Brendan Kane - Social Media Expert | The Secret To Going Viral

As a kid I would watch movies and every time I'd watch a movie I'd be like I want to be that character. When I was in high school I picked up a camera and I was the kid that was always shooting. Then I decided why don't I go to film school. That's how I kind of got the start into really studying this art form. In a world where attention is currency, Brendan Cain has cracked the code. From pioneering the first ever YouTube influencer campaign to managing $200 million in marketing spend, he's built digital platforms for icons like Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Adriana Lima. For years he was the mastermind behind the scenes. Until he used his own methods to gain one million followers in just 30 days. The first YouTubers would let you in like their your friend. And that's a big mistake that people make with social media is they think it's one to many when it's really a one to one platform. You need to be able to grab that attention and hold that retention through retention. And that's what a lot of the top creators were doing at the time. When I first started like back in 2005 we're talking maybe a few million people on these platforms. Today it's close to five billion. Now at hook point his viral content model has generated 60 plus billion views and 100 plus million followers redefining what it takes to go viral. This is Brendan Cain. In some people think of virality as Mr. Beast. To me it's like what is important for the impact that you're trying to have and the brand that you're trying to build. Work on yourself. As entrepreneurs as business people we're so focused on optimizing and scaling the business when a lot of times the core focus first should be optimizing yourself. Welcome to success story. I'm your host Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. But HubSpot doesn't just have great podcasts. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're a builder they've got your back now. Why is that important? Because if you're building anything you know that marketing in 2025 is absolutely wild. Now why is that important? Because you know if you're an entrepreneur, if you're building anything marketing in 2025 is wild. Savvy customer spot fake messaging. Instantly anything AI generated they sniff it out. Privacy changes make ad targeting a nightmare. And everyone needs more content now than ever. And that's why you have to have HubSpot's new marketing trends report. It doesn't just show you what's changing. It shows you exactly how to deal with it. Everything's backed by research but focused on marketing plays that you can use for your business tomorrow. If you're ready to turn marketing hurdles into results for your business, go to HubSpot.com slash marketing to download it for free. A huge shout out to Lingoda for supporting today's episode. Now if you're ready to master a new language, Lingoda is the online language platform trusted by over 100,000 students worldwide. Lingoda offers live classes with real teachers available 24-7. You can choose from German, English, business English, French, Spanish, or their newest addition, Italian. What sets Lingoda apart the smallest class size in the market? It's just you and up to five other students. Or if you want, you can go one-on-one for personalized attention. Their native-level teachers don't just teach language. They share culture too and you'll speak confidently from day one. With Lingoda's flexible scheduling and proven curriculum, students report being able to navigate real conversations in weeks, not years. And if you're using Lingoda for business, their CEFR aligned courses ensure that you're learning internationally recognized language standards that employers value. Between sessions, you're going to reinforce your skills with downloadable materials and bite-sized practice exercises. And all success story listeners, they put together a special deal. Try Lingoda free with three group classes or one private class. Plus, you save on any course with my link, try.lingoda.com slash success story and code Scott 25. Don't miss this chance to transform your life through language learning. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanden. Now listen up, this matters for your business. And today's digital landscape security isn't optional. It's essential. Without it, deal stall. Sales cycle stretch on and scaling becomes very difficult. Now why? Because investors, customers, and partners all expect businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit. If you can't prove trust, you lose opportunities. So whether you're a startup founder, trying to land that first big client or an established company, scaling your security program, Vanden helps businesses of all sizes prove that they're trustworthy by automating compliance across 35 frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA. The exact certifications your prospects are demanding. Here's why you need to pay attention. Vanden gives you back precious time that you're currently wasting on compliance. Their platform automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work. It helps you respond to those endless security questionnaires at the five times faster, and it connects you with experts to get your security program running immediately. The results speak for themselves. A recent IDC report found that Vanden customers achieve over $535,000 per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months. So you're going to join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Korra, and