🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 052

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 52 weeks (1 year) 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 👩🏻‍🚀

YEAR 1 METRICS & RECAP

Year 1 Recap

I’ve been looking forward to writing this one for a while.

But before I get into any of the details, I want to say thank you.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a true Kallaway fan. Without you, there’s no way I’d be where I’m at today.

All the shares, likes, DMs, words of encouragement, and everything in between…it really does make a difference. So thank you!

It’s been a wild run so far.

For those new to the series…

We are now fully in the trenches. Here are a few of the highlight metrics from year 1:

• 👀 | Total Views: 171M views on ~150 videos (for a sense of scale, the largest football stadium in the US is Michigan Stadium. It holds ~107,000 people. The viewers from my videos this year would have filled that stadium 1,600 times)

• 🧮 | Avg. Views: The average views on a Kallaway short were 1.1M (cross-platform)

• 👇🏼 | Posts: I pressed post 1,911 times this year…that’s 5.2x per day.

• 💰 | Revenue: I was expecting to make $0 this first year. I ended up making $105,780 inbound only (22% CPMs, 57% brand deals, 19% consulting, 2% other). I didn’t ramp up a team until halfway through the year so costs were lower and income was $77,205

• 📈 | Audience Growth: I added 233,956 net followers in year 1…a 75% increase

• 🧑🏻‍🦱 | Zuck: A few weeks ago, I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg about the future of creators, AI, and Meta’s roadmap

• 🎊 | Celebs: I’ve had a number of notable celebrities follow me or interact with my videos (Snoop, Shaq, Patrick Dempsey, Reese Witherspoon, Gary Vee, etc.)

YEAR 1 THOUGHTS, WINS & LOSSES

Thoughts

I’m stoked with how this freshman season turned out.

My only goals were to a) stay alive in the game and b) begin mastering a skill that would help me compound value forever.

I worked 10x harder this year than the previous 5 combined.

I learned 10x more this year than the previous 5 combined.

I’ll be honest…before starting on my own, I had massive ambitions but an undisciplined mind that wasn’t taking action against them.

I felt very “wantrapreneurial” and had to live with that daily as I remained stagnant. That lack of action poisoned my mind.

This year put me in the fight or flight position that forced a mental rebuild…and now I’m a completely different person.

The most important takeaway from this year was a complete mental reconstruction.

This process will end up being the foundation for everything I do moving forward and it’s the greatest gift I could have given myself.

One last thought before getting into the tactics…the hardest part about going on your own is that you end up doing everything for the first time, at the same time.

This can be super frustrating and draining, but the good news is, it will never get harder.

Losses/Struggles:

• Finding Partners: In order to build big things, you need to find world-class partners that are complementary to you. For me, that means operators that love the nuts and bolts of business, managing people, building systems, and don’t want to deal with product, sales, or lead gen. I have struggled to find these types of people. Most of my creator/entrepreneur friends are like me...the distribution potential energy. This is amazing as a peer group, but suboptimal for a partnership (on its own). Until I find these operator types, I will be growth limited

• Automation: I waited too long to attempt automating/delegating my content creation process. The artist likes to do things themselves, by hand. They will hold onto the process forever because they love the craft of the process. The entrepreneur likes to learn things first, and then automate them away as soon as possible. I leaned into the artist narrative as a procrastination technique because I didn’t know how to automate. This meant I had to work harder for longer and grew slower because everything fell on me

• Positioning: My interests are super broad, so when I started making content, I didn’t put guardrails around my topic selection. This led me to make stuff about Apple one day and Taylor Swift the next. I went viral consistently, but my audience was super broad. It’s tough to sell products/services to a broad audience, especially one built through gen pop topics. This was a mistake. I was chasing vanity metrics (views/followers). I should have traded speed for direction earlier and sacrificed the big numbers for the right ones. Because of the choice to go broad, I spent 2 months churning off tens of thousands of followers and stalled growth

