🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 060 (Month 14)

Welcome back to Blueprint.

It’s been 60 weeks (1 year + 2 months) since I went full-time as an entrepreneur.

My goal is to go from $0 → $1M/month while transparently documenting the journey, strategy, and mistakes made along the way.

• Each week, I share learnings & experiments (in written form)

• Each month, I share income & strategy shifts (in video form)

• You can watch the Year 1 recap video here

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 👩🏻‍🚀

MONTH 14 METRICS & UPDATES

Apologies for the delay on this week’s post…I know many of you look forward to reading these on Sundays, especially when I do the monthly recaps.

The truth is, when I started writing it last Sunday, I was in a negative headspace. I don’t like writing if too overly high/low because it skews the pulse on reality. Will be back on timing track next week!

Month 14 Metrics + Updates

The tl;dr this month is that my content crushed (25.5M views), audience grew significantly (+39,505 followers excluding Threads), made +$8K in revenue, and lost -$766 in earnings.

In this section, I’ll share my biggest takeaways, thoughts and learnings from the past 30 days.

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💰 Monetization 

The obvious first question is how I feel about driving 25M+ views with zero take home income?

And believe it or not, I’m not too concerned with the size of earnings (other than having to eat air for dinner).

Brand deal timing can be lumpy and doesn’t always group nicely in a clean 4 week pocket. This will improve & stabilize over time.

But I am concerned with the source of revenue.

To this point, I’ve relied almost exclusively on brand deal income.

I intentionally chose this starting path in an effort to compound as much of my focus on content as possible.

I figured, if I let myself get distracted with other things, it would take away from my content learning and slow growth. Decent logic imo…but I’ve let it go too far.

A trap I’ve noticed is that content performance can be intoxicating, and once you get it working, it’s very hard to let yourself intentionally slow it back down to focus on anything else.

Now that I’m scaling my team and costs are increasing, it’s becoming a bigger priority to launch other things.

The general takeaway, is that it’s clear I’m not getting a strong “return on attention” to borrow the phrase from my homie Jay Clouse.

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🎯 “Solving” short-form video

It took me 2 years of making content to do it, but I’ve finally cracked short-form as a medium.

I averaged 2.5M views/short over my last 6 videos (as of Sunday 🤦🏻‍♂️).

Every one of them was a banger.

I now know exactly what to do to make a short-form video go viral at will (if I have the necessary time + full creative freedom).

But, it’s important to realize, this took me 2 years, 334 videos, and 1,300+ hours of reps to get to this point.

Some of it is formula, some of it is sauce honed over months.

I have dedicated most of my daily mental bandwidth to solve this single problem…can I generate virality at will via short-form video. 

But the question is…was it worth it? Was cracking short-form video the highest leverage use of my problem solving capacity?

Maybe, maybe not.

This exercise has taught me that problem selection is much more important than I’d previously thought.

With enough reps and a strong force of will, you can solve anything.

I now feel confident that I can crack any distribution problem…any medium, any format, any platform if given enough time.

But certain platforms pay bigger dividends than others. Certain moves have a bigger return on time than others.

I don’t get to play the counterfactual, but knowing what I know now, YouTube might have been a better thing to focus my time on, even if I’d have a smaller audience at this point.

If you’re reading this, it’s worth spending a cycle or two evaluating if your time is being spent in the highest leverage area. Also worth saying that for me, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far if all I focused on was YouTube because I hate video editing and am below average at YouTube packaging 🤷🏻‍♂️

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🎥 Vlogging

This was the month that I started vlogging on Youtube!

Of all the different types of YouTube videos, these are my favorite to film. Most other YouTube videos feel like work for me to do, but these don’t.

Never thought I’d be a vlogger, but here we are.

My goal is to use vlogging as another “video version” of Blueprint, to live as a sauce layer on top of the businesses I end up building.

Now we have these written posts, the fully animated Blueprint monthly recaps, and vlogs.

Btw, if you like Blueprint, I’m building out this second YouTube channel dedicated strictly to these vlogs + Blueprint recaps. Make sure to subscribe if you want to see these when they first drop.

👀 Next & Last

What makes business hard isn’t solving one problem…it’s keeping the first solution running while you’re solving the next problem.

The framework version of this figuring out Y without letting X fail. 

The more time intensive X is, the harder this period of ramping Y while sustaining X will be.

I’m in this now with long-form and short-form content and it’s proving to be difficult to optimally allocate my focus on a daily basis.

