🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 047

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 47 weeks (11.75 months) since I went full-time.

A reminder that the local 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 👩🏻‍🚀

WEEK 47 METRICS & PULSE

Kallaway Pulse Check

Here are a few quick updates on my progress. Month 12 Strategy update coming next week!

• 📈 | Green Chutes: My content flywheels are starting to spin. Hard to measure depth quantitatively, but feels like more shares, more new discovery, more DMs, more cult fans. Still haven’t hit ludicrous mode compounding, but it’s coming

• 🤤 | Still Fasting: I’m intentionally not prioritizing money in the immediate term…this was the second straight week with negative burn. I’ve learned a valuable lesson about leaning on variable income (brand deals) as the primary revenue stream. And that lesson is…don’t. Before starting this journey, I had multiple years of runway banked, which lets me be less desperate during this phase (would recommend). Still…don’t love see the money number red. For reference, all my costs are from YouTube production

• 🚀 | Content Topic Shifts: I made an intentional choice to only make short-form bangers from here on out, so the views should start getting crazy (2.57M this week is pretty decent). Had been experimenting with both broad and narrow content through shorts. I’m now focusing the deep stuff only on YouTube and going full blitzkrieg on short-form. Will be fun when I can actually monetize the 2.5M+ views per week.

•  🎥 | Sleepy YouTube: I’m putting a ton of effort into long-form YouTube. I can’t believe the videos haven’t started popping yet. When I watch them, they feel +90th percentile in terms of quality, value, topic, editing, etc. I know they will start popping eventually…but this is the conundrum zone where most people would quit (they feel like they’re doing all they can and it’s still not working)

• 👨‍✈️ | LinkedIn: At this rate, I will own LinkedIn in 6 months

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BLUEPRINT MONTH 11 VIDEO

Blueprint Month 11 Video

We just released the video version of my Blueprint Month 11 Strategy Recap.

If you like reading these weekly, you will love watching the monthly video versions even more. This is the best one we’ve made!

This episode breaks down:

• 🧮 | Month 11 Metrics

• 🧐 | Top 3 Biggest Creator Learnings

• ⚖️ | Short-Form Experiment (Greenscreen vs Cinematic)

• 💰 | Huge Opp to Make Money in Creator Wave (Without Being a Creator)

SPINNING PLATES

Spinning Plates

I’ve been making A LOT of content lately (short-form, long-form, podcast, email, tweets, LinkedIn, community, livestream, etc.)

I’m not burnt out…but feeling stretched thin creatively.

Fractured focus across many things typically leads to average outcomes everywhere.

Most content makers will tell themselves something like…“I’m not doing a bunch of things. I’m only doing one thing…content”

But this is a lie.

Each unique content format and platform is a different thing. You’re not doing one thing, you’re doing ten.

And each one is a spinning plate.

The more plates in the air, the more time you spend running back and forth between them trying to keep them all spinning.

The spinning is the art. The running between is wasted energy.

And it’s not that you can’t win this way…but lots of spinning plates force you to shift from offense to defense.

I hate defense. Breakthroughs don’t happen on defense.

So the challenge for me, and you (if you make content), is finding the fewest possible plates to spin that unlock your intended outcome.

Many fall into the trap of feeling like they have to be everywhere.

You don’t.

I’ve written in the past about ways to assess which platforms and formats are best for you, depending on your goals.

Here’s a helpful framework (also covered in this Blueprint pod I did with Alex Garcia).

To build a sustainable business from content, you need:

1. Top of funnel (Reach)

2. Middle of funnel (Nurture)

3. Bottom of funnel (Capture)

The most efficient way to complete the stack is with a single channel (YouTube).

1. Reach: YouTube’s algorithm will push you to new viewers

2. Nurture: Long-form video (especially vlogs and talking head) is a great way to build trust and depth

3. Capture: YouTube Adsense can be substantial enough to drive low 6-figures per year

YouTube as a platform is unique in this way…it’s the only platform that can meaningfully serve all 3 buckets at once.

This is why the majority of massive creator businesses have been built on the back of YouTube audiences.

However…there are drawbacks to a YouTube only strategy.

The biggest one is speed.

Unless you start with a prebaked audience or some other unfair advantage, it will take years to get this funnel flowing with enough capture to support you financially.

This is why you’ll see other approaches that string together multiple platforms.

For example:

1. Reach: Instagram Reels / Tiktok videos

2. Nurture: Email newsletter (deep content on a topic)

3. Capture: Email newsletter ads + paid course

In this case, the creator needed to make three different types of content (short-form video, email newsletters, and long-form courses).

Although balancing three plates instead of one, this loop can get goinh much faster given the explosive reach from short-form algos.

There are thousands of combinations for how to assemble the content funnel.

Right now, this is what mine looks like:

1. Reach: Instagram Reels / Tiktok videos / YouTube Shorts / LinkedIn Shorts

2. Nurture: Email newsletter (Blueprint) + YouTube (long-form) + free community (WavyWorld)

3. Capture: Brand Deals + ???

For me, I’ve built a ton of reach and made huge strides in past few months with nurture, but am still hunting for the right capture moves.

As you can see, I probably don’t need all of these different Reach/Nurture channels…it’s possible I’m extending myself too thin unnecessarily.

Here’s a general list of different content types and where they’d slot in:

1. Reach: anything with algo help (short-form, possibly viral YouTube long-form, Twitter, etc.)

2. Nurture: in-depth content (podcast, email newsletter, blog, YouTube long-form, free community, livestream, free email drip campaign, free course, free book)

3. Capture: revenue generating (brand deals/ads on any of the above, paid community, paid course, Adsense, etc.)

MARKETING 101

Marketing 101

Marketing is much simpler than people think.

