🧑🏼‍🚀 Blueprint 064 (Month 15)

Welcome back to Blueprint.

It’s been 64 weeks (15 months) since I went full-time as a creator entrepreneur.

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

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 👩🏻‍🚀

BLUEPRINT UPDATE

Before I dive into the full post, I wanted to comment on where I’ve been for the past few weeks and the future of Blueprint.

If you’re a diehard Blueprint fan, you’ll know that I posted for 61 weeks in a row and then disappeared for nearly a month.

Here are the two biggest reasons why…

1. 🧮 | Metrics Frequency: My biggest achilles heel…is overthinking. I’ve realized that the only way I’ll lose is if I stop. And the only thing that makes me stop is overthinking. Overthinking is the hole in my game. When I was writing Blueprint weekly, it forced me to analyze my performance metrics every 7 days. If I had a bad week numerically (which happens often), these forced check-ins would drag me into a strategic reassessment. Essentially, I was questioning my approach every 7 days. You can imagine how paralyzing this was. Most businesses don’t assess KPIs on a weekly basis for exactly this reason…it creates false negatives because good strategy doesn’t have enough time to play out. I had to stop this.

2. 🧐 | Topic Clarity: Per the above, you may be thinking…”cool, just don’t include the metrics but still post weekly because we like hearing your thoughts.” I agree. I am posting weekly here (https://content.game). I now have two newsletters — Blueprint and Content Department. And this speaks to a major learning and unlock I realized over the last month…topic clarity (more below). In order to grow a content channel you need to be extremely specific on who it’s for and why they should care. The broad approach (“you are the niche”) doesn’t work anymore. Blueprint as it currently exists was covering two topic areas — entrepreneurship (income, metrics, mindset) and content/marketing strategy (how I’m growing, experiments, frameworks). By jamming both of those things into one content stream, it became really hard to a) message who it’s for and b) get people to stick. You can imagine the confusion when I say, “I have this cool newsletter where I break down my viral content formula” and then someone subscribes and the first thing they read is my income for month 14…they’re not going to stick.

So what I’ve done is parsed out those two buckets into separate content homes.

If you like reading about the entrepreneurial journey, business of content, mindset tips, that’s all I’ll cover in Blueprint (1x/month).

If you like reading about content strategy, marketing case studies, and opportunities I’m seeing, that’s all I’ll cover in Content Department (3-4x/month) [https://content.game].

If you like everything I write, you can subscribe to both for free!

This strategy means I can go much deeper and more tactical on the entrepreneurship and business strategy stuff in Blueprint.

And with that…let’s dive in.

MONTH 15 METRICS & UPDATES

Month 15 Metrics + Updates

A lot of things changed for me this month…and everything started clicking. I’ll get into it more below, but I now have max clarity around exactly what I’m doing.

Here are some key metrics:

• 📭 | Posts: 33 videos // 117 total

• 👀 | Views: 88.5M views (if this were a population, it’d be the 18th biggest country in the world)

• 🚀 | Revenue: $30,971 (top month so far)

• 💰 | Income: $23,071 (top month so far)

There are 4 quick things I want to comment on from this month (highlights, traffic, income, mindset).

1. Highlights: I got the chance to go in-person to 3 super cool events. First, I met Zuck at Meta Connect (this was wild, we have a vlog coming soon here). I also went to Dreamforce with Salesforce, and spoke on a Creator panel for Instagram at Meta. I really enjoy these types of opportunities and think they’ll be a big part of my personal brand moving forward

2. Traffic: 88M views in 28 days is hard to fathom. I’ll admit, half of this is from one super nuclear outlier that went crazy across all 4 major platforms, but I’ve definitely found a viral formula and approach that works repeatedly. I broke that formula down here. My next in depth content breakdown video is going to walkthrough exactly how I drove those 46M views in 8 days on a single video…will be posted on my new YouTube channel next week

3. Income: This was my highest revenue and income month so far. It was also the first month where I exceeded the income from my corporate job. To put this in perspective, I started making content 9 months before quitting and have been at it full-time 15 months since quitting. That’s 24 months…so essentially two years. If you’re considering quitting your job to try entrepreneurship, you have to ask yourself, “Am I willing to work 2-3x harder for two full years just to get back to where I was?” This is a tough choice for many. I share this transparently because not enough people are honest about how much work, time, and struggle it takes to get started on your own

4. Mindset (a few words on my current mindset as a time capsule for future decades)

I feel like I’ve taken another step forward.