Factory who use Vanden to manage risk and prove security in real time. And don't miss this for a limited time only. My listeners can get $1,000 off Vanta. That's real money back in your pocket. Visit vanta.com slash scott right now before this offer expires. That is vant.com slash scott. Vanden, what made you first start studying the mechanics behind viral content? It actually interestingly started in movies. So just kind of take a step back like as a kid, I would watch movies and every time it was crazy, like every time I'd watch a movie, I'd be like, I want to be that character. Like it was about firefighters. I want to be a firefighter. If it was about like a baseball player, I want to be a baseball player, not realizing that it's really the mechanics of the storytelling. So when I went to when I was in high school, I picked up a camera and I was the kid that was always shooting videos and editing in them of our friends. And then I decided, well, why don't I go to film school? So in film school, that's where you kind of start really starting to learn the mechanics of great storytelling. It's not necessarily virality in a sense, but it's like great storytelling of like through this format of a movie that can really stand out at the highest levels. Then I moved to LA in around 2005, the pursuant career in film. I wanted to be a film producer. And like everybody, I started at the bottom making coffee, copies, deliveries, and things of that nature. And when you're trying to rise in any industry, you want to connect with the top people. So that was like the head of the studio, directors, producers. But when they would ask me why did you move to LA? And I would tell them that I wanted to be a film producer, their eyes would glaze over. Like it's just like, oh, this is just one of a million people that have the same pipe dream. So I really had to take a step back and be like, okay, how can I grab that attention of these top people and offer the most amount of value? And I just noticed at the time for the studio that we work on, every time we finished a movie, we'd invested tens of millions of dollars into this single piece of content. And then we were going to invest tens of millions of dollars and more marketing this piece of content. And this isn't like traditional business where you have years or decades to build a brand. You're talking about six months to a year for hundreds of millions of people to know about this piece of content around the world. So at the time, like everybody was reliant on traditional media. So it was television, print, radio, things of that nature. And social media was just coming on the scene. So it was like, my space was like the predominant player, but YouTube was starting to gain some momentum. So I just went to the head of the studio and I was like, I know we're spending all of our money on these traditional media outlets, but let's pay attention and create a strategy for these new emerging platforms because it's going to be a fraction of a cost. And in some cases, free in the case of like, I did the first influencer campaign on YouTube in 2007 for a movie called Crank with Jason Statham. And I just kind of realized there was no such thing as an influencer at the time. There was just these people creating content. They were massing millions and millions of views. And at first it was, well, why don't we just tap into that so that we can market our movies? But then it started to introduce me to the psychology of like, well, how are these platforms actually operating? And why are they gaining so much momentum? What is the actual difference between a video that's generating millions of views and one that's generating thousands of views? So that's how I kind of got the start into really studying this art form. Yeah, no, I was going to say, when you started to look into what these individual content creators, like really early nascent stages of social we're doing, it's interesting. I'm sure you saw it from a professional lens because this is what you went to school for and you worked with the best to the best. But were they doing anything that was taught in film school at all in sort of best practices for creating compelling content at all? Was there any similarities or was this radical shift in almost a 180 from the way Holly was doing it, actually serving them better? Yeah, so it's a great question. There were some major differences and there was also some similarities. So in terms of the differences, one of the big differences that was kind of overlooked in the beginning was you have these, most of the kind of like the bigger influencers at the time again, they weren't called influencers, but there are people in their bedroom on web camera, web cameras. And a lot of people wrote them off because of that, they're like, oh, it's just some kid in their bedroom on a web camera. But the difference was, you know, if you think about movies and television, it's a very passive experience. Like you're just kind of engaging this with this content from a passive, you're just watching it, consuming it versus in the, and it still holds true today with social media, it's a very active experience. Like the first YouTubers would let you in, like they're your friend, like they're connecting with you in a one to one basis. And that's a big mistake that people make with social media is they think it's one to many when it's really a one to one platform. Because if you think about one, we're mostly consuming social media, we're sitting on a couch on the train on a