ideas podcast, if people are like, I really like this idea I'm looking for a co-founder and someone like people have commented before, be like DM me on, you know, DM me on Twitter or whatever. to me, that's like, you know, a sign that what you've built is working.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I also just made me think as well as like in this first point of streaming servers versus social, I think what's interesting is like YouTube has that kind of like time spent that you get from like a streaming platform as in how long you're spending with the viewer. But there is like some social media components, which is a common section. like Netflix doesn't have a common section.

So you feel more connected to the community than just watching content. 100%. All right. Let's keep going. Totally. So yeah, really do like to look at content Evergreen. I think that is a really good point though. Not everything is Evergreen, but there is like algorithmically nothing that punishes

older content. If older content started getting more views than newer content on YouTube, that's what would be promoted. There's no like bias towards new content on YouTube. In my experience, I'm curious what you think. think about this, Greg, but in my experience, from comparing it to other like marketing forms, like I find that YouTube converts second best only to email when it comes to selling to a product, when it comes to selling or promoting a service, I find YouTube converts really,

really well compared to other platforms and at least at a per user basis. So that's also something to really consider as well as like you can build really big audiences on other platforms. but YouTube, especially if you do have like a quite defined, clear audience you're going after, after, I find conversed really, really effectively. And this might not be as big of a factor for people in your audience, but it's also worth mentioning. And I'm sure you've noticed this as well yourself is like you're kind of getting paid to make advertising content in some ways.

Like your content is advertising what you might provide or do or even if it's just purely because you want to build community. you're getting paid to do that. YouTube have AdSense built in. I would say the kind of range I give most people here is if you have a Western audience, if your audience is primarily English speaking in America, Canada, UK, Europe, you're probably going to see a $3 to $10 or PM,

so that's the amount you get paid per 1,000 views. So if you're going to do some basic maths on that, like you look at the viewership that we see on these channels. And you just look at like December, number, 27.9 million views. You apply a $10 or PN to that. That's $280,000. So like, there is a lot of potential money just to make just from that. And even if you are a smaller channel, like I've worked with channels that are maybe doing a couple million views a month, which is still big in the grand scheme of things, but a lot smaller than these numbers, they're promoting a service.

They're promoting their book, their service, their product, whatever it might be. But they're still making 20, 30K a month from YouTube kind of seamlessly. And the audiences are also so used to advertising that it doesn't have any cost really when it comes to frustration or people feeling like you're selling too much. Because this is just so seamlessly integrated that it's like I can just turn us on and make money from my content. Which if we're being honest, although we don't want YouTube to hear this, like most of us would make for free. Like we don't need to get paid directly from YouTube. It's like such a such an extra little bonus that I think is great. another thing is it's really hard, which could be seen as a bad thing, but I think when you compare it to other platforms, YouTube is the hardest, one of the hardest to master, which means there is a big moat.

I think it's hard to compete with someone who has a good understanding of YouTube and knows how to make content on the platform. And I do think there is more barriers to entry, but that makes it a bit more predictable and more stable of if you get good at this, you can consistently grow audiences on YouTube. and it's kind of how I made my career. I've been doing YouTube since 2007. I've just got really good at growing YouTube channels, and I find lots of people into the space, and I still have that advantage of, I know these skills.

I've been through all of these different journeys of these different channels, and that's a hard skill to compete with, whereas I have some friends that are into, like, growth hacking on Instagram, which I used to be into at some point as well, and other platforms, and there does seem to be more of a kind of, like, fast turnaround over marketing tactics that are working,

like how can we kind of like game this system really quickly and then that gets overutilized move on to something else there's forms that that takes on youtube for example like a new video format that everyone's copying or whatever but generally the platform is just a bit more stable and mature and you just need to be able to make really good videos and if you can do that you're going to do well on the platform and kind of building on the same point stable there's no ban coming for youtube anytime soon at least not that we know of um I think think I feel good building a house on YouTube. And as much as I really like X and I admire Elon in many ways, like I do sometimes feel a little bit unstable on X. Obviously, TikTok, if you have a TikTok account

right now, you're feeling a little bit unstable. I know there's that quote of like, you know, building on rented land and, you know, it's still owned by YouTube. But it's an American company, super stable, makes really good money, has good leadership. I've met the CEO of YouTube. And, you know, I felt really good about him. That doesn't really mean that much. But I felt, well, this guy is really prioritizing creators and prioritizing the platform. So I think that's worth considering if you're willing, because it's such a big thing to invest time into, like with this previous point,

about how hard it is, that if you want to, if you want to decide if that's a good use of time, I think this is a platform that's going to be around for indefinite, like this is here. Something as well that maybe is a point that doesn't need to be made too much, but anyone that has a kid or younger, siblings, like, it's kind of crazy how popular YouTube is with those younger demographics.

So this is off the top of my head, but I believe total market share of the streaming market for the US as a total number is about 10%. YouTube, 10 or 11%. I've seen it get as high as 13%. With 2 to 11 year olds, it's 33%. So that's 33% of basically what they're watching is YouTube, which is kind of crazy. And again, when I look at any of like younger siblings or cousins that are than that age cohort, they're watching YouTube pretty much exclusively on their iPads, on their TVs. And all those viewers are going to grow up and still watch YouTube in different forms.

They're going to want to learn about business. They're going to want to learn about different things. Your audience might be building products and offerings around. I like to look at YouTube as like pretty stable algorithmically as well. It's not always the popular narrative, but having built on this platform for a year, years. Like what works now hasn't changed that much from what has worked in the past. That's kind of my previous point around it's less lottery based. There's more stability. There's not as much sort of gimmicks and growth acts. And when I first started on YouTube, I mentioned 2007. Back then it was like

the Wild West. Like I was, you know, doing some outrageous things to exploit things I noticed around YouTube's algorithm, like different things I could put in a title, different things I could put in description, all that doesn't work anymore, which sucks in some ways because it was so fun, but it's actually good now because it means that, okay, we kind of understand the rules we're playing with. There's no way to really exploit this system like there was previously. And then I would say the final point. I want to talk about that for a sec. Go ahead. Because on my good days, that's what I believe. I'm like, yeah, YouTube has a stable algorithm and like you know i'm building on such a solid foundation and i just have to create

good content and i'm going to let the youtube gods just lift me into valhalla but on my bad days like today for example i posted a video okay so i'm in miami i spend thousands of dollars to bring people to miami to do an i rl pod with cody schneider a friend of the pod and cameras and people I put, you know, I, I, I think I have an incredible conversation about this concept called digital gravity around how to actually use a lot of AI tools actually to basically create, you know, internet audiences and how you funnel people into customers. And I post, me and my team post the video, it goes nowhere. I refuse to believe that I was like,

okay, I'm just going to have lunch. I'm not going to change the title, you know, right away. Not changing the title. I'm going to have lunch and just like be a calm, stoic person. And by the time I get back, hopefully, you know, the common section is buzzing and stuff like that. And by the way, I'm not talking about views. To me, like, again, likes and comments.

Yeah. Specifically comments. and it's Ghostown, ghost town, USA, bro. So that's when I'm like, oh man, do I have to do a clickbait title change right now?

Did the clickbait title change? Ended up. So the video was called, I'm going to tell you the official, here, I'm going to give it to you straight. The only marketing you need, the only marketing strategy you need for 2025 and then I changed.

So that's what I have. previously, then I changed it to he built a startup using AI that prints money, full tutorial in brackets. Put that, you know it's right now it's already at three on ten. In an hour, it went from a ten on ten to a three on ten and the common section and everything.

And it's like, damn it. What do you think about that? Well, I think what you're describing is a very, like, it's a common thing that. YouTube is often fine, which is like, hey, like, I've put effort into something, because you described this was like, IRL, you got these cameras, spent this money. You put effort into something, which is important, but it's less important than packaging. So like, you could do incredible. I have a friend in Austin who is this like, he's shot advertisements for like Porsche,

Aston Martin, Adidas. Like, he's like this incredible, like, creative mind. He gets no views on YouTube. His videos are incredible. Every time I watch them, I'm like, this should get more views. But it's because his content isn't packaged. He's not actually a really good title thumbnail wizard when it comes to his content. So the point you're making, I don't think that contradicts the point of that YouTube is a stable algorithm. It's just that maybe you dislike a little bit of what that game is in that sense. Like, hey, I put this effort into something that wasn't rewarded.