To solve YouTube, I want to dedicate every waking hour to it, but I don’t want to sacrifice the momentum of shorts.

Content is unique in that it can’t fully be delegated, so there will always be some minimum viable lift for me on the shorts side to keep it cranking.

Hiring has helped reduce that, but I’m in that interim period where doing both has been challenging. Wanted to share this in case you’re in a similar mode.

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🤝 Teambuilding

This was the first month that I began scaling a proper content team.

It’s no coincidence that I was able to fully solve one format at the same time I added help.

The reason this worked is that my editor took on the 80% tasks, allowing me to focus exclusively on the last 20%.

When you’re doing everything yourself, you have to spend 4x more time on the 80% stuff than the 20% stuff…this means you spend less on the last mile.

With anything creative, the last mile is where outliers come from.

I’m in the outliers business, so adding capacity has allowed me to focus exclusively on that last mile.

On the flip side, it has been a challenging experience to go from solo to collaborative teaming.

The biggest difference is that the timing of the work matters more than the volume. 

When it’s just you, you can piece things together whenever it’s most convenient. If you want to workout at noon and pull an all nighter on a task, you can do that and still hit the deadline.

But as soon as you add other teammates, especially in different time zones, your freedom becomes massively constrained. 

All of a sudden you have deadlines for when to get the raw materials out so they have the most time to do their portion.

It’s interesting that even though the volume of tasks goes down, the diligence for timing and sequencing goes up significantly.

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🤖 Iteration

The other big learning from this month was around iteration.

If you’re going to play the entrepreneurial game, you have to learn to be okay with things needing more iterations and missing a deadline.

In corporate settings, you’re trained to compress the number of required iterations down to one. They want you to be assigned a thing and finish that thing on the first try with zero mistakes.

Creative work doesn’t really work like this.

New projects & new formats take time to dial in.

Rushing to post the first iteration to hit a made up deadline will result in market noise that doesn’t breakthrough.

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🎥 Youtube

Still haven’t cracked YouTube.

I think I’m confusing the algorithm with all these different video topics coming from the same channel. Still working on this.

I will solve it within the next 6 months. For now, head still banging on wall.

NEW NYC VLOG

As I mentioned above, I just dropped my 2nd vlog from a recent weekend in NYC.

In the vlog, I covered:

• 🗽 | Should my wife & I move back to NYC (and touring different neighborhoods in Brooklyn)

• 🤝 | Meeting with my management team in person for the first time

• 👀 | Meeting up with a few creator friends (JT Barnett, Zach Pogrob, Hunter Weiss)

• 💡 | Where do great ideas come from (Central Park ideation walk)

Would love feedback on if you think these types of videos are more fun/interesting to watch.

Btw, I’ve been told by the YouTube gods that instead of giving you the direct link to each video, it helps my channel a ton if you go to the channel homepage and then click the video from there (even better if you search kallaway in YouTube search → click to my channel → click the video). I don’t make the rules. Here’s the link

MONTH 15 STRATEGY FOCUSES

• 🥱 | Settle into the repetition: My goal for Month 15 is to continue accelerating the pace with shorts. I’d like to get to 16 shorts next month (averaging at least 4 per week for 4 weeks in a row). For reference, I posted 10 this month. When things are working, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to settle into the boring repetition of letting them keep working

• 🤔 | Figure out YouTube: This one pretty much speaks for itself. Goal is to continue down the path. I have newfound clarity about how YouTube works and where I was approaching it incorrectly. This was a painful process to go through, but I’m crystal clear now on what will and won’t work. I’m going to try a few different strategies this month…will comment next month how/why they worked

• 💬 | Comments: I’d like to get a lot better at consistently engaging with comments across all platforms. Comments are sneakily the best way to build depth in community, and if people took the time to watch and comment on my stuff, I feel like I owe them a response. My goal is to respond to every comment thoughtfully. I currently get over 100 comments/DMs per day across all platforms, so it can take 1-2 hours to respond to everyone. I’m going to start scheduling in pockets in the day to respond as much as I can. Keep me honest about this!