bus, whatever that may be by ourselves consuming that content. So that's a big distinct difference. Now, similarities is you're still having to tell a story. Like you need to be able to grab that attention and hold that retention through retention and have some type of payoff. And that's what a lot of the top creators were doing at the time. That was a different type of storytelling. I'm not using like the three-act structure in terms of how those stories were unfolding, but they were still telling stories, even if it was about their day of what unfolded or things of that nature. That was causing the people that were really rising to the top to connect and generate that level of engagement initially. Yeah, no, I just, if I think about, I mean, I've looked at a lot of your work and you really pinpoint, like you slay some sacred cows and really some really sort of, you kill some ideas about what creates great viral content that I think are incorrect. I think that's probably some of the best work that you do. And I think that you sort of reposition and refocus people on what they should be focusing on. And what they should be sort of over indexing on what they should be paying attention to when it comes to creating viral content. That's really, in my opinion, like, that is your life's work. And when you think about what has created these early influencers versus what creates viral content today, do you think it's the same things? Do you think it's changed over time? Do you think that it's evolved? Or are like, there's core fundamentals that you have studied, you believe to be true, you've seen replicated again and again and again and again that hold true over the lifetime of social media? I think it's definitely changed. And there's one, there's one key ingredient that's caused that dramatic shift. And that's the number of people using social media. So when I first started like back in 2005, we're talking maybe a few million people on these platforms. Today it's close to five billion. And the reason that shifts that dynamic is the sheer amount of content that's being produced. And what that means is you have far more competition. So what worked and broke through in 2005, 2006, even through 2010, the barrier of entry is much lower. So your storytelling didn't really need to be as dialed in as it needs to be today. In addition, people have been using social media for so long that they become professional consumers of content on these platforms, meaning they can tell within like a split second or less than a second, and it may not be a conscious decision. It may be subconscious. Am I going to consume this piece of content or am I going to scroll to the next one? So there's a lot of fundamental kind of storytelling dynamics and nuances that go into what makes successful content today versus if you were doing it back in like 2005 through 2010. But I want to differentiate between successful content and viral content. Are those different kinds of content or in your mind can all content be viral content? I love that question, that's such a great question because virality is a term that's like thrown around. And in some people think of virality as Mr. Beast, but other people getting like 50,000 views on a post is going viral. Like to me, it's like what is important for your business? What is important for the impact that you're trying to have and the brand that you're trying to build? Now, when we're analyzing content to try and understand what are the patterns, what are the structures that we need to emulate, we're looking at a certain benchmark of in the millions of views to kind of gauge and dissect the content. But for an individual for a business or brand, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 may be considered viral or more may be success. And that's more kind of what we're after is like what is going to have the impact the bottom line that you're going after with your content and not saying that like if you're a, you know, a dentist or a nutritionist or something like that, maybe 100,000 views is all you need and you can consistently do that and you have more business, more impact than you know what to do with and that's completely fine. You know, you've put out work about how to build a massive audience, massive following. In your mind now, if you sort of like, if you look at what's been most impactful in your life, in your career and whatever metric you're tracking, do you think that brand should even focus on that? Because a lot of people throw around the world like vanity metric and is it useful? Is it not social proof? Does it add value? Is it actually driving leads, revenue, all that? So, I mean, you wrote a whole book on how to grow your following. So, is that a metric people should even track anymore? Was it ever a metric people should track? Talk to me about that. Yeah, it's, there's a lot of levels to that question and it's really intelligent question. So when I first wrote the book, One Million Fowlers, that was 2017 that I wrote the first version of it. I released like three or four different versions of that book, but back then, following meant a little bit more than it does today from the standpoint is the amount of reach that you would get with each post. Like, you, around that time, if you had, say, a million followers, you could get like reach of like 30 to 40 to 50 percent of that audience with the content that you're publishing. But as we just recently discussed, like the more people are on the platforms, the algorithms really have to determine like what are the pieces of content they're going to retain audience? Because there's a lot of demonization and myths around the algorithms. They're there to serve one goal. And that's just to keep people in the platforms longer. The longer people spend on the platforms, the more as they can serve. 