🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 014

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

It’s been 14 weeks since I went on my own full-time.

Today’s topics:

• 🧮 | Week 14 metrics & earnings

• 🤨 | My coolest video ever flopped big time

• 🔮 | The future of content is not what you think

• 🤦🏻‍♂️ | My wife was right again

• 🏆 | The most important factor to growing online

• 🌿 | How to plant more seeds

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 ✌🏼👩🏻‍🚀

WEEKLY RECAP

Weekly Highlights

I really look forward to writing these…it feels like a weekly check-in with the OGs 🙌

Thanks so much to everyone who has been supporting and sharing my content!

Today was the first day a random person on the street noticed me from my videos and said hi. Pretty surreal.

For this edition of Blueprint, I’m going to experiment with a slightly different format.

Instead of writing 2-3 mega sections, which can get a bit long, I’m going to bounce around 5-6 smaller ideas that have been marinating in my head.

If you like this style better, please reply and let me know!

Also, If you look forward to reading these and some of today’s edition resonates with you, please share with a creator/entrepreneur friend you think would also like it. Best way to help me grow this thing.

WHAT’S COOLER THAN BEING COOL?

When cool flops

I thought I made the coolest video in the world this week. Here it is on (IG, Youtube, Tiktok) if you want to watch it.

I was so convinced it was going to go viral that I willingly recorded without a hat (yikes) and shaved my beard to the studs (first time in 4 years).

The concept was to use open source AI faceswap technology (FaceFusion) to turn myself into different celebrities. I tried Brad Pitt, McDreamy, Robert Downey Jr., Ted Lasso, and Harvey Specter.

My execution ended up at an 8/10, mostly limited by the GPU in my Macbook. These types of video renders require a ton of compute to make look convincing and mine was a little too blurry and not realistic enough.

I was inspired by my friends Riley Brown and Roberto Nickson, who both made sick videos using this.

If you want to download the technology to play with it yourself, Riley shared a fairly straight forward method using Pinokio and Roberto wrote a detailed newsletter and made a YouTube video on how to download the software directly onto your computer. Both work well (I used the Pinokio method).

Btw, if you like tech/AI/VR, you should be following both of them.

As I mentioned, I was so pumped to post the video, but it ended up with pretty low engagement everywhere.

At first, I couldn’t believe it and thought the platforms might be intentionally throttling it.

After asking my friends (who I typically rely on as a no bullshit barometer of good & bad content ideas), most thought the concept was closer to gimmicky than amazing.

Back to the drawing board 🤷🏻‍♂️

CONTENT FORTUNE COOKIES

The future of content is not what you think

The best part about making the AI Faceswap video is that I ended up talking with Riley Brown for almost two hours on Friday.

We dove down a really interesting rabbit hole about the future of content.

Here’s a sampler (we’re going to record a podcast soon and go deep on all this):

The AI Faceswap technology is currently v1, and it’s already incredibly convincing. It’s going to get much better.

We predict, in about 12 months, anyone in the world with a reasonably high powered computer, is going to be able to perfectly render any face on any source video with a single click.

AI voice technology will follow a similar path.

Not only will you be able to turn yourself into existing people (e.g., I become Ryan Gosling), but you’ll also be able to digitally construct new characters that don’t currently exist.

We’re already seeing this with platforms like HeyGen and Synthesia…artificially created, life-like characters.

And of course these characters will be optimally attractive, optimally personable, optimally vulnerable. Max 100 on all stats like Madden “create character” mode.

Okay, so what does that mean for content creators?

What it means is that the moat around content will no longer be technical ability (to edit or film), physical attractiveness, or vocal delivery.

So what’s left?

My first thought was the “storytelling and script writing.” You might be able to artificially manufacture the “who is saying” but the “what is said” is still an artform, right?

Not exactly.

There are AI models being trained on every YouTube video ever produced. Every Tiktok video with over 1M views. Every great video ever.