But to me, I would look at that and say, well, it's still, even if something is not, even if something is focused on, being quite clickbait in some ways or like being over the top, exaggerating, like using superlatives, at least we can say, well, that's what works and we can build around that. Yeah, don't hate the player,

I hate the game type thing. It's like, I'll tell you what works from that experience. It's like the only marketing strategy you need in 2025, dude, no one's looking for a marketing strategy. Yeah. It's just like,

it's like eat your vegetable. right? Like no one wants to eat. If you tell a kid to eat your vegetables, they're not going to want to eat their vegetables. Not going to work. But what we ended up with, which was he built a startup using AI that prints money,

full tutorial. It's like, ultimately, what do people want? They want to create startups that are successful. Yeah. He built a startup that prints money. He, that kind of adds, like, who is this guy? Intrigue.

Maybe I'll click in. and full tutorial just basically it says that it says without saying that here's a bunch of information that's going to be really valuable. Totally. I think a similar parallel to this is one of our clients in the business is a personal finance creator, one of the biggest personal finance creators in the world. And if we make content that's around things that realistically, the average American should really be doing, like paying off debt, typically doesn't perform well.

If we make a video that is like, how to become a millionaire in 2025 following this, you know, system or playbook, it's like everyone's clicking that. Which is like, yeah, maybe the, maybe the viewers need a marketing strategy for 20% but it's less sexy. It's less interesting than seeing this big case study that you did instead. Totally. It just, I will say, I have to admit that it does make me feel a little. bad. You know what I mean? It makes me feel bad because I want people to, I wish I could say eat your

vegetables, but I end up having to make soup instead. I'm making vegetable soup instead of here's a piece of broccoli. Here's a dry piece of broccoli that's going to have like, you know, it's going to be like eating like a box and you're going to have like, you're going to have, like broccoli stuck in your teeth. No one wants that. But like here's a hot vegetable soup on like a cold day with like a slice of sourdough bread. You know what I mean? But I do feel a little bit bad because I'm like, I don't want people to be like,

I'm going to watch this and I'm going to be able to build a business that will print money. Right? That you have to put in the work and you also, there's a certain degree of luck that is necessary and you have to like have placed bets. consistently. But I, again, I think that it's helpful for people to hear to these stores and have these frameworks and have these tutorials because I do think it increases their odds of winning. Yeah. Yeah. I'm at a tweet one time where I was like, I'm 28. I run a seven-figure consulting firm for the biggest creators in the world, ask me anything. And someone in

the comments replied saying like how do you not be so arrogant or something and I was like I know how to not be arrogant that we just get no views you know like if I was just like I run up pretty successful and people aren't going to ask questions so I think so much of these things is interesting and even the conversation we've just had the last three or four minutes it hasn't made about the algorithm it's been about people it's been about human behavior and what humans are drawn to and I think what helps me sleep at night when you know I'm coming up with tile phone else that are on the verge of being more clickbait is always like if I feel that the video has really good value in there and has like a good message and can be really good

content this person should have watched then to just sell them on getting them in there to oversell them a little bit on getting them in there is the price I pay you know for my conscience I do think there's some truth to like I mean even if you look at the world's biggest creator right like the world's biggest creator Mr. Beast, he'll make a video on like $1 versus $100 million private jet. In the thumbnail, there's a solid gold jet. Like it's just solid gold. The whole thing's made of gold.

That didn't happen in the video. The video does 200, 300 million views because the video is still an incredible piece of content for the people that wanted that piece of content. So it's like, yes, we oversaw a little bit, but it's kind of like how a movie poster or shows something. And that might not exactly happen in the movie. So, yeah, I think it's part of the game. It is like a human experience.

It's a human thing of like, ah, like, I wish people would just watch what was actually important. It didn't need to be like sold. And sometimes when the audience members give some backlash, it's kind of funny because it's like, well, stop clicking on it then. Like, you're the guys that like make me have to do this. Because every time I package it in the way that is more authentic

to what it is, you don't click. So yeah, it's a, it's a funny paradox. Should keep going? Absolutely. Last point to have here, I believe, maybe I'd be interested here if you disagree at all here, but I think YouTube is the platform that has the best marriage between building real depth with your audience and discovery. So if we think about those two things, they're quite often inversely correlated.

Platforms that have very high discovery, let's say TikTok, Instagram Reels, whatever, aren't the best for building depth. And then on the flip side, platforms are great depth like, for example, email, newsletter, but also things like Twitch. Twitch is a great example. Twitch creators convert insanelyly well, but there's no discovery on Twitch. There's really bad discovery on Twitch. In fact, most Twitch creators grow by going viral on X and on YouTube and then putting an audience towards Twitch. So I think it's a bit of a unicorn when it comes to you can build a really strong connection and community around an audience and still have really good discovery. I don't think there's anything else out there. I'd be curious if you agree or disagree

with that. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think I'll tell you how I think about YouTube. It relates to this and you can tell me if I'm thinking about it wrong or right. So I think that if you're going to be on YouTube, you have to have two different types of bets, affinity bets and attention bets. So affinity bets is, for example, I used to do these live streams where it was like, bring me your startup ideas and I'm going to work with you and give you feedback on it. A hundred people would show up, but it would be like the true 100 fans. and that's about like building that tribe.

Attention bets are what we kind of talked about before, which was what's something that like top of the funnel, like pick your niche and then actually pick your sub-niche because I think if you know your high-level niche is going to be too big. If I would have picked business, that's too big. But I pick startup ideas. It's like a sub-niche, right? So pick your sub-niche.

and then think about what's top of the funnel for that sub-niche. And I think that if you do two-thirds attention with one-third affinity, it's probably your recipe for success. Yeah, I like that. But, dude, you're like the pro. I'm just like, don't know what I'm doing, putting out content. You know what I mean? This is just like based on what I've known,

known building on YouTube over the last few years, this is what I've learned. But I could be completely wrong. No, I think you're hammering on a good point though, which is like there, I mean, even here's a great case study of this, right? Noah Kagan, you mentioned Noah Kagan in this conversation and someone we worked with. When I first started working with Noah, he was doing 10, 15, maybe 20,000 views of video. At our height of working together, we were doing four or 500K views a video. But in doing that, because that was,

you know, when we met with Noah's team, they were like, we want to increase views. So I'm like, okay, we will work on increasing views. But what happens in doing so is,

yeah, we go so top, like your example of like looking at the very top of the niche, the broadest videos in the niche, we went so focused on making formats around there.

But then on this kind of beautiful, like 360 it can happen on YouTube. I think Noah kind of looked at it and was like, okay, now I'm getting loads of views. viewership, but when I want to promote something or when I want to make a video that's talking about me or my stuff, it does terribly. So I'm almost like being like negatively reinforced and

not do that. And then I've kind of made a prison for myself of making these viral videos, which is the cost of going viral, which is like, hey, like if you want to go really broad, there is a downside, which is you're not going to be able to do whatever you want. You're going to have to pander to an existing audience. And there are exceptions of that. Some creators who just like say I make whatever I want and they can be very loud about how silly it is that everyone else panders too much of their audience but I'm like you're a unicorn like Casey and I start I love Casey and Istatt to bits. I'm not going to listen to him too much when it comes to YouTube strategy because he's a unicorn like he can his like sense of what's good is so strong that he can

make great videos and I also still don't fully believe that he doesn't at least pander a little bit or think to the audience a little bit because I believe everyone does on some level. But with most of our clients, like I always like to look at it. Like, how do we sort of establish the rules for what videos need to get made? And some of these points I'll bring in as we go through this screen share together. So how do we establish the rules of like what's big enough for us? What's like an idea that will do well? And then mix in you use the word affinity, whether that is like community,

whether that is like things you're generally passionate about. Mix that into those ideas or after those frameworks have passed. So like can this video do this, this and this? and then also can we include this in the video, like some form of community, passion, whatever it might be. I have found that what's interesting is like everyone on the surface says their goal

is to grow the biggest YouTube channel, at least when they work with me. But I've just noticed from observing people that you kind of have to let them at least one and every five or six, just let them try something and do something. And, you know, some creators call it like one for me, one for the audience.

you know, I would look at it more like five for the audience one for me if I'm in control because, you know, I'm prioritizing the audience over myself and if I'm trying to build the biggest channel possible. But yeah, there's lots of like competing tradeoffs where I think people can, would be well served thinking twice over whether it is, it is they want to build the biggest audience possible because Mr. Beas gets worse conversion rates than you, if you're promoting, you know, a business product, obviously. But his total volume size, is so huge. That's powerful in its own right. Totally. What else is on this cheat sheet? So next up, let me just scroll down here. I've actually just got my month by month. So like this

is going to be posted in January and kind of going through and looking at this year, like for anyone that is maybe they've already started their channel, maybe they're thinking about starting a channel. Like this is the real month by month that I recommend people to do. Now of course, with any kind of prescription. This is about adjusting it based on what you can do, what you want to do, whatnot. But like, we grow channels for fun with my business. We, you know, work with these huge creators, but we also kind of incubate and work with these smaller creators from the ground up all the time. And this is what I found works. So if I was coming in and becoming a partner on a beginning channel starting tomorrow, this is the month by month I'd follow. So maybe I'll go through

each phase and then just pause and see if there's any thoughts from you, Greg, and we can go from there. Yeah, I mean, this is, I wish I had this when I was starting. Oh, could you, can you just walk us through it? Totally. Totally. So month one to four, so your first kind of four months on YouTube, if you're starting from scratch, so zero videos posted, I'd like to look at this as the establishment phase. So it's kind of like figuring out what we are, what we're doing, like what are we even doing here, and just trying to kind of get to grips of the platform. A big mistake I think people make is they listen to people like me and other people talking about YouTube strategy too early.

