🧑🏼‍🚀 The Blueprint 010

Welcome back to The Blueprint, a series where I share an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes look into my journey as a full-time creator & entrepreneur.

It’s been 10 weeks since I went on my own ($27K earned • 417K audience)

Today’s topics:

• 🧮 | Week 10 metrics & earnings

• ⚖️ | Quantity vs quality

• 🚀 | Blowing up slow

• 🧍🏻 | Single person audiences

• 🇯🇵 | Japan is the bee’s knees

Feature creator:

• 🤯 | Keanu Tylle (@keanu.visuals) - Keanu is one of the best creators showcasing VFX (using After Effects). If I could buy stock in internet creators, I’d invest in him. I think he’s going to be big in 10 years

A reminder that this internet game is not zero-sum. Everyone reading this can win at an unlimited scale. I’m writing this for the internet astronauts building their own digital worlds. If that’s you…let’s ride ✌🏼👩🏻‍🚀

AUDIENCE GROWTH

Weekly Recap

Hello from Tokyo!

This is one of my favorite places I’ve ever been. Traveling here has given me a creative unlock and a much needed reset (more on that below).

This week I was only able to ship one video, but it performed super well on both Instagram and Tiktok.

And of course, that led me down a path of debating quantity vs quality.

If I can achieve similar results with a single banger vs four “average” videos, is it smarter to focus on lower quantity and high quality?

Here are a few of my thoughts on the quality vs quantity debate:

• 👺 | The “quality” disguise: Most people that say they are “biasing towards quality” are actually using it as a procrastination technique to work less. They justify lower output by saying it’s higher quality, but it isn’t. It’s the same quality as before, just less of it

• 🔢 | Advocating for quantity: The biggest reason for quantity is that it’s hard to know which piece of content is going to hit. I may assume a video is higher quality, but it might not resonate with the market in the same way (examples of videos I thought were bangers that didn’t really work here, here and here). Putting all your eggs in the quality-only basket may result in the worst outcome because you’re playing the game with fewer attempts

• 🪤 | The quantity trap: I don’t think quantity for quantity’s sake is the smartest path either. I’m realizing that forced output by arbitrary time deadlines (e.g., posting daily or once every single week) often leads to subpar output. Because if you could spend an extra 20% of time to get 300% of the result, it’s always worth it, even if it means missing a made up deadline you put on yourself. 99.99% of creators are not appointment television. And even if if they were, their fans would be happy to watch their latest content the next day. Mr. Beast doesn’t post a new video every second Monday…he posts as soon as it’s ready

• 💨 | The chase: It sounds counterintuitive, but the chase drives more happiness than the achievement. Chase = working on a video. Achievement = posting one. This week, I spent 2.5 days working really hard on a single video, and I was fired up the whole time. The content treadmill woes almost always come from a place of high quantity burnout, not quality. As always, the only real goal of creating is to stay in the game long enough for it to start working. Nobody quit from having “too good” of videos. They only quit because they were burnt out from making so many

• 😴 | Dream state: The dream state is obviously super high quality at a super high quantity, but I’m starting to think that there is a level where even super fans get burnt out. Imagine if a new Marvel movie came out every single week. You’d start to not get excited about them. I think the same logic applies for any content medium

THINKING

Blowing up slow

To most of my friends, it’s felt like I’ve “blown up” pretty quickly. 417K followers in my first 11 months making content.

To new creators, this feels like the dream state…blowing up fast.

The truth is, you actually don’t want to blow up fast. It’s a trap.

Here’s why…

The real objective of this game is not to blow up. It’s to unlock the thing(s) that come as a result of blowing up (money, fame, influence, power, free stuff, access, time freedom, etc.).

But what’s important to remember is that those things start coming gradually over time. It’s not as though once you cross a certain audience size all of your wishes are granted.

That means in order to unlock those results, you’ll need to keep creating and producing at a high level once you’ve blown up.