Today, ChatGPT is shitty at writing scripts for short-form video. This is because, as Riley pointed out to me, it wasn’t trained on video content transcripts. It was trained on things like blogs and wikipedia.

Once the YouTube-specific AI models are trained on every great YouTube video ever made, the “storytelling and script writing” will also be replicated by AI better and faster than any human could produce it.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us in a place where anyone in the world can produce any amount of content, at optimal quality, with the optimal story, with perfect looking characters that have perfect voices and are increasingly optimized based on all meaningful viewer retention metrics.

….Yeah, I know.

And maybe it takes longer than 12 months…let’s say 36 months to be conservative. In 3 years, this will for sure happen.

So what are the possible scenarios here?

• The government could intervene and stop AI platforms from enabling this type of god-mode generation. They would do this, effectively, in the name of “saving art.” If this happens, then perhaps there would still be a moat in content around the creator storytelling skillset

• The government could allow the technology to be created, but mandate some sort of profit share with the creators whose content trained the models. Wouldn’t it make sense that if MKBHD had 200 of his videos scraped to train the super YouTube AI, he’d deserve some portion of the profits from the product that enables anyone in the world to make better videos than him? I’d think so. So in this scenario, the creators with the largest back catalogues to train the models might profit handsomely

There’s a lot of ways you could play the “what if” game from here.

My heart wants me to believe that art will always exist and taste will always matter.

But sadly, I don’t think those are protectable either.

AI will be trained on every tastemaker ever. Meaning newly generated, fresh tastes will be the only thing that is “unique.”

But the AI will also adapt at increasing rates, so any novel “taste” that gains popularity will be quickly replicated and broadly distributed by AI.

Much more to dive into here and will be sure to have Riley on the podcast as an early episode when it launches.

WKNDS EMAIL?!

I’m thinking about writing another newsletter. Just links with 1-3 sentences for each, no fluff, sent 2-3 times per week.

Why? In search of the best video topics, I probably see 1,000 stories per week. 25 are worth your time and I only end up having time to make 4-5 videos.

I think it be helpful for creators, entrepreneurs & builders if I shared the other 20.

If this sounds useful to you, you can subscribe here. Will start sending in a few weeks.

Btw, wknds is a broader brand play I’m launching soon. Excited to reveal it!

SHE’S ALWAYS RIGHT

My wife was right again

My wife has been telling me that a vlogging style format would work for my content.

I resisted it…mostly because I feel awkward filming myself in public.

Then I found Jack Cook on Tiktok and realized I was organically enjoying his style.

He essentially films clips of his day (no talking in public), does one voice over at the end, cuts the clips to match the voice over, and posts. 100T Lough does this sometimes too.

So I gave it a shot and made my first one last weekend (I call the series wknds, it’s part of the brand I’m launching I mentioned above).

And I found that I really loved making it.

The process was much more fun than editing the talking head style videos I typically make, got me out into the world, and had me thinking more like a creative director.

On top of that, I realized that video netted significantly more authentic engagement. The views weren’t crazy, but the comments felt much more real.

You can learn so much about a person in a single video like this vs a typical talking head. It’s also a great way to incorporate the brands and products you use in your every day life 🧐

My wife was right.

I’m going to start doing these types of videos once per week (usually covering a weekend day in my life). The goal is to shoot these with only my phone, keep it authentic, edit them quickly on Sunday nights, and post.

Eventually, if they do well, maybe I’ll add another one mid-week as more of a “behind the scenes” visual complement to this newsletter.

Keep me posted if you like these more or less than my normal videos!

ONLINE HGH

The most important factor to growing online

One of the things I hear a lot via podcasts/Twitter is “consistency is the most important factor to growing online”

Let’s pressure test that.

The most important levers to content creation are idea quality, level of execution, and level of consistency.

Here’s a chart to help us think about it (apologies in advance to those color blind readers at home).

I’ve mapped Execution and Idea Quality across a 3×3 grid. Think of consistency as a switch you could turn on and off for every box.