And that pollutes their thinking. And they end up like overthinking content, spending too long trying to make a video, trying to be perfect from the beginning. And I mean, it's the same with business, right? Like, you know, you can do all like the seminars. You can learn all the stuff, read all the books. But, you know, if in four months you haven't launched anything, you haven't done anything, like it doesn't matter.

So first four months for me, step one, find your niche. Like I really liked your point you brought up there a minute ago about niche versus sub-niche. So kind of find what your niche or sub-niche is. I like using the triple Venn diagram. So find the intersection between what you love, what you're good at and what people want to watch. Very simple in theory, hard and execution.

But I think when you're trying to identify what your niche is, whether that is your personal brand, whether that is something different, because maybe there's people watching this that would like to make a channel. as the kind of founding point for a business and sort of reverse engineer it, rather than just saying, I've got a business, kind of build a channel to promote it.

Someone thinking, hey, I want to start a business in the future that's in this niche, can I build in a YouTube channel first? So I think understanding that triple event diagram and finding that is really important. And then step two,

laser focus on that's important, even if you don't end up doing this, you know, even if you don't do, go on YouTube for any social product, like for any internet audience and for any just professional career stuff so that's key yeah yeah because you'll see sometimes people like really focus in on just what people want to watch but if you're not good at it you don't love it like you're not going to last very long doing it um and sometimes

you know i have certain things that i love that no one cares about you know like there's some things that are too niche or too focused and also sometimes people think especially if they're a personal brand that their channel should just reflect them as a person. And for anyone that knows basic probability, like if we say like, hey, you have an interest that 20% of the human population is interested in, which is ridiculous,

but let's say, and then you have another interest that 20% are, and then another interest that 20% are, and you try to combine those all together on one channel. Like the probability of finding a person that is interested in all those different things is well under 0%. And that's kind of the step two here,

which is laser, focus on the niche or sub-niche, don't be a sushi restaurant serving burgers. I'm sure you're familiar with Andrew Wilkinson. I remember being on like a Zoom Q&A within one time and like you just made a really good point of saying like if you're a business, like don't be the sushi restaurant that also serves burgers because you know that does, that's not a good sushi restaurant. If you do everything, you're not really good at anything. And I think when it comes to YouTube, like same is true. Don't be that channel that is like making business content, but then also like posts a vlog of their golf at the weekend. And then when I get angry, they say, lots of people that

like business also like golf. I'm like, well, you know, what, 100%, 80%? I don't think so. It's like 20%, 10%, like we're focusing on the wrong thing here. So laser focus on the niche, don't be a sushi restaurant. And step three, this is a bit prescriptive, but I think it's really useful for people starting out. Find a way to make two videos every week at the beginning. Don't worry too much about ideation. Don't even worry about like yeah what you're making just do what calls to you pick your niche and say hey this would be fun to make this would be fun to make just make videos and if you do that for for four months and you're posting two videos a week you're going to be in a very different position when we get into the the next phase of of the plan so yeah i'll pause here for a second so if there's any

any thoughts for you Greg um it's hard to make two videos every week it's really really hard um it's not impossible. I do two to three pods a week, which is really hard. Because I'm not a creator, so to speak. I'm running businesses, so like finding the time to do it. But I think the key is when you're going through this,

at least this list for yourself, is what would it look like so that I can actually make two videos per week? Like, what would need to exist in, you know, would I need a full-time editor? Would I need someone to help me research ideas? What I need? Like, what would that look like? What is the cost for that? And then what do I think the ROI could be?

And actually doing a financial model for YouTube. Like, I don't think a lot of people do that. I don't think I've ever seen that. Like, even you saying it, I'm like, because I think I have a biased view. because people that I typically work with are either creators that are all in on just being a creator. So they're not doing this as an extension to their business or their Fortune 500 companies who are like right to check. We don't care. Like we don't need to think about that.

I guess I think about it more like SEO. Like when you think about SEO, you think about, okay, I'm going to spend $5,000 a month to create X amount of pieces of content. And then based on that, I'm going to get Y amount of visits. And then each visit is worth Z amount of sense. So I think that, and this is probably something that you can use chat GPT to help you actually like, you know, pretend you're a financial model model for Mr. Beast. You know, pretend like you're starting a new channel and you're starting from scratch and you have no help from anyone else. Maybe you have one Twitter account with 600 followers.

assuming I create two videos per week, what do you think, you know, based on XYZ and then you make, you get like a first version of a financial model. And then from that you can edit it. Yeah.

I think part of that is like understanding that even with this, like there is every real possibility that you could do this for 12 months and not see an ROI or not see like a kind of enough traction to justify it. So I think useful power that as well as like looking at the beginning and saying like I'm willing to make this bet.

Let's say it's going to be like 30K for six months of runway because I'm going to have a power time manager. I'm going to have this person, that person. And to me, spending 30K on this to try it for six months is worth the potential upside that I think this can bring me. Yeah, I think this is like the broccoli kind of thing, which is like I don't know what we're going to title this this pod um but realistically it's going to take at least 12 months for you to see the ROI so we have this um i have this like cohort based program we just called the youtube

accelerator and i'm not bringing up to plug it because we're not actually taking applications right now but the interesting thing is like one of our like things we look for is you have over 1,000 subscribers and you've posted over 50 videos before we let you into the program because I find that like that is like the awkward phase. That's the kind of figuring it out phase. That's the kind of necessary like steps you have to put in before you're even primed for growth. After that stage, like if someone has a strong niche, if they are doing the right things and they have the right strategy, like things can grow quite quickly. Things can snowball. pretty quickly after that point.

But yeah, you need to be willing to kind of look at this as like, I'm going to eat shit on this for a long time before this might pay off. All right. Let's keep going to. We won't title it. We won't title at that. By the way, Matt, I'm going to, I think what we should do is you should title this, this podcast.

Totally. I've titled, I've titled nearly every podcast I've ever been on. And most of them have done well. So I'm totally down. Cool. All right. Let's keep going. all right so let's say you figure that out you have and when i say make two videos a week like

it i agree it's really hard especially if this is something that you're only able to dedicate a certain amount of time on but um at the start to me it really is about numbers and just getting stuff out there and just getting used to posting videos and not really worrying too much about ideation so like let's just say you're a channel that wants to talk about um AI startups. Like at the beginning, like you're, maybe you're just filming a video on Lume,

just walking through some thoughts and you're just posting that video. And there's not much edits. You're just trying to make a basic thumb out. At the beginning, I'm not really worried about that. I just want to kind of put something out there to just get into that habit of making content

versus like, you know, trying to refine something really well at the beginning. But let's say you do that. You do that for four months. You are about 32 videos posted. Now we move into improvement phase. So we've kind of established ourselves as a channel. Really at this point, we're posting frequently and we have a laser focus on what that niche is.

Then people often ask me like, how do I know if it's the right niche? How do I know if I should pivot? All these things to me at least, they're like the wrong kind of questions because if you did this exercise at the beginning, we know you're in a niche that people there isn't an audience for and we know you're good at it. We know that you love this niche. So the question isn't or the solution isn't to pivot just. because we haven't seen results. It's to keep focusing on this niche.

You know, I see these people. Maybe you see this people in the business world, Greg, which is like they're just constantly jumping between projects or ideas or passions. And they never actually really build anything of note because they don't wait long enough. It's like the fisherman who constantly moves his hook from the bottom of the ocean to a different spot every like two minutes and keeps missing the fish. So I think being focused on that niche you select and just committed to it is, really important. Any, like in terms of selecting the niche, I know we're selecting it using the triple

Venn diagram, but are you, like, that feels very human to me. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's like, you kind of like, that's how I picked my niche with startup ideas. It's not like I was like, oh, there's like demand with startup ideas. It's just like, it was what interests me. Do you have any tips for people with like how to jumpstart your ability to find your niche? If you do want to look at it at a more kind of data-backed rather than human-focused method,

one thing you can do is use a tool. And I'll give you two examples of tools. These are basically called YouTube Outlier Tools. I don't if you've seen them, but one example would be one of 10.com. Another example would be view stats. You can use these tools.

you can go on to basically their own search on their own website, search a topic. Let's see you search like startup business. And it will rank and filter videos by outlier score. So basically how much more views of this video get than the average for that channel? By doing that, you can then get a really nice like insight into like what content is outperforming in certain niches. So I'm using the business example. Let's actually flip it and say what if it's like personal development?