Here’s all you have to do:

1. Get super clear on who your customer is

2. Identify their top pain point

3. Create content that maximally twists the knife into that pain point

4. Show them where the bandages are

For example…my friend is building a SaaS product that helps podcasts automatically cut their episodes into super high quality short-form clips, schedule them, tweak them, etc. It’s basically done for you podcast growth.

Here’s how most people would approach marketing…”Hey Billy! I’ve built the best possible tool for podcasts. It does these 10 things super well. You really should try it. You’re gonna love it man!”

This doesn’t work for two reasons:

1. You’re showing them the bandage before you twisted the knife. They don’t feel the pain yet so they don’t need a solution

2. Internet buyers have become sophisticated enough to tune out blunt asks

So here’s the marketing logic that makes more sense:

1. Target Customer: People with a podcast

2. #1 Pain: People struggling to grow their podcast (fortunately, this is every podcast)

3. Content Strategy: Make content talking about why/how it’s so hard to grow a podcast

4. Bandage: Other podcasts that have grown faster using your thing

First, make them remember the pain, and then second, show them how you solved that pain for a similar version of them.

You don’t have to solve their pain. They will solve their pain with your product if they believe you’ve solved it for their peer.

This logic applies to all marketing across every format in every industry.

INVISIBLE AI

Invisible AI (Apple Intelligence)

Apple (finally) dropped their first AI-specific product release…Apple Intelligence.

If you didn’t see the coverage, here’s a short-form video I made about it.

Below I’ll share two quick perspectives I haven’t seen from other tech creators…why it’s interesting + Apple’s brand genius.

Invisible AI

By far, the most interesting feature announced was AI Siri.

I came up with this term “Invisible AI” when I was watching them demo it.

In a nutshell, AI Siri will be turbocharged with ChatGPT and eventually able to execute a series of app actions automatically via speech or text prompts.

So for example, let’s say you told Siri to “Buy Ken a birthday gift”

Old Siri would respond with something like….”The weather in Kensington is 74 degrees…”

Literally useless.

But new AI Siri would be able to…

• Look up Ken in your contacts

• Find out his birthday

• Go to your message threads with him

• Read and understand them

• Decide what Ken is into

• Open your Amazon app

• Find an item he might like

• Buy it (assuming you’d some spend limit)

• Use Ken’s address from your contact card

• Place the order on Amazon

All automatically in sequence…without you touching your phone again.

Imagine this across all of your apps (“scan my email and call these 5 places”, etc.)

Immediately your life admin and logistics tasks can be automated away.

I called it Invisible AI because I believe the majority of daily AI usage won’t be from “using an AI tool.”

It’ll be from using the tools/apps you already love, with an invisible system of AI pipes connecting them automatically to make your life 10x easier.

This is why owning the hardware layer is so important…and why none of the other AI device challengers like Rabbit or Humane, had a chance to beat Apple.

Your iPhone is a trove of customization and personalization preferences. It has messages and emails full of your likes, interests, and favorites.

Now assume you lived in a vacuum where privacy concerns weren’t a problem…the only way to make an AI assistant truly useful is to give it your life context so that it knows how to actually execute on your tasks.

It can only become an extension of you if it has the data on your life. Apple, Meta (and maybe Google) are the only companies with this type of data access.

I’m super excited to see how this progresses.

Most people think AI means we’ll spend more time on our phones…I think this means it might be less.

Apple Intelligence

You’ll notice Apple took the term AI and cheekily named it Apple Intelligence.

Although extremely corny at times in the presentation, I think this was a genius branding move.

Our culture has a way of accumulating negative brand debt around certain terms.

NFT is the best recent example that comes to mind.

There was a time where no one knew what the term NFT meant.

Then, it became this exciting new technological innovation where lots of people were making tons of money.

And now, NFT has such a negative brand debt attached that it likely has no chance of being widely adopted in mainstream culture ever again.

The term “AI” is not as bad as NFT, but seems to be heading down a similar road.

For AI, the negativity doesn’t come from a scam, moreso that normal people associate AI with things like robot soldiers, automating their jobs, invasion of privacy, etc.

Because we live in a world where words matter, companies get a lot of hate when they talk using these charged terms.

Now Apple was in a bit of a pickle.

They needed to talk heavily about AI to satisfy Wall Street, but also, needed to avoid overmentioning AI to prevent a mass protest from scared consumers.

So they call it Apple Intelligence.

This phrase obviously is synonymous with AI for those that care (Wall Street), but is soft enough to be easily embraced by mainstream culture.

Brilliant job on the comms side.

MYSTERY BOX

You never know what you’ll find…

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WEEK 47 BEST CONTENT

My best content from last week:

1. 📱 | Apple just debuted the future of iPhone: Watch

2. 🤖 | Would you buy a Tesla phone?: Watch

3. 😱 | What happened to Abercrombie & Fitch?: Watch

4. ✍🏼 | The Art of Storytelling: 6 Tips Inspired by Steve Jobs, Casey Neistat & South Park: Watch

5. 📹 | All creators should be livestreaming (with Ben Kaluza): Watch

6. 🚀 | Journey to $1M/month as a Creator (Month 11): Watch

7. 🧑🏼‍🚀 | Blueprint 046 - Edgerunners, embedded behaviors, livestreams, storytelling tips: Read