And here comes the big issue…

When you blow up fast, you haven’t had the necessary time to develop the skills required to continue producing the level of content an audience/brand would expect at your “post-blown up” size.

So now you’re stressed.

You feel 100x the responsibility for creating “higher quality” stuff for your huge audience and brands that are paying you 5 and 6 figure deals, but you don’t know how.

This is a metaphor I like to use.

Let’s say a brand is willing to pay you $100K to cut through a thick piece of rope with a knife.

You get one slice to do it.

Every rep making content is another knife stroke on the sharpener, improving the blade.

People who have spent years grinding to grow an audience have an extremely sharp knife. It’s a proxy for their skills. Super sharp.

When it finally comes time to cut the rope, they have no problem doing it. It’s routine and stress-free because their skills developed before their growth. This is blowing up slow.

Take the other scenario…

If you blew up too fast, your knife is still dull. You have underdeveloped skills. When you go to cut the rope, you struggle. The brand isn’t happy. Your audience isn’t happy.

Your skills lagged your growth.

The goal is to use the incubation period of your audience to learn the skills necessary to be able to cut the rope when the time comes.

The stress you’ll feel from not being able to cut the rope will far outweigh the impatience from not getting a chance to do it.

All this to say, don’t focus on blowing up…focus on sharpening your knife.

DOING

Single person audiences

I ran an experiment with my video this week.

I wanted to make content about Sunday. It’s an innovative creative agency meets venture studio that helps companies (e.g., Last Crumb, Friday Beers, Brazzers, etc.) launch high quality apparel brands. They also create their own apparel brands (e.g., Bloody Sunday).

Sunday’s founder is Jesse Sebastiani, one of the founding members of the Nelk Boys.

In the past, my thought process to make this video would have been something like, “What can I make that will appeal to lots of people that like apparel/brand building/hypebeast?”

In other words, take a subject, guess who the audience might be that also likes that subject, and design the content for the widest possible cut of that audience.

This time, I tried the opposite.

What if I didn’t try to make the video for the widest cut of people? What if instead, I made it for one…Jesse himself.

What can I make that will compel Jesse to watch and share my video?

A single person audience.

If I could produce something that was so compelling the founder himself would appreciate it, surely that video would have value for others like him.

And it worked.

Jesse saw my video, reposted it, and the video naturally began to surface the target audience. 1M+ views.

The reason I like this framing is because it forces you down a quality path. Rather than try to make content that games an algorithm and baits thousands of people to take an action, you intentionally approach the problem with a completely different lens.

Even if your single person audience doesn’t take the intended action (e.g., see and share), the act of designing the content for them will change the way you tell the story.

MOVING

Japan is the bee’s knees

I’ve been in Japan for 4 days and can already feel myself thinking about things differently.

It sounds ridiculous, but physically switching your baseline environment, moving time zones, and getting out of the online bubble has an incredible impact on your daily thoughts.

Here’s what I’ve realized…

We all fill our brains up with so much routine and junk news that our capacity for creative thinking is bogged down.

Sometimes the only way to forcibly clean out the pipes is to physically move and force yourself into a new environment.

After a few days, the plaque of daily life begins to break down and things start flowing differently again.

I’ll write more about this next week when I’m back from my trip, but for now, here’s a couple of things I’ve noticed about Japanese culture compared to the US:

• The baseline stress is here is MUCH lower. Nobody is rushing. Everyone does things with intention and the feeling of “missing out” doesn’t seem as obvious

• The baseline quality for things is MUCH higher. An average restaurant in Japan is producing 8/10 quality food. They take pride in their product, regardless of their status or location

• Society feels much more team-focused than individualistic. It feels like the average person generally cares more about their fellow citizens and will go out of their way to help others

It’s a refreshing change of pace to be immersed in this for a couple weeks.

More to come next week!

VIDEOS FROM THIS WEEK

Here are links to this week’s videos if you want to check them out:

1. 🧤 | This brand is going to be huge (Sunday): Watch on TT | IG | YT

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