Consider the scenario of someone with low quality ideas, low quality execution, and high consistency (the red box) vs someone with high quality ideas, high quality execution with low consistency (the green box).

A practical example of this would be someone that makes bad daily YouTube videos (red) vs Quentin Tarantino (green). Clearly Tarantino is the “more successful” case here, despite much lower consistency.

So consistency in a vacuum is not the most important thing.

Let’s take another more nuanced case…high idea, medium execution, low consistency vs medium idea, high execution, low consistency. A battle of the blues.

A practical example would be someone like Marko Terzo (completely original, high ideas, pretty good execution but not flawless, publishes every 10 days) vs someone like MKBHD (not every video is a super original idea, amazing execution, publishes around the same frequency).

I’ll admit, it’s tough to compare apples to apples here and it really depends what you’re optimizing for.

Marko has 6.1M subs in 5 years across 249 videos. MKBHD has 17.7M subscribers in 14 years across 1.6K videos

I’d say if you had them creating content for the same period, Marko would have the bigger channel, with broader influence, and a higher slugging percentage on videos that went nuclear.

MKBHD would probably have the deeper fan base that would convert higher on purchasing his products.

Why is this?

My hunch is idea originality is the most flammable substance on the internet. Said another way, if you want to start a forest fire of attention, you want to have the most original ideas possible executed “well enough.”

If one were consistent and the other wasn’t, I do think consistency would become the most important factor.

Holding consistency constant, idea originality is much more important than execution.

Would love to hear another perspective on this. Again, these are all open, one-sided loops in my head

JOHNNY APPLESEED

How to plant more seeds

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve started catching up with more creators.

I’ve done this with Justin Fineberg, Riley Brown, Roberto Nickson, Calum Johnson and a few others.

Each time, I’ve noticed that the few days after the conversation I have my best clarity of thought and purest ideas.

And the clarity/ideas aren’t necessarily a direct result of things we talked about on the calls, it’s more like the calls served to help shift my mental atmosphere.

Said another way, I felt like I was able to plant better idea seeds after talking with them than I would have after a 60-min Twitter wormhole.

And as I reflected, I realized it’s ideal to spend as much time as possible articulating your ideas to others in a similar space.

Not because they help to confirm those specific ideas, but because being around them helps nurture the other ideas you have floating around in your head.

It seems the best way to plant better seeds is to hang out with other farmers.

MY FAVORITE PRODUCTS

Here are a few of the products I’m using lately (a few of these are affiliate links so if you give them I try, I’ll earn commission, but I actually love all of these). None of these companies are paying me:

1. 💪🏼 | Morning workout stack (the pumps are crazy): LMNT (electrolytes) + Create (creatine gummies) + Momentous Protein (cleanest protein)

2. 👕 | Clothing brands: Stevenson Ranch, Deus Ex Machina, Carte Blanche

3. 👟 | Shoes: These New Balance 9060s are like walking on a cloud

Here are a few products I heard about that I’m looking forward to trying:

1. 🎥 | Topaz Labs: Uses AI to make your video smoother, high quality, etc. One time purchases

2. 🌴 | Tropic Color: Solid video assets and overlays

VIDEOS FROM THIS WEEK

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

1. 🌴 | wknds in Oceaside (vlog): Watch on TT | IG

2. 💬 | ChatGPT just got way more useful: Watch on TT | IG | YT

3. ⭐️ | What happens when AI merges with Hollywood: Watch on TT | IG | YT

4. 🤫 | My secret weapon as a creator: Watch on TT | IG | YT

LOVED THIS EDITION?

If you liked today’s post and you know another creator building on the internet, it’d mean the world if you shared this with them. Friends sharing with friends is the best way to help us grow 🤙🏼

INTERESTED IN SPONSORING BLUEPRINT?

I’m open to partnering with interesting brands looking to sponsor Blueprint. If interested, please drop a note to [email protected]