If you’ve read back in previous episodes, I always spoke in a confident tone, but the truth is, I was very lost and very lonely for the first 15 months.

I was lost because I didn’t have clarity on direction. I kept taking two steps forward, overthinking, reversing back to square one, and repeating.

And I was lonely because I was building by myself in a silo.

I have my friends and family of course, and even a lot of awesome new entrepreneurial friends, but unless you’re in the trenches building full projects with others, you quickly realize that entrepreneurship is a very lonely game.

Chris Williamson and Alex Hormozi call this first phase, “The Lonely Chapter.”

During this period, you have to find a way to develop your skills enough to where other talented people would want to work with you. And nobody can do that development for you.

The echo of indecision in your own head will be be deafening.

And there’s no way around this period other than to start with a business partner from the beginning…someone that complements your skills and can play business advisor, therapist, and friend.

As a creator, due to the nature of the economics and process, you rarely start out with this type of partner.

This Lonely Chapter phase lasted about 15 months for me.

Fortunately, I’m addicting to working so I was able to force myself to keep going during this period.

I’ll be honest, it wasn’t always fun.

It was not fun to wake up, not know why I was doing what I was doing, spend half my day do something I didn’t want to do (edit), post, see the video flop, and then feel like that effort was wasted.

I spent many many days like this…hundreds of days like this.

But I kept going because I knew that on the other side, when I finally did find clarity, the work I put in to hone those skills would have been worth it.

I had to delusionally believe this would be the case because nobody around me could tell me otherwise.

I’m writing this post so when you’re in this era, you have one other proof point to convince yourself that it’s worth it to keep going.

It will get better. Your skills will develop. It will be worth it. You will eventually evolve out of the Lonely Chapter.

This month was the first month where I felt past it.

And for me, things are totally different now.

I’ve realized that the most valuable currency in entrepreneurship is clarity. When you have clarity (and a brain that works), you will win.

It’s also critical to understand who you are and how you tick.

I realized that I’m not the type of person that likes wandering in the woods without a plan (lack of clarity).

I like to have a plan and then go win. Not having direction was sucking the spark out of me.

New era has begun.

— — — — — — — —

I’ve said this many times previously, but for new readers…I don’t write these types of pieces to brag…I just want these to exist as a time capsule for a younger version of myself.

When you read this, you may wonder if I’m delusional. I am. Delusion is simply believing something is so before you have proof to justify it. You must be delusional to get through the lonely chapter.

LINKEDIN SHORT-FORM VIDEO

LinkedIn short-form video is the craziest marketing opportunity I’ve ever seen.

I made a video breaking down:

• Why this is a generational opportunity

• The tactical playbook to begin executing on it

• 3 advanced strategies brands can use to outpace everyone on LinkedIn

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 kallawaymarketing in YouTube search → click to my channel → click the video). I don’t make the rules. Here’s the link

MONTH 15 LEARNINGS

These are my 3 biggest learnings from Month 15…

Clarity

If you want to win as an entrepreneur, you need to be able to signal to a stranger that they should give you money for something.

The best way to signal at scale is with content.

But to do this effectively, you need complete topic alignment in your content, messaging, funnels, flows, landing pages, etc.

For the first 15 months…I didn’t really have this.

I was dumping all sorts of content topics and types into a single channel.

Let’s take my Main Instagram Reels channel for example…

There was a period when I was posting tech breakdowns, AI tools, marketing strategies, and broad business breakdowns…all on the same channel.

I thought this was smart because it showed I was diverse!

What I was actually doing was confusing the algorithm.

And this is exactly what I broke down in my piece on variety shows (if this sounds like you, you should read it)

The algorithm is meant to serve as a jetpack to boost your ideas to millions of people.

Its job is to audience match and then continue serving your content over and over to that same audience.

If you tell it to aim one direction one day and another direction the next, it doesn’t like that. It will throttle your reach if it can’t match audiences.

So for the past 15 months, I was making a massive mistake across all my content channels…too much content diversity.

And my logic for doing this reveals a common mistake that most creators make.

The typical advice from content gurus is “you are the niche.”

This essentially gives people license to create any type of content they want, about any topic, and make the channel about them as an individual.

This approach worked in the previous content era…but no longer works because of “For You” algorithms (again, explained the full thing in this piece on variety shows).