99% of the time, they're not shadow batting your, shadow batting your content. They're not suppressing it to get you to pay for reach. It's just they're looking for the best content that can grab and hold attention over other content. So if any one of us opened up our favorite app today, like whether it's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, there's probably 150,000 pieces of content they could see to us based on the accounts that we follow, the content that we've engaged with. So they can't just because you're following an account, make sure that every piece of content they're gonna see because there's all that's other competition out there. So just because you have a lot of followers doesn't mean you're going to reach a lot of them. So that's kind of number one. I always kind of say focus less on the number of followers and focus on like what is the impact that you're having with that content. Typically we're looking at views to see is it breaking through? Is it holding attention? But to your point is like why are we doing social media? And for people it's different reasons. Like for some people it's like pure leads. Like I need to generate leads for my business and I need to generate, you know, sales calls, sell products, whatever it may be, whatever that foundational piece is. Like that should be your guiding light in goal there. For some people it is, you know, getting kind of the recognition you're having a number next to their name so they can get on stages, get book deals and things of that nature. So it really kind of depends on the individual. The one thing that I will say though is there is a big distinction between organic social and paid social and a lot of people misunderstand organic. They think that organic social is meant to sell your product. It's meant like I'm gonna do a product shot. I'm gonna talk about my product and things of that nature. Organic social is about building that trust that what we call to get people to know like and trust you. If people know like and trust you with organic they're ultimately gonna wanna buy from you and take that next step. But you can't lead with the sale. You know paid media you can kind of lead with the sale and go more direct response. But that's a big distinction is like organic is really about how you build that relationship, how you tell that effective story so that ultimately people wanna take that next step. Then as you get more experience and more success you can play paid and organic off of each other. That's where you can really maximize it. Just to give you an example of that because it kind of seems counterintuitive is like why am I gonna make content if it's not selling my product. We were working with a leather craftsman, his name's Tanner Leatherstein and he came to us really struggling with social media to have a lot of experience. He has like 2000 followers and the challenge I'm probably was having was he was trying to sell his products. And what his products were with leather goods. It was like leather handbags and purses and wallets. But we took a step back and said, well what is the way that we could best express his expertise and genius through a storytelling format. Build that no like entrust where it motivates people to go and buy the product without having to talk about his products. So we helped them design a format called Is It Worth It? Where he'll be like a $500 Chanel handbag deconstructing and answering and telling you whether it's worth the money that you paid for it. So that format took him from 2000 followers to 2.5 million across all of his social channels. And if you watch his content, there's no CTAs. He just has the link in his bio. And previously he was spending ads on like paper click advertising search advertising he was generating at 10,000 visitors a month. But when the organic took off it jumped to 100,000 purely organic and his most expensive items. The items he was selling for thousands and thousands of dollars they were custom made. He couldn't keep them on the shelves. So I just use that as an example. It was first he's a very niche kind of like expertise. But also he's not trying to kind of sell you the product. He's trying to kind of build that relationship and by building that relationship it ultimately pays that dividends. And you think about like why do why does Nike and Reebok and Adidas and in all these beauty companies spend billions of dollars on like celebrity endorsements, athlete endorsements and things of that nature because that inherent relationship is already built there that you're just tapping into it that leads to that ultimate sale and conversion. A big thank you to indeed for supporting success story because hiring people is one of the hardest things you're ever gonna have to do as an entrepreneur as a founder as somebody who's trying to build a business. It's important to hire well and find the right person but it takes so much time and it's so labor intensive because like most entrepreneurs you have a thousand things going on and there's a good chance that you just realized your business needed to hire somebody yesterday. So how can you find that great amazing right fit candidate fast? It's easy, just use indeed because you don't have to waste time struggling to get your job post seen