So to say, hey, I'm starting a channel and my niche is personal development too broad. If we type in personal development or we search personal development content through one of these tools, and we notice that content built around this certain shelf of self-improvement, let's call it like breathwork or something, is outperforming the average by quite a bit right now. That could be a good sub-niche to start in. Like focus on just breathing, breathwork, breathworks healing properties, whatever it might be, to be the focus for your channel. So that's one thing you can do

that's a bit more technical than just human base, which is like try to see where the outliers are within a sub-niche. And what you'll find is there's always trends. Like, what's fascinating to me

is I remember it being in like, like studying self development content in 2016 and cold showers and getting up at 5am was really popular. And it was just going crazy. Like people would make like cold showers are changing my life. Getting up at 5 a.m.

It's changing my life. And then everyone started doing it. And then it kind of died down as an interest profile. And then it kind of resurfaces again, reemerges again. And it's like if you want to find in your niche what's working right now, it's like look for what the outliers are right now in the niche. Yeah. And sometimes you're like, you're in the eye of the hurricane of the niche.

So you know exactly what a particular niche or community is feeling at the moment, which allows you to create really well. But sometimes, and people let me know if you want me to create a separate video or podcasts around using some of these tools and to come up with ideas. Because I do find that that's helpful too, like using view stats and some of these tools. Totally. I think the key thing is, is if you use those tools to pick your niche, then you almost have to stop looking at them because it's very easy to be like, okay, I'm going to focus on calls. showers to start. Oh, no, now I'm seeing this thing. You know, I'm seeing this other sub-neesh is working. And yeah, you get this spinning wheels sensation where you're just constantly going between things.

But yeah, let's say you've gone through that journey. You're in this what I call improvement phase, month five to eight. Posted 32 videos, roughly speaking. So you have some volume under your belt. You know your niche. Everything feels like, okay, I'm kind of understanding. And at this point, I'm not even looking at results. I don't really care too much about that right now. and when we get to this point. It's just about we've picked it, we're doing it. So step four to me in this plan is start coming up with 100 ideas per week. Now, a lot of the recommendations you're going to see here are like things that require a lot of effort and time. So we always have to consider the fact that, you know, people here running their own businesses doing their own things as well.

But I would argue that people see this number of 100 ideas and just get too intimidated by it. I can sit down and with a channel and come up with 100 ideas in an hour together. Just you think about it. It's just like a look like what is it 1.4 per minute or something. Like you can write ideas down pretty quickly. I'll walk through like my process for ideation a little bit later in this podcast. But that's not as hard as it seems. But if you're looking for like what is the difference between big creators and small graders,

I feel small creators who are not growing put too much emphasis on like, I'm going to make this video. And then committing to that video, sunk cost fallacy, just make it happen, put out the video. And they don't really have a process for like, was this the best idea I could have made? Did I come up with enough volume to really see if that is a good idea? So I really recommend people start investing into ideation at this stage, not in the first stage because at that stage, we just want to start making content. But at this point, 100 ideas per week, I think is a really good place to be.

when I worked with Mr. Bees, for example, I know that is like a crazy, you know, top of the line example of YouTube strategy, but like ideas that would literally be considered like the, the lifeblood of that company, like video ideas. And you'd have spreadsheets with 20, 30,000 video ideas in them. And you'd have people, individual people, whose each person was brainstorming, you know, 100 ideas a day.

Just like consistently. It was kind of like an idea fan. And you don't have to do that, but yeah. Were they using tools or it's more like they're drinking Red Bull and coming up with ideas? Drinking Red Bull coming up ideas. Definitely like the tools, like I mentioned, the one of tens, the view stats, even just like using YouTube yourself and, you know, searching for popular videos. But a lot of it is just like spamming ideas, honestly.

And I really do think about it as like something like that. talk about a little bit later. I read it, I believe in a book about Steve Jobs, but this idea of 110.1, when they were thinking of like innovations and ideas instead of Apple, just like, realizing that some of it is just like volume. Like if you get enough volume, you put it into an effective filtering system, your quality is going to improve. And I think that's very true for ideation. And then my point here is like try to start brainstorming around outliers. So at the beginning, I do think it's very useful to focus most of your attention on, okay, we've established a channel, now we're in the proven phase, what is really working in the niche.

Let's make a list of all the things that are working in the niche using tools like we've mentioned. And then for each one of those ideas, that's brainstorm four or five ways we could change, adapt, twist this idea into something new for ourselves. And one of my favorite things to do is look at my niche and then find what I would describe as like kind of niches that are vertical to it are very similar to the niche, but not. the niche. So for example, if you are a fishing channel, let's say, what is something that's like fishing in many ways but is not fishing? To me, something that's like fishing but is not fishing is golf. Bear with me. The reason why I would say that is golf is enjoyed by a similar demographic of people to fishing, generally speaking in the USA. It is very equipment focused. So it's gear heavy, like golf clubs, fishing rods, tackle, those things are very kind of similar. It's an outdoor pursuit.

So when I look at the niche and if I say I'm a fishing channel, I might study other fishing channels, but also golf channels and say, well, if something worked really well in golf, it's not a world apart from fishing. So is their way to adapt it? So if we see there's a big outlier where someone played a whole round of golf with a wooden golf set,

which I saw was a huge outlier for someone. Maybe in the niche of fishing, that's I fished a lake with wooden fishing rods, something like that. That's kind of top of my head. I'm sure there's better examples out there. but I like to not only look at my niche, but also kind of similar niches

and try to adapt into what I'm doing. I think that's like a great place to start. It's just to really brainstorm outliers like that. Side note, startup idea. Someone needs to build an agent that does that for people that basically you put in your niche. And then based on a bunch of sub niches, it brings you formats and content that are,

you should look at, to help get you to come up with ideas. Yeah, yeah. There's actually, I mean, that could be a whole other pub, but like I feel like there's a lot of open space for these kind of tools in the YouTube industry. Like something I'm always like trying to figure out as well is overlap, audience overlap.

How I've traditionally done that is I used to use a tool that was called subreddit overlap. So I would look at subredits and see what subredits had overlap with each other to try to understand connecting points between, niches with YouTube is quite difficult. So see on the outside, what is the overlap between these two channels? So that could be something interesting people to explore as well. 100%.

Let's keep going. All right. Step five, start making three thumb-lars per video. Just do it. Everyone has ABC testing. So YouTube gives everyone ABC testing. It allows you to upload three film miles every time you upload. It's kind of controversial.

Some people don't like it. Some people do like it. I use it with most of my clients and find it as effective and increases the average user we're getting for videos when we try it. But even regardless of ABC testing, thumbnails are so important. They're kind of like the 20% of a video that gets 80% of the result in some ways. And yet people still like spend 20 hours, 30 hours on a video and then they spend 20 minutes on a thumbnail, which is crazy. And to use an extreme example, Red Bull are like one of our biggest corporate clients. I would.

was speaking to like two or three hundred rebel producers. I looked at a video and I kind of broke down the video. I was like, okay, there were 50 people involved in this video. It was filmed over all these weeks. It involved this much risk, this much experimentation, all this stuff. And then, you know, I mentioned the budget, which I can't mention the video, but you can imagine big ass budget for this video. Then it was like, how long did we spend on the thumbnail? And so I was like, we made it like 20 minutes before upload. And I was like, if the thumbnail can lead to so much of a difference in performance. It can literally be like 50 or 60% of what makes a video effective on YouTube. And we're spending so much time like hundreds, maybe thousands of total

hours of employees working on this video. And then we spend 20 minutes on the thumbnail. It's just doesn't make sense. So while you're making videos, try to get to a place where you're making two or three thumb options per video. And I'm going to hit you with this, Greg. Do you do that right now for your channel? So I do do it. I do three thumbnails. And then we do, two to three backup thumbnails. Great. Yeah. And I noticed, like, I, just the other day, I got a comment being like, bro, stop changing

your thumbnails, you know, and I do hate to see that. Like, people, it might not be a great experience for people who might not see a video when it first comes out and be like, oh, I don't have time for this right now. I'll get to it later. And then they have issues finding it. but guys, I'm trying to get the videos to be seen here. You know what I mean? Try to get that comment section going.

