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š§š¼āš Blueprint 047
Spinning plates, invisible AI, mystery box, marketing 101, green chutes
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Welcome back to Blueprint, a weekly series where I share an unfiltered, behind-the-scenes look into my journey as a creator entrepreneur.
Itās been 47 weeks (11.75 months) since I went full-time.
TODAYāS TOPICS:
š | Week 47 Metrics & Pulse
š½ļø | Spinning Plates
šÆ | Marketing 101
š» | Invisible AI
š | Mystery Box
A reminder that the local internet game is not zero-sum. Everyone reading this can win at an unlimited scale. Iām writing this for the internet astronauts building their own worlds. If thatās youā¦letās ride š©š»āš
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WEEK 47 METRICS & PULSE
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Kallaway Pulse Check
Here are a few quick updates on my progress. Month 12 Strategy update coming next week!
š | 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 havenāt hit ludicrous mode compounding, but itās coming
š¤¤ | Still Fasting: Iām intentionally not prioritizing money in the immediate termā¦this was the second straight week with negative burn. Iāve learned a valuable lesson about leaning on variable income (brand deals) as the primary revenue stream. And that lesson isā¦donāt. Before starting this journey, I had multiple years of runway banked, which lets me be less desperate during this phase (would recommend). Stillā¦donāt love see the money number red. For reference, all my costs are from YouTube production
š | 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. Iām 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.
š„ | Sleepy YouTube: Iām putting a ton of effort into long-form YouTube. I canāt believe the videos havenāt 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 eventuallyā¦but this is the conundrum zone where most people would quit (they feel like theyāre doing all they can and itās still not working)
šØāāļø | 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 weāve made!
This episode breaks down:
š§® | Month 11 Metrics
š§ | Top 3 Biggest Creator Learnings
āļø | Short-Form Experiment (Greenscreen vs Cinematic)
š° | Huge Opp to Make Money in Creator Wave (Without Being a Creator)
SPINNING PLATES
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Spinning Plates
Iāve been making A LOT of content lately (short-form, long-form, podcast, email, tweets, LinkedIn, community, livestream, etc.)
Iām not burnt outā¦but feeling stretched thin creatively.
Fractured focus across many things typically leads to average outcomes everywhere.
Most content makers will tell themselves something likeā¦āIām not doing a bunch of things. Iām only doing one thingā¦contentā
But this is a lie.
Each unique content format and platform is a different thing. Youāre not doing one thing, youāre 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 itās not that you canāt win this wayā¦but lots of spinning plates force you to shift from offense to defense.
I hate defense. Breakthroughs donāt 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 donāt.
Iāve written in the past about ways to assess which platforms and formats are best for you, depending on your goals.
Hereās a helpful framework (also covered in this Blueprint pod I did with Alex Garcia).
To build a sustainable business from content, you need:
Top of funnel (Reach)
Middle of funnel (Nurture)
Bottom of funnel (Capture)
The most efficient way to complete the stack is with a single channel (YouTube).
Reach: YouTubeās algorithm will push you to new viewers
Nurture: Long-form video (especially vlogs and talking head) is a great way to build trust and depth
Capture: YouTube Adsense can be substantial enough to drive low 6-figures per year
YouTube as a platform is unique in this wayā¦itās 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.
Howeverā¦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 youāll see other approaches that string together multiple platforms.
For example:
Reach: Instagram Reels / Tiktok videos
Nurture: Email newsletter (deep content on a topic)
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:
Reach: Instagram Reels / Tiktok videos / YouTube Shorts / LinkedIn Shorts
Nurture: Email newsletter (Blueprint) + YouTube (long-form) + free community (WavyWorld)
Capture: Brand Deals + ???
For me, Iāve 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 donāt need all of these different Reach/Nurture channelsā¦itās possible Iām extending myself too thin unnecessarily.
Hereās a general list of different content types and where theyād slot in:
Reach: anything with algo help (short-form, possibly viral YouTube long-form, Twitter, etc.)
Nurture: in-depth content (podcast, email newsletter, blog, YouTube long-form, free community, livestream, free email drip campaign, free course, free book)
Capture: revenue generating (brand deals/ads on any of the above, paid community, paid course, Adsense, etc.)
MARKETING 101
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Marketing 101
Marketing is much simpler than people think.
Hereās all you have to do:
Get super clear on who your customer is
Identify their top pain point
Create content that maximally twists the knife into that pain point
Show them where the bandages are
For exampleā¦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. Itās basically done for you podcast growth.
Hereās how most people would approach marketingā¦āHey Billy! Iāve built the best possible tool for podcasts. It does these 10 things super well. You really should try it. Youāre gonna love it man!ā
This doesnāt work for two reasons:
Youāre showing them the bandage before you twisted the knife. They donāt feel the pain yet so they donāt need a solution
Internet buyers have become sophisticated enough to tune out blunt asks
So hereās the marketing logic that makes more sense:
Target Customer: People with a podcast
#1 Pain: People struggling to grow their podcast (fortunately, this is every podcast)
Content Strategy: Make content talking about why/how itās so hard to grow a podcast
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 donāt have to solve their pain. They will solve their pain with your product if they believe youāve solved it for their peer.
This logic applies to all marketing across every format in every industry.
INVISIBLE AI
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Invisible AI (Apple Intelligence)
Apple (finally) dropped their first AI-specific product releaseā¦Apple Intelligence.
If you didnāt see the coverage, hereās a short-form video I made about it.
Below Iāll share two quick perspectives I havenāt seen from other tech creatorsā¦why itās interesting + Appleās brand genius.
Invisible AI
By far, the most interesting feature announced was AI Siri.
I came up with this term āInvisible AIā 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, letās say you told Siri to āBuy Ken a birthday giftā
Old Siri would respond with something likeā¦.āThe weather in Kensington is 74 degreesā¦ā
Literally useless.
But new AI Siri would be able toā¦
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 youād some spend limit)
Use Kenās address from your contact card
Place the order on Amazon
All automatically in sequenceā¦without you touching your phone again.
Imagine this across all of your apps (āscan my email and call these 5 placesā, 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 wonāt be from āusing an AI tool.ā
Itāll 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 importantā¦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 werenāt a problemā¦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.
Iām super excited to see how this progresses.
Most people think AI means weāll spend more time on our phonesā¦I think this means it might be less.
Apple Intelligence
Youāll 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 āAIā is not as bad as NFT, but seems to be heading down a similar road.
For AI, the negativity doesnāt 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.
WEEK 47 BEST CONTENT
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My best content from last week:
š± | Apple just debuted the future of iPhone: Watch
š¤ | Would you buy a Tesla phone?: Watch
š± | What happened to Abercrombie & Fitch?: Watch
āš¼ | The Art of Storytelling: 6 Tips Inspired by Steve Jobs, Casey Neistat & South Park: Watch
š¹ | All creators should be livestreaming (with Ben Kaluza): Watch
š | Journey to $1M/month as a Creator (Month 11): Watch
š§š¼āš | Blueprint 046 - Edgerunners, embedded behaviors, livestreams, storytelling tips: Read