on all these other job sites. If you're using indeed you can just use their sponsored jobs to help you stand out and hire fast. Your post jumps right to the top of the page for relevant candidates so you can reach out to exactly who you're looking for faster and the results really speak for themselves. According to indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. And you know what I love most about indeed? It really just makes hiring so fast because everything is streamlined in one place. No more juggling multiple platforms or waiting weeks for the right candidate and how fast is indeed in the minute I've been talking to you 23 hires were made on indeed according to indeed data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of success story will get a $75 sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash clary. In terms of this is do apply just go to indeed.com slash clary. A huge thank you to net suite for supporting today's episode. Now what does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're gonna get 10 answers bull market, bear market inflation up inflation down. Honestly, at this point, you just need a crystal ball. But until we get one over 41,000 businesses have found the next best thing. They future proof their businesses, their operations with net suite by Oracle, which is the number one cloud ERP. Imagine having your accounting, your financial management, your inventory, your HR, all flowing together in one fluid platform. And here's what makes net suite different. It gives you one source of truth for your business. You get the visibility and control to make quick, confident decisions while others are guessing. You're working with real time data insights forecasting. You're basically looking in the future of your business with actionable data, whether your company earns a couple million or even hundreds of millions. And net suite helps you respond to immediate challenges and helps you grab your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunities, they put together the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at net suite.com slash Scott Clary. This is the playbook for understanding how to use AI for your business. The guide is free that is net suite.com slash Scott Clary. Well, I think that what business owners struggle with is bridging the gap between starting and when it's actually gonna realize some sort of return. And they, I think this, they grasp onto this incorrectly safe idea that if they're gonna create content, well, why not just make it sales content? Why not have a CTA because we're making it anyways? And, you know, I don't see my account growing because I don't have a formula for achieving what that leather, that leather guy was achieving. So social is kind of just like a necessary requirement. And I'm gonna put out half fast content with a CTA in it and most of my sales channels coming from my outbound or my ads. Anyways, I think they really missed the point of social media. I think most businesses miss the point of social media. I'm sure you probably get a ton of, a ton of these examples, but I don't understand why in 2025, businesses still have such a tough time understanding how to create great content. It seems like there's case studies, examples everywhere, but if you go to an average business owner's Instagram account, it's horrible and you will wanna leave it immediately and never follow and never consume unless they're a friend. Why do business owners have such a hard time? Why can't business owners adopt the same creative eye as a creative, as an influencer? And yeah, do a lingo kills it. Great example, but why this 95, 99% of them just dropped the ball on it. What are they getting wrong? Yeah, I think that there's a few different elements. One, we talked about where they're approaching social media and social media organic content as an ad. Let me place a shot of a product. Let me put a discount through that. Like nobody, just think about yourself when you're consuming social media. Nobody logs on saying, I wanna see a great ad. I wanna see a great brand of piece of content or I'm looking for a discount. So that's one thing, they're essentially treating their social media profile and their content as if it's their website. And it's just not that. Secondarily, we're talking about close to 20 years on social media, it's relatively new. And the challenge is there's a lot of creative practices and creative models that are being used that were designed pre-social media. So there's a lack of adapting to like a creative process that works for these platforms. Third, that we talked a little bit earlier, I think one of the biggest inhibitors of success is the fact that every one of us has one of these devices in our pocket, these phones that we can literally open, click record and post. So it's a true blessing in the fact that we can do that and reach the masses. It's democratize your ability to reach millions of people because pre-social media you had to have connections with a television station, radio station, news, it wasn't available to anyone. The downside is, is it doesn't take a lot of thought. So people think just because I took the time to pull up my phone and press record and post it or just because I took the time to load up Photoshop and create a graphic or just because I took the investment to hire a social media manager, then I am owed that level of success. And that's where like the blaming of like algorithms, like, oh, it's out to get me a shadow banning. It's there to force me to pay for reach, come