So I do do it and have notice it helps. Totally, totally. I would say something with that is definitely on the fringe, like people complaining about that kind of thing. Because at least generally, like for one, if someone has seen a video, sometimes people have this concern, but if someone has seen a video and watched a video, they're not going to get recommended again just because of something else.

So it's one thing. And then also usually YouTube A-B testing will select one thumbnail and show that to a user and then not change it for the same user as much as people think they do. But it can definitely happen. So it's interesting that you got that comment. Yeah, maybe it was like on, it sounds like it was, that was actually the first time I ever got it. So I didn't even know that was a thing. But yeah, maybe maybe he was like on his phone and then he came home. and yeah so you're right do this you know and then what do you recommend for tools in order to

create thumbnails like is canva okay or what do you what do you say canva's like the the very fundamental thing or platform you can use or tool you can use if you just want to make something that's like decent if you want to make something good like Photoshop is what I use and what I've always used for my thumb-miles. And I think you can get to a point where you can make good filmiles and maybe five or six hours of Photoshop learning. So like a Sunday. And this is a point they have later actually, which is that the correlation between being really good at graphic design and really good at film-iles is actually pretty weak. I've tried to work with some of the best graphic designers in the world. And I've not been successful with making them great at

thumbnails. I find some random kid on Twitter who's like just looking at donals all day and making thumbnails. He might not have actually have very good Photoshop skills. And if I showed the PSD file that he used in a Photoshop and sent him to a graphic designer, they would say this is a war crime. But he is able to make thumbnails that people click on because he understands the psychology of a thumbnail more than just the execution. So I'd say for Canvas fine, learn some basic Photoshop. People always ask about like AI thumbnail tools. I find that AI can be good for like the base of the image you use, but you still have to bring it into Canva or Photoshop to like get it there.

But using AI and thumbnails is not against YouTube's terms, contrary to popular belief. And a lot of people do it and they're quite effective with it. But yeah, those would be the main tools. I think Photoshop Canva. Also thumbnail designers, like you can hire like a pretty cheap thumbnail designer. like thumbnail design rates vary a lot like I pay five or six hundred dollars for thumb mouse um with like our biggest clients potentially but there's definitely like a market

for people that make thumb else for like fifty two hundred dollars but where do I find those people I'm glad you asked whitey jobs dot co my own uh actually the world's biggest recruitment website for YouTube channels yeah well I pull it up yeah pull it up so yeah I call on this company And we have, if I just go to talent here, I'm not even signed in, which is funny. But yeah, we literally have, I believe, 40,000 video editors, thumb out designers, YouTube strategists, create directors. We basically have like the entire YouTube workforce. Regist on the site.

You can post a job and people can apply. You can filter by thumbnail designer. You can see all these thumbal designers we have. some of these thumbel designers are going to charge a lot. Some of them are newer. Someone like Brittany, Brittany works with me. You can see some of the film that she's worked on, Red Bull, Jesser, 22 million subscribers, all these different people

and has reviews, everything there. So obviously a bit of a plug, but it's a good platform to use. And I'll see if you did want to link it, I'll see if I could get like a discount code for your audience. Cool. I mean, I will use this. You know what I'm saying? You know, so it's like, I don't like plugs when they're just plugs,

but when it's going to help people and save them time and money, that's, you know, it's my duty to go and show people these things. So, yeah, this looks great. But yeah, step six, this is where, it depends on the channel, depends on the kind of content you're making. this is a good place to actually switch from two videos every week to one video a week. Again, it depends on the channel. Some channels, like, it works while having a good volume of content.

But I would say for most channels that I'm starting from scratch or I'm working on that are small, I like to get us to a place where we're able to make decent videos and then switch to one and really try to focus on improving the quality of those individual videos. So that would be the step six is switching to one video a week and starting to actually put more emphasis into it to making a great video. Right. So I think the prompt there for people is if I doubled my effort here, what would that look like and how would that affect the product, which is the video?

Yeah, absolutely. These things also go in like really interesting flows where I filled 10 years ago on YouTube. And for people that remember YouTube 10 years ago, it was daily vlogging. It was Casey and I started posting a video every day. It was Logan Paul and Jake Paul doing their daily vlog getting in trouble. Then we went into this period of like the Mr. Beastification of YouTube in some ways. And YouTubers are starting to realize that quality was like highly rewarded.

And that goes to extremes on the other side where like I have encountered creators that get five or six million views of video and they post once a year. For anyone interested, type in James Janney on YouTube. he's a creator friend of mine from London. He posts a video probably twice a year and has a full business, does really well, has people working for him. But he just makes really, really high quality documentaries. And he's able to sustain himself from just one or two videos a year. So, yeah, I think one a week is a good medium place, though.

Because when people learn that information, what's funny about that is like, let's be honest, like if James, my friend in London was able to post a great documentary every month, he'd make way more money and would be way more successful. I think he would admit that as well. And a funny conversation I had with Jimmy, Mr. Beast, when I first was talking to him six or seven years ago, I was like, hey, like, I think it's really smart that you like focus on scarcity and you focus on like keeping things like scarce

for the viewers so that when they see your videos is a real special thing. And he was like, you idiot. Like I would post, if I could make a banger every two days, I would post every two days. So he was like, it's just that it takes longer to make a banger. Like, he's like, if I can press a button and bang, bang, bang or comes out, like, I'd make one every day. So I think one a week is a great place to be at if you've already kind of established yourself

as a channel. So moving on to the last stage of the first 12 months. So this is where we're kind of looking at, hey, we've posted like around 48 videos. We were close to that 50 video mark, which I think is really important to get to as a channel. at this point, I really want you to start honing in on the top 10% of videos. I know it seems very simplistic, but what are those top 10%? When you look at all the videos we posted, we've posted in any 50 videos at this point. What are the top 10 performers?

What are the top 10% performance? The top five videos, I suppose, that are doing the best on the channel. And can we do more of those? I've been introduced as a genius of YouTube strategy by people. And while I appreciate that, so much of it is like, like, hey, this did well, let's do it again. And obviously, there's a lot more to it than just that, but so much of my career has been built on, like,

actually telling people they can make the same video again or repeat the content again. And even if, I don't know if anyone in your audience is familiar with my own channel, but on my channel, when I used to post videos on that channel, I literally just did the same video again and again and again with just different creators as the subject material. So find ways to really kind of build formats out of your, videos that are working well.

And if you're looking at that first sort of nine months is like, okay, start I'm just making whatever. Then I'm starting to put more focus on ideation. I'm making more and more videos. This is the point where we start to be a bit more strategic and look for like the right opportunities. An example or like a metaphor people use that I think is really useful is like there's the machine gun approach.

And then this is a sniper approach. The machine gun approach is kind of just like spraying bullets at the wall, seeing what it hits. The sniper is just zoning in, looking at your distance, picking your target and shooting. I think the more you do YouTube, the more you become a sniper versus a machine gun in terms of how you approach things. So really try to focus on those top 10%. This one I would encourage, even for people that purely look at YouTube as like a kind of marketing channel, I still think it's great to just carve out time to really study YouTube, study trends, outliers,

what other people are doing. I like to have this. I have this for all my employees. I have this for myself. I have this for my clients. I just say, hey, try to carve out four hours a week where you're studying YouTube

and you're actually just going through and looking at content. One thing I do that's, I think, a bit of a hack for this is in YouTube, I create different playlists. So I'll create these playlists. And the playlist title

will be something like Outlier Video or great thumbnail or great title or great intro. And every time I watch a piece of content, because most of us watching this here is we'll be watching, you know, quite a bit of YouTube per week. Every time I'm watching YouTube and I see something interesting, I put it in one of those playlists. And then I have time scheduled in my calendar to go through those playlists and just sort of write down and break down what I think worked about that and what did well. So I think for anyone that is really serious about becoming a YouTube creator or using this as like a major channel for their business.

really understanding and learning that game is so crucial or hiring people that will do this for you and save you that time. This is kind of like, you know, we talked about on the channel before, the idea of a swipe file. So this is kind of like a swipe file for YouTube. So a place where, you know,

you've curated what you think are the most interesting videos. I think, of course, titles and thumbnails is one thing. But for me, I think what, yeah, that's really important. But equally as important is the formats and just trying to stay ahead of the formats because they're always changing. And they get, like, a format could work, work, work, work, work.