In the “For You” era, what works is having a single channel dedicated to a single topic, 1-2 formats, and hammering that over and over and over.

This gives the algorithm a better sense for who you’re targeting so it can audience match daily.

The tighter this match, the more it naturally boosts you and finds people that like your stuff.

A good way to test if you are doing this effectively is to ask a friend to describe your channel to another friend.

If they can do it easily, and it’s easy to understand that your content is about a single topic/audience, then you’re perfect.

But if it’s hard to message, like my stuff was, you’re in big trouble. I don’t know any creator that was messing this up more than me. I had millions and millions of likes/shares on my stuff but my following and consistency wasn’t there.

So I completely revamped.

Now, each social platform has multiple channels (either tech focused or creator/marketing focused).

Each of my channels is targeting one audience archetype with one category of content. And I’ve already noticed this has helped the algorithm dial in who to share my stuff with.

The takeaway for you is that if you’re trying to make content that drives an audience to follow or buy a product, you need crystal clear and consistent alignment across the full stack….every touch point needs to align perfectly with the rest.

Efficiency

I’ve been laser focused on efficiency lately.

The more things I add to my plate (content channels, businesses, projects) the more efficient I need to be with my systems and processes so I can get it all done.

Here’s how I think about efficiency in the context of creating content (this is something I’ve changed my mind on recently).

I look at content on a spectrum.

On one side you have the artist…the type of person that really really loves the art and beauty of the process to make something amazing.

They need lots of non-working time to come up with great ideas, but when they do nail one, damn they are so insane.

These are the type of people where you see their work and think, “my god, this person is incredible…a true talent.”

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the engineer.

These people do not care at all about the art.

They will do whatever, make whatever, try whatever to achieve the result they want.

They do not romanticize the process, the simply do it, as well as they can, as efficiently as they can, constantly looking for ways to improve.

The engineer typically goes under the radar, nobody knows them, but if they execute well, they are wildly successful.

While the artist makes the cooler things, the artist creator archetype typically struggles to make a super high income unless they are an extreme outlier.

And the reason for this is because social algorithms reward volume.

If the way social media worked was that every user only got one slot per week to post something…the artists would win, because they would make the best stuff in that unit time.

We don’t live in that world.

Both paths can make some money relatively easily…but to make a lot of money from content, an easier path is to shift closer to the engineer.

Now, if you’re reading this and you identify with the artist side, you’re probably thinking, “f*ck this guy…he doesn’t know art.”

I’m simply commenting on how I view the strategic tradeoffs.

When I first started making content, I tried to view myself as an artist.

Part of this was because I wanted to seem cool, but the other part was that I am extremely detailed oriented and liked to think obsessing over the last detail mattered.

I would spend hours agonizing over those last few details…priding myself of staying up until 2am to finish a masterpiece.

But I actually didn’t make more money doing this. You could argue I made less because of the opportunity cost.

And the reason was because the market didn’t seem to care whether I went that extra mile or not.

Creatives and artists often lie to themselves about what the market actually values because they need a justification for spending more time on what they love to do.

This is a completely natural psychological response.

To steelman myself for the creatives screaming in the back…the beauty of art is that most artist do not care at all about money. So they actually prefer low efficiency.

And I think that is awesome!

But if you do care about making a lot of money, which I do, the limiting variable is time and I was wasting most of mine on an artist-driven process that was super low efficiency.

So over the last couple months, I’ve shifted more from the artist mindset to the engineer…and this is simply because I’m optimizing for dollars as my north star metric.

I realized that for me personally, I enjoy the art of earning more than the art of making. 

But again, that’s just me.

The reason I write this is less about which strategy is right or wrong (you can make money with both), it’s more about knowing who you are, knowing what actually moves the needle for you, and then adjusting your frame and approach accordingly.

This was the first month where I really began to embrace the engineer side of things.

And what that means tactically is trying to accomplish 80-90% of the effectiveness in the most efficient and scaled process possible.

I believe the most dangerous creator is one that can vacation as an artist but works daily as an engineer because this best allows for scale across multiple projects.

Partners

There are three main groups of people you’ll interact with as an entrepreneur.

1. Non-work friends & family

2. Professional counterparts but non-partners

3. Partners

Non-work friends and family are easy.

You actually need the escape with these people from time to time. I’m fortunate to have some great people around me in this bucket.