in. But I think also, again, we need to think about the world that we live in versus pre-social media. Because if you think pre-social media, how many content creators are really on the planet? Less than 10 million probably. Because you had the traditional media, but you kind of had bloggers that were coming on and news outlets and websites. And if you think about 30 years ago, it's probably less than a million. Maybe it's the hundreds of thousands. Today, you're talking about five billion people on these platforms. There, and even if we think about entertainment in general, like it's not like we just go to the movie and we just have 300 cable channels. Now we've got Netflix and Amazon Prime and all these things and YouTube becoming a player in this space. So again, it's like we have so much content to choose from as consumers that we really need to up our game and really justify why should somebody spend the time, even if it's 30 seconds, paying attention to what we have to say versus the 100,000 other pieces of content that we could be seated engaged with. And you know, that's actually, I'm curious because I'm in this game, I'm in the podcast game and I don't quite understand. I don't quite understand why podcasts have as much influence as they do. Because it seems like everybody loves short form because they're always looking for this next dopamine hit. And that's how the majority of social set up. And a lot of people ask me as somebody who has the podcast, the business owner would be like, hey, should I start a podcast and I say yes because I see a high amount of trust with my audience and when I advertise products, those ads do quite well and I see what Joe Rogan's doing and how he has influence over elections to a degree and obviously podcasting was a huge piece of it. So when we think about all the different kinds of content because you live in the world of social and short form social, but you also study all kinds. What is the psychology there? Why are some consumers sort of going to both ends of the spectrum? Super long, three hour podcasts on one end are very popular. And on the other end, you have short form, 15, 30, 45 seconds because the business owner who doesn't understand any of it, it's very confusing which direction to go in. Yeah, so it's really interesting because people say we live in a micro-attention world and the truth is we do live in a micro-attention world in terms of grabbing the attention. Once we've grabbed it and justified we're worth paying attention to, then people are willing to sit there and watch and consume long form content. Like you just said, people will spend an hour with you on your podcast. They'll listen to a three hour Joe Rogan podcast. Heck, Squid Games 2 just came out. They'll sit there and binge watch the whole thing in a day. So it's the short attention span is there but it's from grabbing that attention. But if we're able to sit there and grab that attention and justify, this is worth paying attention to, people will spend the time with it. Now, there's an interesting kind of dynamic if you look at the social media platforms and this has been going on for over a decade in that like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they're all short form. And their consumption behavior that they've ingrained in their users is short form. People go to TikTok or Instagram Reels or Facebook with a train from a subconscious level, I'm gonna give a piece of content 30, 60 seconds. I'm not there to watch something for three hours. Now, Facebook has tried really hard, TikTok has tried really hard to shift that dynamic. Like you look at like Facebook's history, they did Facebook lives, you know, they did, you know, Facebook TV, you know, an Instagram, Instagram TV to kind of shift that human behavior and dynamic and it just really hasn't worked out versus YouTube, YouTube from the beginning was ingrained. Like this is a long form platform. When you go to YouTube, you're going in, knowing, again, a lot of this is happening on a subconscious level. I'm willing to give something five, 10, 20 minutes. Like my behavior, like I use YouTube probably more than any other platform. I just download podcasts, download clips, and then I just listen to it. Like that's my behavior. And I know the stuff that I listen to, like sometimes I'll listen to like a three hour podcast, but I know that behavior is ingrained in. Now, the interesting thing is YouTube got scared of TikTok and created YouTube shorts because they were worried that they were gonna lose out in the audience. But that's kind of the real kind of element of like short form versus long form is understanding the dynamics of the platform you're playing on, but also understanding you can hold attention. Now, the numbers may not be as big as short form, but as you've seen, the impact can be massive because somebody listening to each one of your podcasts for an hour to time, and they spend, let's just say they spend five hours with you a month versus like on an Instagram reel, like maybe they spend equivalent of like 40 minutes a month, like there is like a huge difference there. Now, that's not to say that you can't play the two off of each other or ones that short form can't be valuable. It definitely can. It's just the strategy and how you deploy it for the end goals that you're going after. I think that's very smart. And if I think about it and how the biggest podcast grow in the strategy that we use as well as it's short form to capture net new, and then that's sort of the top to funnel for lack of a better