And then all of a sudden, not work. So this is step eight is you kind of have to do it. If you want to win. And something I think about this on it as well is like I find a lot of it is about documenting, databases, studying swipe file. I totally agree with that. But also some of it is just like training your brain. Because I did this in my bedroom in Ireland for like 10 years just every day, just studying

YouTube and going through and like studying things that worked. And two weeks ago we're making a thumb out with a client. and I just sort of say, what about we try, like, what if we try this? Like, we create a sign in the thumbnail that looks like this and whatnot. And my team who ran the call were like, yeah, let's do that. We did it with the client. The video did really well. And I tried to reverse engineer how I came up with that specific thing to add to the thumbnail,

because I think it made a real difference in this thumbnail, putting this specific component in. And as far as I could sort of trace back, it was from like studying a video six years ago. that had a similar element in it. And maybe I'm inefficient, so I don't know this. But I think some of it is like databasing really useful, but also just training your mind to like see enough content and understand the content where it becomes second nature to you,

where I can just think of these things on the spot because I've trained my mind. And maybe there will be, and this is something we'd love to talk about is like an agent or something that can like say, oh, you're working on this thumbnail. Like here is 20 examples of film miles that were on. themes that perform well in the last six years or something like that could be interesting but um definitely like focusing on youtube studying youtube for some time each week is is huge in the last step is it's the last step nine continue to post weekly make each video that a little bit better improve one little thing each time one percent improvements um so this is your first 12 months like

i'd love for you to end the first 12 months with this just philosophy we're going to continue to post weekly. We're going to try and make each video a little bit better. You know, that classic 1% each time, like little marginal gains in each video. But if you're doing that with every video and you're posting weekly, like, you make quite a lot of progress. So this would be the last step of the first 12 months. And then there's a lot of unanswer questions, which we can jump into in some of the next pages. Cool. I think, I forget the name of the creator, but I saw a creator do this where he kept a Google sheet of every improvement he made on each YouTube video he did.

So I think that could be really cool. I kind of want to do that. Whereas like, because otherwise you forget and you're not as conscious about it. So I think, you know, creating a Google sheet could be cool. One thing we do with clients is at once per month we do like a learning, a learning's report. So that's just say we're working with Rebel.

Like we go through and like break down the learnings of, the videos posted. And those learnings are a mixture of like looking at how well the video performed, looking at retention curves. So if anyone that doesn't know, YouTube gives you a retention curve, which shows exactly where you lose people, where you like game people,

where they hold on your videos. So if you're like looking at that, studying that for each video, then each time hypothetically you're equipped with more information about what works and what doesn't work. So yeah, we do that for every video. I've probably looked at 10,000 retention curves.

in my life, probably more. And it just gives you a great insight into what holds attention and what loses attention. And some things would surprise you. Like even this is just a bit of a side note, but a few years ago, I was looking at a retention curve with a creator and he was like, for the life of me, I can't understand why 10 minutes into the video. This was a 20 minute video. So 10 minutes in, I lost 5% of viewers, like 5% of people left. And for his video with how many views he was getting, that was like maybe 50,000 people clicking off the video at that point. And he was like, I don't. understand it. And I watched a video. And on the surface, there was nothing in it. Like, he didn't, like, do a bad edit. He didn't, like, bring in something really boring. But what he did was

he used language that made it feel like the video was ending. So he said, at the end of the day, the reason America pulled out from Afghanistan, because I think that was, like, the topic for the video, he said, at the end of the day, and viewers heard that. And they were like, oh, the video's over. Goodbye. And then when I brought up that point, he's like, that can't be right, because they have, like, the progress bar. So they would have known that wasn't the end. I'm like, dude, have you seen someone watching YouTube? They're like one swipe away from changing content all the time. Like, you're hanging by a thread the entire time. So if you give someone this indication that the video might be closing to an end, so like another language like

this is like, you know, nevertheless, like I hate that word because that like makes people think it's like a summary of the video and it's going to end. So like to recap, another thing I hate. Like whenever someone does that, I just like feel like getting sick. So, little things like that you notice from studying retention groups and these are the little improvements where you're like okay well five percent of people left at that point in the video it might seem like a small amount but that's 50 000 people youtube is about marginal gains it's also about marginal gains over competitors so two videos being side by side by each other if one video loses 5% at the 10 minute mark and that's 5% of people that are not going to watch the next 10 minutes of content and you compare

that against the competitor who holds that 5% you it might be the difference in the video getting 1 million views in three minute views. That sounds ridiculous and that's really kind of stretching, but like these things really add up. So these small improvements can make a big difference to video performance. 100%. Awesome. So if there's time, we can jump into next here, which is just a real quick cheat on ideas. So I've mentioned how important ideas are a lot on this podcast so far. So I just want really quickly run through like basically how I think about it. So this is like my diagram for sort of explaining how I think about ideation for YouTube. First of all, you have zero ideas at this point.

You're just trying to understand like your strategy for your channel. So a lot of that is what's my niche, but also some of these frameworks, which I'm going to touch on in a second. Then you brainstorm 100 plus ideas, whether that's in a week a month, but just brainstorm 100 plus ideas, ideally in a week. Then you apply elimination criteria. It's a classic funnel. You're eliminating at this point. then you're left with, let's say, 10 strong ideas, and then you further developed 1. So sort of 0 110.1, that is the framework I've used for most of the channels that we work with. And the keys really are brainstorming enough.

And then having like a strict criteria for what actually becomes a video on your channel to eliminate and whittle down those ideas to be left with the 10 best and then selecting the best out of those 10 you think is the best to go forward with. two frameworks that I find are really useful for this. First one is CCN fit. So what I notice, and this actually leads a little bit into your point earlier about like niches,

sub niches, and then like what are broad videos in a niche versus like core videos in a niche. But generally when I'm ideating for a channel, like I always want videos to have CCN fit. I want them to be appealing to the core, casual and new. It's very simple in theory, but like a lot of things on this call, simple in theory, but execution is hard because what I find is oftentimes people make videos that are too core focused. Maybe the video we talked about earlier,

the marketing plan for 2025, it's two core. People cared about it, but only like a real small part of the core cared about it. Then other times people make videos that are two new viewer focused and they alienate the core. They go too far outside of the core. They're trying to do something too different. And I always like to sort of look at my videos and say, does this have CCN fit? Does this hit my core casual new viewer on my channel? So I always like to say, does my fan favorite viewer who watches everything I do, are they going to like it? And does this viewer who I have never heard before, never watched my content before,

are they going to be able to enjoy and consume this content as well? So I think that's a really important framework to think about. And then I would say this is arguably the most important to understand on YouTube. And it's where almost everyone goes wrong in my opinion, which is I like to build channels where each. video, I look at it and say, does this have 80% plus? I should actually add like a plus there because videos can have higher than that. Audience overlap. So I don't want to make two videos. Like everyone thinks, okay, I understand the niche thing. I should be in a niche. I should be a sushi

restaurant that doesn't serve burgers, whatever. But then they still make content that jumps around too much between different things. They jumped around too much between different topics. Like maybe it's your business channel, but you're covering videos that focus on like startups. And then you make videos that focus on like cash flow business that do 10 million in a year that are already existing. And you don't make that interest into the startup audience or whatever. So I always like to look at the content and say 80% plus overlap. We have to look at our videos and say people that watch this video,

80% plus of those people could watch this video, could watch this video, could watch this video, could watch this video, and look at it like a catalog in that sense. And yeah, I find a lot of people who just don't really grasp that as a concept, which is really interesting. just what I'm talking about, man. I feel like I'm not doing enough ideas. I'm looking at this.

I'm like, I, I'm like, I'm the idea guy and I'm not doing enough ideas, you know? Like I feel like you do really, what I'm learning from you just taking me through this is you have to force your, you have to, you know, force yourself as the wrong word, maybe add systems so that you're, you're really putting out the ideas. It does feel like a volume game. Yeah. Like this to me is scheduled time. It's, I think so many people just do ideation where they do like shower thought ideation, which is like,

oh, I'm going for a walk. I'm in the shower. I think of an idea. I write it down in my notes app. And that's something. But I like to schedule idea time. And I also like to use other people a lot for this as well where I remember like working for a child at one point and I would like send them like three outliers or send this,

sorry, not them, but this college kid that went to the, the college I used to go to, three ideas. And then I would be like, these three ideas work for us. Brainstorm 50 ideas similar to this for each of these ideas. He'd come back with 150 ideas. I'd pay him $40. I would look at the ideas. I would go through and they'd be mainly dog ship, but there'll be some in there that jump out. There'll be something in there that sort of has a like a kernel or something I can work with. So I like to do this myself, but I also like to bring in other people for this. I've worked with big credit before to have like a discord channel. We're in the Discord channel or the Slack channel, whatever might be, if it's a community thing, school,

circle, whatever you're using for community. You have a channel where people like contribute their own ideas as well. And it's almost like, how do we just have this huge funnel that's capturing ideas from everywhere. So I want the shower thoughts. I want the walk in the park and I think of an idea. I want those. I also want the schedule idea time. I want the idea. If I have a producer, an assistant producer has joined one of our teams that we, we work with who has never done YouTube before and just is like, hey, I just hold the camera. I'm like, I still want you to come up with ideas and see what happens because I'm a big believer that like anyone can come up with like an interesting idea for a YouTube video.