• Leaky Bucket: When I started making content, I didn’t have an offer to sell. This is okay at the beginning. But as I ramped up audience and saw the view count going higher, I should have forced myself to figure this out. Again, more procrastination. By not doing this, my content funnel was a leaky bucket. Tons of views in, temporary interest in me, nothing to buy, interest lost, etc. I should have spent more time figuring out the offer earlier

• YouTube: Still haven’t figured out YouTube long-form. I’m not sure why it still isn’t working…maybe I come off too unlikeable in my delivery or my content + bio positioning is disconnected (views are converting to followers). Unclear why, but I have yet to crack it in a meaningful way. I think I will solve it this year, but damn, it is frustrating

Wins:

• Commitment to Quality: I have an obsession with quality. I can’t always execute my vision with my own hands, but my standard for what is acceptable is incredibly high. I think this has worked to my advantage, especially with my short-form content vs the rest of the market. Because of this quality standard, my stuff looks different than most others

• Intensity: I come off super laid back, but I attack things in a super intense, all-in way. I hadn’t found many people like me until I started playing the business game. Consistent intensity for long periods is a superpower, but often comes at the expense of everything else in life. Turns out most people don’t like when I pepper them with questions for an hour straight lol. I think my intensity toward the craft of video storytelling has helped me accelerate faster than baseline

• Entrepreneur Friends: I mentioned it above, but I’ve found a handful of other entrepreneur/creator friends that are similar to me. This has been one the best byproducts of the overall journey thus far. Entrepreneurship is one of the lonelier things you can do in life. It’s common to quickly become unrelatable. Having other friends playing the same game has been invaluable for me

• Shorts: I am now a savage at short-form storytelling

YEAR 2 STRATEGY

Year 2 Strategy

Before I started down this path, I hobbled together a YouTube video outlining my overall strategy to build a $100M holdco.

Here is a pulse check on where I’m at in the grand vision and my focus for year 2.

The strategy:

1. Develop content knowledge (master the skill of generating, funneling, converting attention at will)

2. Use that content knowledge to build a personal audience via one content format

3. Repeat steps 1+2 across other content formats

4. Automate the content creation process (for each format) without sacrificing audience quality or trust

5. Deploy that content knowledge and/or automated process against a business opportunity

Those business opportunities could be:

• 🦸🏻‍♀️ | Growing my own personal brand (e.g., becoming an MKBHD-type media brand)

• 💊 | Growing my own product company (e.g., starting a supplement company and owning the distribution (using knowledge and/or personal channels)

• ⚙️ | Growing my own services company (e.g., start agency helping other companies figure out organic content)

• 🤫 | Applying the knowledge to silently grow other brands (e.g., making content via Tiktok Shop or on faceless channels)

In year 1, I developed expert knowledge in short-form video and used it to grow fairly large channels.

I’m currently in the “repeat” stage for YouTube long-form and email newsletters.

My strategic focus for Year 2 will be:

• Figure out how to learn and scale YouTube + email

• Figure out how to automate short-form and apply that knowledge/automation to one of the four business opportunities above

I have a good sense for which one of the four opportunities makes the most sense, but you’ll have to keep reading to see how it goes 😉

YEAR 1 LESSONS

Year 1 Lessons

Here are a few general lessons I’ve learned along the way. I wish someone told me these when I was younger.

• Some games are rigged against you…don’t play those: Corporate jobs are rigged against you. Your salary is capped within a band regardless of performance. This means, if you’re special, you will never be rewarded accordingly. This typically causes exceptional people to revert back to the mean, because the incentive isn’t worth the increased effort. When you play non-rigged games, that max effort will map to higher rewards. Be careful which games you sign up for