term. And then they sort of start to discover you. Well, they do discover you, then they explore all the other types of content you create and then some of them convert into long form podcast listeners and long form YouTube viewers. But if you think about that first piece, to your point, that viral first piece, the hook that brings them in, the captures their attention and sort of is like the, for lack of a better term gateway drug into all the rest of your content, I know that you study what makes that first piece, that short form piece so effective because you've done it successfully for yourself. And this is the playbook that I think people really have a hard time wrapping their mind around. And I know that you studied all these different sort of elements of what creates viral content with the good hook and something that captures people. So let's talk about some of those elements. But I want to first, we can talk about the things that do work. But I think what's more important and a little bit more fun would be to talk about some of these, I mentioned before, these sacred ideas about viral content that people hold true, that are definitely not true and really have almost zero impact on the performance of your content. What would some of those be? Yeah, so a lot of these myths, and I'll say that at some point they may have held true because there's less content on the platform. So we're talking like 10 years ago. So one of the big ones is frequency. Frequency is the key to going viral. It's just not. It's like, it's the storytelling elements. And you look at, for example, like some of the best content creators, like a Mr. Beast or like a Mark Rober or Veritasium, like these guys, Mr. Beast has ramped it up. But for a long period of time, they're producing like one piece of content a month or every six weeks and they're engineering every aspect of it. You know, frequency can come into play once you've kind of really mastered the art form of understanding how to tell a story, but it's not the driver to your success. Like it's not the driver to you breaking through. And we can kind of talk a little bit about kind of the elements of why this is true. But a lot of people will say, well, I'm just going to throw a bunch of things at the wall and hope that one's one goes viral. But the reality is, let's just say you post 50 pieces of content and one goes viral, you don't have a process or a model in place to understand why so that you can replicate it. We can talk a little bit about that model in a bit. But that's one, you know, there's an over emphasis on hashtags. There's the one thing that I always hate is like still. In 2025. Yeah, still, you'll see it. Yeah, you'll still see it. The one thing that I can't stand is use this trending audio and you'll go viral because if you click on the trending audio and you look 99% of the content's not going viral because you don't understand the dynamics about it. But there's, I think that the biggest thing is there's this over emphasis on quantity versus quality. The other thing is people are chasing trends. You know, that's another big thing is like, like if you think about trends is like nobody's still doing the ice bucket challenge today. You know, it's just like that's a fleeting thing. And I kind of think of if we talk about mastery and like everything that we focus on is like, how do you become the top 1% of on social media? If you think about mastery of anything, let's just say we want to master a musical instrument. Well, you wouldn't like week one start with a piano and then week two switched to a saxophone and week three switched to a flute. Like how are you going to master any one of those, those different elements? So those are like some of the big mistakes that people are falling into. And I can kind of dive into the model that we built and how they can kind of overcome those and they should focus on because it's super easy to say all these things don't work. But what are the things that do work? Like how should you go about it? Yeah, no, please. I think that's, and I wanted to, I wanted to highlight the things that don't work. Another thing that I've heard you speak about before, even production quality. Any of these sort of ideas that you have to have the best equipment or the best lighting or the best audio, does any of that impact at all? I believe that you can, and I've seen a lot of creators with just picking up a phone and recording in the middle of nowhere do quite well. But is there any merit to that? So it depends on the format and structure you're using and we can get into what that means in a minute. But the quick answer is no. Like there are certain formats that do require it. Like if you look at it like Diary of the CEO and Steven Bartlett, they're creating an experience and that experience is reliant on certain production elements. But like you look at somebody like Robert Croak that does walking listicles who walks around the block and records himself on his phone super successful. You look at the man on the street format, which School of Hard Knocks does. Simon Skiv is doing my friend Alex Stemp. Like we can shoot those things on iPhone. So there are certain formats that kind of dictate, you know, higher production value. But by no means do you need to start there and no means is it required for success? Okay, so let's talk about the playbook. Talk to me about first, how did you build this playbook? What were the different things that you studied? How did you come to this conclusion? How did you test it out? Sort of validate