And sometimes there's a benefit in someone that's outside of your your world as well. I was thinking of putting on my website, Gregisomerg.is.is.com, a little suggestion box, like a content suggestion box where people can actually just give me suggestions on what they want to hear. So I'm going to try to do that. And I think that getting the communities what they want to hear about is just like no-brainer. So if you apply your criteria filtered up.

Because the classic, like, if I had asked people in 1910, you know, what they wanted, they'd say a faster horse instead of car. So that's why the system of having the elimination criteria is so essential, because I've found the flip side where people listen to our audience too much. And the audience were literally always say more of this. It's something you've already done. Or like, they'll just say, you should do something like this again.

And that might be a good idea, but maybe there's something else that exists out there. 100%. And sometimes you actually get community feedback and you're like, oh, no, not at all. I don't want to do that. I want to do the opposite of that and it just like clears your mind. But either way, if it's good feedback or bad feedback, you're still really,

it does help sharpen the ideas. 1000%. To me there's like three main sources of ideas for YouTube channels. So external sources, this is basically like outlier, outlier theory, outlier ideation, which is looking at other channels. We've talked about this throughout this podcast, but using tools like view stats,

one of 10, even just looking at YouTube yourself, seeing what's working. There's so many levels this can go to. Like another thing I've done in the past is create a dummy YouTube account and then only watch my channel on that YouTube account and then see what videos I get recommended

because YouTube's algorithm can serve you videos you might not have seen otherwise because let's say I'm a channel that just does startup ideas. you still probably watch other things in your watch history that aren't just startup ideas and that's going to pollute your recommendation feed to a certain extent because it's tailored to you. But if you create a channel, it just watches your channel,

you're kind of getting your viewers like archetype and seeing what they might be watching in other ways. So external ideation, internal ideation, that's like looking at our own channel, what's work for us, what's doing well for us on the channel, what's getting views on the channel right now, can we bring some more ways of doing ideas around that. And then innovation is, you know, the classic kind of like blue ocean sit down,

like what could be cool. Like, I'm a big believer that nothing is ever completely original. There's always going to be some way that got impacted or molded by something else. But more so, you're not looking at a video for inspiration. You're kind of like just sitting down. Maybe you're looking at like a show or something or a movie and you're like, oh, that could be cool to do a YouTube video on or whatnot. But if you're using those three sources, and maybe it's like 40, 40, 20, 20. like 40 ideas coming from external, 40 from internal, 40 from internal, 20 from innovation, something like that, you can mix and match those ratios.

But if you're brainstorming a large volume, 110.1, you're just going to be in a much better place as a channel. The crucial step here as part of this process is your elimination criteria. To me, that's like four or five things that you sit down and decide a video needs to have to get to the next level, to get to the point where you're even choosing. Like when I have these 100, 200, whatever, thousand ideas in the spreadsheet, they're not even at the point of choosing. They're just at the point of, okay, you're ready to go into the elimination criteria. To me, the elimination criteria, four or five points, I'll give you some examples of like what we do with clients.

So one thing I would always put in the elimination criteria is can I think of a good title for them off for this. In noisy, when people say, I've got this great idea, but I can't title thumb out of it. I would always say, well, you don't have a great idea then. Like, that's not a great idea for YouTube if you can't title thumb out unless you just can't think of one. there is one out there, but if you can't realistically in your head find a way to package it, it's not a good YouTube video. So that could be one. And you'd be amazed. You might have 200 videos in a spreadsheet. You apply that filter of like, could we actually come up with a good tile of a mouth? Suddenly you go for it. And you're like, oh, okay, I've got rid of a lot. Another filter is

the view target filter, which I really like, which is a bit of gut, but is like, hey, like realistically, could this video get Xfuse? So for me on my channel, when I made my own videos, it was is can this video get one million views? And if you look at my channel, the average is around one million, a lot of videos didn't get one million, but I always tried to make videos that I thought if everything went well,

this video could get one million views. For other channels, that might be 10K, 5K, 20K, for you, maybe it's less about views and more about can this get X amount of positive comments or whatever it might be, but some sort of like aspirational target because it's amazing how many times we justify a video, but then if we put it through that filter saying,

let's be real here, like could this get this viewership, it's too much of it just a I'm not sure you're never going to be guaranteed but like as an example I made a video on my channel where I covered Graham Stefan

who's a finance YouTuber I broke my rule because Graham Stefan on his own channel was doing 300K views per video so me making a video brainstorming how Graham Stefan grew his channel it's probably not going to get one many views of video

so that's a case of like you can kind of use some basic logic to be like it's probably not going to get my view target so I think those are two examples. Other examples might be like more kind of like holistic, like does this excite us? Is it feasible? Like is it physically feasible? Like, you know, I did a BMX trick shot on the moon. Is it a viral idea, but it's not feasible? So can we actually do this video? Is it something that excites us? Maybe you have some other things in there. But basically four or five points that

you can use to whittle down an idea to make a great idea for your child. And then some things that I think make a great idea. So easy to convey in title film out. Like I said, if you can't convey an entire thumbnail, it's not necessarily a great idea. Has some form of uniqueness, superlative,

like so often when people are pitching ideas to us, I'm sort of like, okay, like we're going to do a facility of like an interesting, let's say we're doing it, we're a wildlife channel and we're going to like tour a zoo.

I'm always looking and saying like, is it the world's best zoo? Is it the world's biggest zoo? Is it the world's most expensive zoo? is there something unique about this zoo that we can title the video around? Because otherwise, you know, what's unique about the video?

If you look at the most part of videos on YouTube, they always have something that's a bit unique or different or the user superlative, like, you know, can you bend the world's strongest bar? It's not can you bend the strong bar? It's can you bend the world's strongest bar as a strength challenge. So always looking for superlatives,

I think is really important. Something to think about really heavily is like, does it play on a competitive advantage I have? So with channels, I always like to identify what are your competitive advantages? Like, what are the things that you can make content on that other people can't? That could be a competitive advantage from knowledge and experience. Like, hey, like, I'm a multimillionaire. So obviously I can teach people about building businesses or personal finance. Or maybe it's, I have specific access to something that other people don't. Like, you know, a great example is we work with a basketball creator Jesser.

And when we're brainstorming, I'm looking and saying, Can we play on competitive advantage because his competitive advantage is he knows players and he has access to the NBA. Like they give them access to games. So just a random creator can't really do that. Like you can't come up with an idea and saying, I got to gift LeBron James shoes, which is an idea we did that did 10 million views because you don't have access to LeBron James, whereas we do. So like playing on competitive advantages I think is great.

And that doesn't have to always be things that are impossible to get. It doesn't have to be just money. it could be like you have specific expertise or knowledge on something that other people don't. And kind of on the same CCN fit idea, not too narrow, but also not too broad. We don't want something that's so broad and like could be anything. We also don't want something that's so specific and niche that it's only appealing to like a certain percentage of the audience. Cool, yeah. I know I'm happy you said that the unfair advantage doesn't.

necessarily need to mean you're like super powerful wealthy crushing it i i do think that anyone could have you know some form of that it's just about packaging it in a way that that is your unfair advantage yeah totally and then moving on quickly to just some things on packaging um it's a bit of a packaging cheat sheet so again packaging toggle formal this is like interesting with our discussion earlier, which is the kind of like the line between boring and misleading, which is where I feel like all title filmals on YouTube fall on, you're going to be somewhere between being boring, not interesting, which is potentially what you had with the example of like the broccoli, the vegetables example. Misleading, that to me is when you're putting

something in the video that is in the thumbnail and you're creating an expectation that's just not delivered on at all. And I think people are sometimes too afraid. to be on this side. But again, if we just look at the game, the game is the game, you look at the biggest creators on the platform, they almost exaggerate and mislead a little bit, but then they deliver something so good that you don't even know about it,

don't even think about it. So as a great example of this, actually, we did a video with Noah Kagan, which was asking millionaires how to make a million dollars knocking on doors. We kind of made, we're one of the channels that made that format really popular. And in the video, we didn't have a good thumbnail.