This first year I made a ton of what I call “professional homies”…these are other people building stuff that think like you, understand what you’re going through, and are super helpful for bouncing ideas around.

It’s critical to have a handful of these people you can grow close with as you build.

The problem though, is that you really only talk to these people every couple weeks. As I mentioned above, it’s lonely af if you don’t have partners.

Partners are the people that you’re actually building stuff with…in the trenches together, talking daily or every couple days.

Partners are short and long-term incentive aligned with you and have complementary skillsets.

This last couple months was the first period where I really leaned in with a couple partners across various projects and I love it.

My goal has always been to become the type of person that people would do anything to be in the trenches with and would hate going up against.

Finally starting to team up with other A-players and working together has unlocked so much energy in me.

The two biggest questions I get on this…

1. Where do you find partners like this?

2. How do you structure the partnership?

On the where to find them…

The more dope stuff you do, the more you attract other dope people.

Then, those people often ask you to meet on a call.

You should take as many of those meetings as you can, because this is where you form those “professional homie” relationships.

I used to be the type of person that would try to limit calls and stay super focused and efficient…but that led to a lonely world. 

Obviously you shouldn’t take any call willy nilly…you want to only do it with others you think are doing dope thing, but these relationships often end up becoming the foundation for where partners come from.

The second piece is the approach…

Two things here, for one, I try to always give more to the other person in the deal.

Fundamentally, I try to be super super strict on who I work with and what idea we’re chasing.

Once that’s decided, I want the other person to feel amazing about the partnership.

And this is because I can only control my side, and I’m a pretty happy guy when incentivized properly.

Most problems in business come when expectations or incentives are misaligned, so I try to always give more than I’m worth.

The second thing is that if I’m gonna take on multiple projects, I want my contribution to be the same bucket of things over and over and over.

This allows me to max compound and make it feel like I’m only doing one thing.

For example, the thing that I know best, and like best, is cracking the distribution code.

I can get lots of people to watch something and take an action.

With my partners, I own the distribution side. No matter what type of business we’re building, it always needs distribution.

Then, I can apply the learnings from one project to the next without spreading myself thin from too many projects.

Find partners that you’re excited to collaborate with and take projects that enable you to compound against the same skill in all of them.

KALLAWISMS

Kallawisms

Mental models and frameworks about business and life…

• Time thieves: Don’t rob from tomorrow to play today. Heavy drinking, heavy drugs, eating late, not sleeping…these are things that borrow energy from tomorrow. Every time you do this, you’re breaking the streak of compounded effort. It’s rarely worth it

• Winning: Winning is a certainty, the question is…at what cost? Anyone reading this can achieve whatever they want. It’s pretty simple honestly, you just do the thing, and don’t stop doing the thing, until you win. The question is usually what gets in the way that makes you consider stopping doing the thing, and what are you willing to give up to make sure that doesn’t stop you?

• Failure: People aren’t afraid of failure, they’re afraid of either a) being seen as bad, b) feeling bad for being bad, or c) the work required to go from bad to good. Those that find a way to mentally grapple with this and push past, win. Doesn’t matter how smart or talented you are. Intellect and talent only help you compress the work phase, but it still must be done

• Urgency: Here’s a mindset that has helped me lately. There are things that are in my control and things that are out of my control. For those in, win with urgency. For those out, win with patience

• Generalist vs Specialist: You want to be a generalist with opportunities but a specialist in your role. Good ideas can come from anywhere but to compound your own value, you want to do the same thing across all of them

• Math vs Drama: I was listening to a conversation between Russell Brunson and Ali Abdaal where Russell was coaching Ali through business strategy. For every objection Ali had, Russell kept asking, “is it a math problem or a drama problem?” And what he meant is that all questions/problems in business boil down to one of two things…math (the numbers aren’t working) or drama (you’re making up some belief about a thing that isn’t true). This is a super helpful frame

MONTH 15 BEST CONTENT

My best content from last week:

1. 🤖 | This Russian engineer built a real Ironman Suit: Watch

2. 👟 | This shoe technology could change running forever: Watch

3. 📦 | These drones are the future of delivery: Watch

4. ☀️ | This company lets you order sunlight from an app: Watch

5. 🤳🏻 | How to trick the Instagram algorithm to make you go viral: Watch

6. 🎯 | LinkedIn Shorts is a cheat code for fast growth and more leads: Watch

7. 📺 | Avoid this huge social media mistake in 2024 - Variety shows: Read