🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 045

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

It’s been 45 weeks (11.25 months) since I went full-time.

A reminder that the 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 worlds. If that’s you…let’s ride 👩🏻‍🚀

WAVYWORLD

I launched WavyWorld (why, how, and what next)

Very pumped to put WavyWorld out into the world!

If you’re just hearing about it for the first time, WavyWorld is a free community + “living course” for anyone looking to improve their short-form content.

Inside the WavyWorld space, you’ll find video modules for things like:

• How to decide which topics to make content about

• How to come up with unique content ideas

• How to pick which content channels to post on

• Simple editing tips

• How to monetize as a beginner creator

• My favorite creator tools

• Full video breakdowns of my own scripting + editing process

I’ve been receiving amazing feedback from the 442 members already inside.

In addition to the tutorials, there are 3 other community benefits that I think will become super valuable over time:

1. Pain Points Threads - Each week in the community, I post an AMA/Pain Points thread where content makers can share whatever is frustrating them most. Based on popularity, I’ll use those pain points to make new video modules. This is why I call it a “living course.” Over time, the vault of information will become extremely comprehensive and hopefully answer most beginner content questions

2. Live Sessions - Every 1-2 months I’m going to host a live session where anyone from the community can learn from guest creators or ask me specific 1:1 content feedback questions

3. Creator Community Network - After watching people interact in the community for the first couple days, it’s clear that there is a high desire to find others working towards similar goals. People are already helping each other solve problems with their content, which is awesome to see

If you make content for yourself or run a business that’s trying to grow, joining WavyWorld is a no brainer.

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Now of course, the reason you read Blueprint is for the inside baseball on why I make the moves I make…so let me share a bit around my thought process for WavyWorld.

I toiled with the idea of “what to launch” for a while.

It would have been fairly straightforward for me to take all of these “beginner short-form” learnings, record them as video lessons, package them nicely, and sell it as a $300 short-form course.

I would have probably made $30-$50K in the first week doing this.

But instead, I made it free for two reasons…

The biggest one is outcomes.

I don’t believe in selling a product unless I can absolutely guarantee the outcome for my customer.

If you ever buy a hoodie from me, you can be sure it’ll be of a quality that I personally would wear daily as my favorite piece.

I think about all categories with this same mentality…because all I really care about is building max trust.

Offering a paid product/service that falls short of the expected outcome usually ends up sacrificing that trust.

The truth is that there’s a lot that goes into making successful content that performs well consistently.

One of those things is the “knowledge” of how to make it, edit it, etc.

Others include style, sauce, taste, intuition for what’s good/bad, progressive repetition (making the next rep better than the last), etc.

It’s a soup of skills…some of which can be easily taught through video courses and others that take much more personalized help over a longer period.

My goal now is to figure out how to offer that 1:1 attention at scale to help close the gap on all of the “non-knowledge” stuff.

The other reason I didn’t want to charge for it…was thinking back to when I started making videos.

The content game is super tough at the beginning.

You’re constantly looking at others that you admire, watching their numbers go up, and the mountain between you and them feels impossible to climb.

If you’re like me, you would do anything (including pay) to close the gap a little bit faster.

I built WavyWorld so anyone can start closing that gap for free.

CONTENT PLAYBOOKS

Every brand should follow this content playbook if they want to win

If I were running marketing for any company, in nearly any industry, this is the content playbook I’d follow.

First, I’m quadrupling down on organic content.

We’re in a rare moment where organic content is less expensive to produce, performs better, and proliferates further…for free.

I’ve talked to many brand marketers that know this, but haven’t yet actioned against it as aggressively as they should be.

The way to close the gap on your organic content strategy is to nail:

• For who - Who is the target customer we’re trying to get in front of?

• By who - Who is the personality in our content that is consistent from piece to piece?

• In what way - What is the best format for this brand creator to use to drive our intended outcome?

• Where - What channels/platforms should we be posting on?

Here’s a quick breakdown of how to address each:

1. For who - most brands already have their customer archetypes defined

2. By who - it’s super important to have a consistent face & voice on your content. Most brands are trying to have this be one of the founders, but it’s often a huge time suck (because an afterthought) and the founder may not have the right personality for it. Brands should be hiring an in-house creator that becomes the face of the brand through content. This creator should be posting daily on the brand account and collab posting with a named account that they’re building (brand could own IP for this as well). JT Barnett is running an agency to help find and place these types of creators. I think this is the thing that most brands get wrong. They throw a junior level social media person on organic content that either a) doesn’t have the sauce or b) does, but quickly realizes he/she are underpaid and leaves. Performance based comp helps align incentives

3. In what way - This is where brands need to come up with content formats that work. Everybody wants their own “signature format.” Most signature formats get accidentally discovered through iteration and trial and error. I wouldn’t start here. Most brands should start with either a) How we do X (show the behind the scenes of the process) or b) category relevant news coverage with a twist. These are two foolproof formats thats will enable daily posting with constant content ideas

4. Where - The only two places I’d focus on is Instagram/Tiktok (shorts) and YouTube (medium-form). Can you win elsewhere? Yes. Should you be elsewhere? Yes. But video is king and will spread the fastest, so when you’re in the avalanche of options, start with these. If you can’t do both, it depends on the brand category. Most physical products brands should do short-form. Most software, B2B should do long-form daily

I can’t stress this enough, every brand should be 10xing the way they think about organic content.

In my opinion, the gap is that most brand marketers aren’t tactically creating content so they don’t live in the day to day of how to implement against this.

Every brand would benefit from having a fractional head of content that is a creator.

I’ve never offered this before, but if you run content/marketing at a brand and you want me to do a 1 hour session with you and your team to review your content strategy, tune up the approach and help come up with new content ideas/formats…you can book here (I’m limiting this to 5 slots).

YOUTUBE SUBSCRIBER HACK

YouTube Subscriber Hack

If you want increase subscribers on YouTube, add this to the end of all your share links: ?sub_confirmation=1

So my YouTube profile link would look like this…https://youtube.com/@kallaway?sub_confirmation=1

Click the link and see what happens…it’ll give you a confirmation pop-up asking you if you want to subscribe (which is super easy to just click “yes” to).

No gatekeeping here.

NEWSLETTER GROWTH

Newsletter Growth Playbook (going 0 → 8K subs in 2 months)

This is the best tactical newsletter growth playbook I’ve read…from Tyler Denk (Co-Founder of beehiiv)

WEEK 45 METRICS & CONTENT

Thanks so much for reading! Blueprint will always be free to read, but if you like it and want to support, consider becoming a Blueprint Patron.

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My best content from last week:

1. 🚀 | WavyWorld launch video…easiest free way to level up your short-form content: Watch

2. 🏈 | This short-form content format would crush for any brand…works in every industry: Watch

3. 🧑🏼‍🚀 | Blueprint 044 - Month 11 Strategy Update, 2 interesting ways to win with content, friction, dislocation, game theory, the scientist & the lab rat: Read