• 👀 | Offers: As mentioned above, I was intentionally waiting to put an offer together so I could focus on compounding my content growth. I now have two things in the works that I’m super excited about and will launch in the next 1-2 months. Both are geared towards helping founders and marketers accelerate the process to make better content. Will keep you posted on these

• 💡 | Ideation: If you watch the NYC vlog, you’ll hear me talk about the importance of dedicated ideation time. To this point, I’ve been a bit of an execution-forward creator. I don’t spend a ton of time thinking through ideas. Part of the reason I’m able to produce so much content is that I see something, think for 10 seconds, and then go. But the more I study virality and outliers, the more I realize that the idea phase is the highest leverage part of the process. A great idea with average execution can 100x the best execution on an average idea. My goal is to spend more cycles this month on dedicated “ideation” time. Even writing this sounds like procrastination lol

KALLAWISMS

Kallawisms

Back by popular demand (thanks for demanding I keep doing these mom)…

1. Puzzle solvers, bulldozers, and pilots: Entrepreneurship is a game of puzzle solvers, bulldozers and pilots. Puzzle solvers are true 0 to 1 specialists. Lock them in a room with a bunch of pieces, no instructions and they will figure something out. They may not know exactly what the implications are of what they built, or where to take it from there, but they can always build something unique. Many people think they are puzzle solvers…most are not. Bulldozers are people that can take a small seed of something proven and then apply extraordinary effort, to go from 1 to 10. This process often breaks the original thing that the puzzle solver first made, so it requires the bulldozer collaborating with the puzzle solver to rebuild it several times on the way to 10. Pilots can take a scaled thing from a bulldozer at 10 and grow it slowly over time to 100. Each role has certain skills that make them especially suited for success in their respective capacity (and make them struggle when operating outside). After 14 months, I’ve realized that I’m a bulldozer. The only time I like puzzle solving is when it’s a single shot experiment (something that can be solved within one session of 10-12 hours or less). When it takes longer than that, multiple days, weeks, or months, I get frustrated at the lack of progress. But if you hand me the start of a playbook or any indication that something is working, I’m really good at applying unnatural force to make it bigger. Also, as expected, I get extremely bored in pilot mode, which is why I didn’t make for a good employee. Everything in business, with any significant scale, must go through all 3 phases, and it’s rare for a single person to be able to operate maximally at all three. It’s critical to know where you specialize so that you know how who to look for in a partner. For me working alone, this 0 to 1 phase has been very difficult, because it’s outside of my nature. To solve for this, I’ve begun partnering with various people that are in their own bulldozer phase across their various specialties. They have puzzle solved for the thing that I struggled with and can now help me go from 0 to 1. I’ve found that honest self-awareness, across frames like these, is the easiest way to get around blockers

2. Fear of failure: I was with a friend last week and she asked me how I got over the fear of failure when sharing my thoughts in public. This is the mindframe I shared. In order to get good, at anything, you have to go from zero → bad → good. Everyone in the world that you respect, that is a goat in their craft, has gone through this path. You start off at rest, then you suck, then you get better until you get good. Failure is simply the transition from zero to bad. So there really isn’t a reason to be afraid of that failure, because it’s required to be good at anything. There is no direct path from zero → good. You must go through bad. This reframe, that failure is necessary, immediately disarms it as a monster.

3. Gut checks: A common question from beginners is, “How do I know when to keep going vs when something actually isn’t working and needs a pivot?” When you’re smaller, it’s hard to gut check if a strategy is working, because you don’t have enough reps, exposure, or data to properly gauge momentum. It’s kind of like cooking a chicken. When you put a raw chicken breast in the oven at 320 degrees, you may check the oven after 4 minutes and see that it’s still raw. If you ask, “Is this the right way to cook the chicken?”…the answer is yes, but you haven’t cooked it long enough to notice that your method is working. If you keep going…that chicken will cook. If the strategy is straightforward, like most are, you probably just haven’t let it cook long enough.

4. Hard: This is some derivative of Hormozi…when you’re stressed, realize that it’s gonna be hard either way. If you try to build a business, it’s gonna be hard. If you working a salaried job where you make a lot of money but you don’t enjoy it, it’s gonna be hard. If you work a salaried job you love, but you don’t make enough money to pay for life, it’s gonna be hard. No matter which way you slice it, some part of the game is going to be hard…might as well choose the game you like most

WEEK 60 BEST CONTENT

My best content from last week:

1. ❤️‍🩹 | Spotify Founder launches the Apple of Healthcare: Watch

2. 🏈 | This company will change live sports forever: Watch

3. 🤖 | OpenAI launches a deep reasoning model, o1: Watch

4. 🗽 | Should my wife & I move to NYC (Vlog): Watch

5. 🧑🏼‍🚀 | Blueprint (Week 59) - Virality explained, mythical figures, digital drug dealers, boredom, blinders, hurricanes: Read