So Noah, if I remember correctly, like had a friend, this girl. We just shot the thumbnail with like Noah like facing this girl who wasn't even in the video. She wasn't in the video. It was just a random girl that was in the thumbnail. That was the person we used for the thumbnail. The video got four or five million views. I didn't notice a single comment saying that person wasn't in the thumb now. Because I think the average viewer on YouTube looks at a thumbnail for a split second and goes,

is this interesting or is this not interesting? Us as creators, we overanalyze it too much. We think about all the details. We want to be like careful not to click pay, which is good. It comes from a good place. But the average viewer is like, wait, Mr. B's gold jet, click. Start watching the video. And it's like, you watched a video, you finish a video, and you can't even remember what

the thumbnail was. In fact, if we actually think about it at this point of this podcast, I don't know how much this is going to be edited down by, but let's say we're at like the one hour 20 mark of this podcast or whatever. If we sort of ask people, what was the thumbnail for this video? I guarantee you very few people are going to remember what was said in the thumbnail. Maybe we should replace, instead of having Patty as the thumbnail, we'll just put a girl and see if anyone like Patty, like P-A-T-T-Y, you know?

Yeah. And just like we'll use AI to make long hair. Yeah. And who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? It knows. But yeah, exaggeration. It's a standard on the platform. I think misleading someone is the wrong way to view it, but exaggerating the truth a little bit. It's just a game. Make three thumbs per video. Still not enough people do this. I feel like everyone who listens to people like me talk about YouTube, like hear this, but they don't do it or they find ways to cheat, which is like, I'll make three thumbs per video. Don't you worry, Patty? But, The thumbnail is like the same thumbnail with just different text. I'm like, that's not three different thumbnails. That's just the same thumbnail with slightly different text. Like I'm talking about three different concepts. The thumbnail is the equivalent of the dentist asking if you floss twice a day.

Yeah. And it's like you tell them, yeah, of course, I floss twice a day. And then you see the look on the dentist's face and like she's like, there's no way this guy is flossing twice a day. I've seen this guy's teeth. You know, I've seen those gums. You know, maybe you're flossing three times a week on a good week. Yeah, that's thumbnails. I love that analogy.

That's totally true. Learn basic Photoshop, study outlier thumbnails. And being good at graphic design is not equal good at thumbnails. So, again, people sort of like, I don't have time to master graphic design. But it's like, it's more about looking at what's working on YouTube and just learning how to replicate it, rather than like, you know, learning all this advanced Photoshop work. And yeah, like we said earlier, there definitely is like a market for Thumbelma designers out there.

And there's a lot of designers at different price points that people could bring in. And it's one of those things where like, again, people like will spend money on editors and spend money on like production and all this sort of stuff. But Thumbel is kind of an underutilized use of money, resources time when it comes to YouTube. And when it comes to great packaging, some things I think about, titles, keep them under 60 seconds, use like easy language, like easy to understand language, see if you can use like superlatives or like things in your tile that make it unique and different to other videos on YouTube. Something I always think about, even if you are a search-based channel is to focus on human interest and the algorithm.

So without naming names of tools, there's been tools in the past that have been like, hey, like, we'll help you optimize your title for search engine. And then I look at the titles, people write with these tools. And it's like iPhone 12 review 2025. Check out this iPhone 12. It's not even real. Like, I don't know what you're saying. So I always like to focus on writing a title for a human.

Like with some clients, I'll literally say like, what would a, like, what would an Uber driver describe this thing as? Like, could that be our title? Or like, how could you put it in the most simple. language possible. So focus on the human, not an algorithm. If you do focus on search, like you can still incorporate key terms, like your keywords in your title while not making it like a gobbledy gook of different things. I think that's really important to understand. Example I use here, which I'll just make a bit bigger for everyone. So this is with two Austin-based

creators, Ryan, Trajan, and Haley, Pam. And if you look at their title, it's X-Dancer trains like a marathon runner. And it seems simple, right? It's very simple, easy to read. And if you run it through like a readability score, it gets a grade A. It basically says, hey, like seven, eight-year-olds can read this.

To find it as like I have a 100% reach with this specific readability score. You can just type in readability score to like find these tools. And just for fun, I was like, well, what if you like titled it more accurate to what the video was? And it was like,

ex-contemporary dancer trains like a D-1 athlete. If you change that video title to that, suddenly it gets a grade E. It has 33% reach. And, you know, a thing I would actually say, which is really interesting as well, is like, if you're trying to build a global audience and you are American, sometimes things that are obvious and feel like everyone knows that to you might not be to other parts of the world, which is still a huge market. So, for example, D1 athlete, I don't, until I moved to America, I didn't necessarily know what a D1 athlete meant. You know, we just call them like a college athlete in Arden. I'd never heard of that. Or like, someone's like talking about Goodwill. I'm like,

I've never heard of Goodwill. I don't know what Goodwill is. Like now I do, but I didn't know before. So just putting yourself through that lens and saying, is this universal? Can like a seven-year-old read this title? I would even argue for like a channel which has like a much older demographic, like your channel, I'm sure, has a much older demographic than something like this. I still think it's useful to be able to like put things into really simple English and just make things like consumable for the, for the viewer. Thumbels always keep them clear, bright, should be easy to see what's going on in the thumbnail. I think there's like an interesting thing, which is like this idea of like a glance test. And you can actually do this yourself. You can create like a, just open up a Google

slide, put your thumbel on one of the slides, put the second slide as just a white screen, and then just use your arrows and just quickly click between them and give yourself like a second to just look at the thumbnail and say, can I process this thumbnail? and this title in a second. We as creators are making thumbnails in Canva, Photoshop, we're obsessing over all these details. Your viewer looks at them for split seconds. And people sometimes deny that.

I'm like, look at your own viewership behavior. Look at how you consume YouTube. Like when I'm looking through YouTube, I'm just like, oh, interesting, click. It doesn't, I'm not looking at going like, let me read everything. Let me look at every detail. So keep it really simple.

Make sure it passes the glance test. That's a really important one. Shouldn't be text heavy. I try to limit text. It's interesting different cultures are different here. So, for example, I've noticed in Asian markets. So like Singapore, different countries like that, they use more text than English-speaking markets

and Spanish-speaking markets. But in general, for a thumb-mile, it should be about four or five words should be your cut-off point for how much words you put in the thumbnail. And ideally less. Sometimes people just put way too much text in there. You have a title, and you have all the text on your thumb.

It's too much for someone to read in a glance. And then one other thing I would share with your audience, which I think is really useful is the three focus area rule, which basically for a thumbnail, there shouldn't be more than three things the viewer has to focus on. That's the cutoff point. There should be either only one, two, or three things to focus on. So maybe that's like a face, a piece of text,

and the thing that's being held up to the camera, you know, whatever that might be. What you'll see is people try to jam so much stuff in. They have like someone here, they've text here, they have a logo here, they have this thing here, and it's like too many things to focus on it once. So the best thumbnails are very simple and just keep you focused on the main areas. An example of this, like with the clients, like this is what we do with a personal finance client we work with. Super simple background, you know, four words, you've been lied to, which is outlier text. We saw this performing really well on another thumbnail that got like 10

many views for a very small channel. You've been lied to. That video was about the dodo's extinction, so the bird and how it went extinct, you've been lied to. I was like, let's take it for this, thumb on. You've been lied to about housing. So you've been lied to in text there, house on fire. Ramey, his expression kind of matching what the video is. It sounds like an obvious thing, but you'd be amazed at how many people cover like serious topics and they're just like smiling in the thumbnail. It's like weird. Title is like simple to understand, but has like an interesting proof point, multi-millionaire, interesting contradiction. Like why don't you own a house is a multi-minute error.

So all these details out together. And also notice three focus areas, face, text, house. You're not having to look at a million things. Super easy, Thomell. And that was the first video we posted with him and it did 2 million views. So yeah, that's a bit of a cheat sheet on film males and titles as well. A bit of a cheat sheet. That's an understatement.

Thank you. Dude, you've been really generous with your time and knowledge. Thank you so much. For people who made it to the end, Where could they get to know Patty more? I think X is the place. Patty G96. I tweet a lot there.

I'm always looking at what Greg's doing and thinking how I can adapt it to the YouTube side of Twitter. So that's the best place. And I think you've got a really interesting audience. And if anyone does have like startup ideas, they want to run by me or anything around this space, like I think there's so much room to build in this industry. And I think the issue is a lot of. who just build the wrong things.

They try to solve the wrong problem for creators. So it's been a pleasure. It flew by. I didn't realize we were here for nearly two hours. I was looking outside and I noticed that when we started recording, it was light and now it's dark. So it's good. I think people, you know, in 90 minutes or so,

people can actually go through this and really have a good primer around and plan to, actually go and execute their YouTube channel. I think that YouTube is criminally underrated for entrepreneurs. I think we all go to, a lot of us go to like X and LinkedIn and places like that. But I'm happy you shared the gospel. And Patty, I'll see you on X. Totally.

100%. Pleasure. Later. Take care.