• Delusional self-belief: When you have vacuum sealed conviction, it’s impossible for long-term doubt to sneak in. To win, you must have an absolute certainty about yourself as the jockey. I’ll ride 1,000 horses if that’s what it takes, because I have a delusional belief in my own ability. This belief is a prerequisite for doing amazing things. If you don’t have this delusion, but want it, spend hours inward (via meditation) to convince yourself. Some people are born with a higher predisposition to be this way, but anyone can jailbreak their mind. You need to positively brainwash your programming. Your thoughts are simply programs. You can change the programming if you change your inputs. Easiest way to change the inputs in with your eyes closed. Fortunately, I had some of this ability embedded in me, but I forced the last mile this year via meditation and it has changed everything. I am now bulletproof mentally. This is starting to sound woo-woo, but I believe all successful people have gone through this process, they just don’t talk about it. I will. If this resonates, but you still don’t know what to do, reply to this and I’ll give you the step by step. Takes about 30-60 days and you’ll be a new person

• Do interesting things to attract interesting people: When I was younger, I always wanted to be noticed by the interesting people doing cool shit. I thought I had unique perspectives and rare abilities. But they never noticed me…Why not? Because I wasn’t doing interesting things. Interesting people want to be surrounded by other interesting people. If you want them to come to you, learn a skill or build a project that you’re passionate about. If you do this for long enough, eventually, they will notice. These types of projects get you invited into the rooms you want to be in

• Incentives are all that matters: Everything in life boils down to incentives. If someone isn’t paying you the way you want to be paid, it’s because they don’t have the incentive to do so. They either don’t value you or don’t believe you will leave. If your team member isn’t doing what you want them to do, it’s because you aren’t incentivizing them in the right way. Figure out what people want and structure the incentives so that they can get it. When a process is broken, start with the incentives

• You can’t hit your ceiling with ankle weights on: If you’re ambitious, make sure your life and daily expectations are designed to help you win. If they aren’t, you’re adding unnecessary headwinds

• Skills are the currency you’re looking for: As soon as you have high value skills, you’ll realize that you can eat forever. Most people that fear instability do so because they know they don’t have a defendable hard skill. It takes 6 months to become world-class at most things. 6 months to set yourself up for forever. If you do not have a hard skill (like me when I was younger), this is the first place you should start

• It’s nearly impossible to win alone: I talked about this a bit above. Having a complementary running mate pays compounding dividends, many that are invisible at first. A simple way to understand this is rent in NYC. If you live alone, it’s extremely expensive and almost impossible to afford something nice. Why? Because everything falls on you. Most people have roommates in NYC which lets them afford something nicer that they could get alone. It’s a crude and overly simplistic example, but building companies is the same way. 1+1=10 with the right partner

• Stay alive, forever games: All you have to do is not burn out. Do whatever you need to do to stay in the game long enough to let serendipity happen. If you do that, you win. I never wanna retire. If I handed you $20M tomorrow and said good luck, you’d last about 6 months before stress began to creep in. Why? The brain was designed to solve problems. If you don’t give it one, it will create one for you. Because of this, I know that I’ll need to play some game forever. This realization should alleviate the time pressure. Your only goal is to stay in the game. The reward is that you get to keep playing.

• Boredom mistake: A common mistake for high achievers is to work on something for a while, get good at it, start to gain traction, get bored, and abandon it as if it stopped working. Most high achievers are puzzle solvers…so when the puzzle is solved, they bounce. But this is how you lose…because you stop just before the compounding gets going. Don’t do this. Pick the thing and stick with it until you can automate yourself out while preserving the compounding. Or fall in love with the boredom. Invent a new game within the game to keep yourself playing. Don’t jump lilypads or you’ll stay on the surface forever

• Greatness: If you have the capacity for greatness, I believe you owe the world an attempt

Keep going.

WEEK 52 BEST CONTENT

My best content from last week:

1. 💍 | Will you buy the Apple Ring? Watch

2. 🫡 | JT Barnett on creators, brands, pro-hockey and more: Watch

3. 💰 | Brand Deals 101 (strategy, rates, how to get them, negotiation): Watch

4. 🧑🏼‍🚀 | Blueprint 051 - The realness epidemic, creative priming, Blueprint Month 12, no soliciting, Kallawisms: Read