the playbook and let's talk about what it is. Yeah, so as I mentioned, I started in social like 2005, built digital divisions for movie studios and then built some technology in that space. And then about I think like 2012, I helped kind of advise and scale one of the first social media advertising agencies. So if you think back when social media first started, they didn't have their own ad networks. Like they were relying on like, you know, bottom basement, you know, CPMs of banner ads and using third party networks and things of that nature. And then I think I could be wrong, but I think YouTube was the first one they came out and they created TrueView, their advertising platform. And our agency was the largest third party provider of ad revenue to TrueView when it first launched. And we helped scale that agency to managing about a hundred million a year in media spend across the social platforms for Fortune 500 companies. And the reason I say that is I learned so much about the inefficiencies in terms of the creative. So we had like, you know, major corporations and brands you would know come to us with a piece of creative that was designed for television or for print or radio. Or maybe it wasn't, it was designed for social, but it was using these outdated models of like how you create content for those platforms. And what I would ask them is like, how do you know that this piece of creative is going to like work to the tune of investing millions of dollars like they were talking like anywhere from like a million to 10 million dollars against a single piece of content without testing it without any validation that this piece of creative is going to work. And I just kept seeing that over and over and over again. I was like, this isn't sustainable. There's got to be, you know, a different way of going about this. So I left, I left work in that company and I started building the foundations of the model that we use at hook point today. One of the first experiences that kind of really started to refine and understand this is I was brought in by a journalist named Katie Curric when she moved from traditional television the today showed to Yahoo. And she was really struggling because Yahoo didn't have a really strong sense of organic social. So I helped her kind of reframe the interview process, the creative process. We did about 220 interviews together ranging from like Joe Biden to DJ Khalid, to Jessica Chanstein, the Chance the Rapper, Kim Kardashian, all these different people. But one of the things that I did is I created a system in a process that we could rapidly test and iterate to understand, well, what is the right format and structure for each interview? Because typically if you think about an interview is like you just like what are the questions that I'm going to go in and ask this person versus I wanted to stake a step back looking at social understanding what structures and patterns are actually resonating and then back into those. So like what are the initial hooks that we think are going to perform and go in with the hook rather than the question? So over those 220 interviews, we tested like 75,000 variations of content. Just rapidly iterating and testing and testing and testing all these variations to the tune of generating about a billion views in like 18 months. So from that, I kind of started seeing that the success through that model and then that seeded the idea for my first book, one million followers of running an experiment to myself, a generation of million followers in 30 days. And then we kept evolving and evolving and evolving and evolving it. So this model that I'm about to break down this playbook has been in the work for like eight or nine years. And the team, we've done about 10,000 hours of research into understanding how and why things go viral. But the process, the playbook is five different distinct steps. So the first step is what we call research. So most people at a very simplistic high level is they're using social media from a passive experience. Meaning they go, they're just consuming content, not really paying attention, not really learning versus, again, when I went to film school, you sit down and watch films and then you dissect them. Like you understand like what made this scene work, this scene not work like getting into those nuances, you read screenplays, all those things. So the first step in the research process is to understand, and I mentioned this term a few times, is that there's these clear storytelling structures and patterns that improvements is exceed and we call them formats. Now with film, it's the three-act structure. Everybody uses that format when they make a movie. On social media, there's hundreds of these formats. So we've done analysis on over 220 formats. So I'll give you some examples, but I want you to kind of just think that there's a lot of choice out there. So by no means am I saying these are the examples that you have to use to be successful. So one of the ones that I mentioned is Man on the Street, which everybody is seeing short form, you approach a random stranger on the street and you interact with them in some way. So Simon Squibb is blowing up with this format, saying, what is your dream? My friend Alex Temp is a fashion photographer. He approaches a random stranger on the street, offers them a professional photo shoot and shows a result. School of hard knocks, approaches entrepreneurs and asks them like business and entrepreneurial advice. So that's a clear format. Now that format can be used for any content. You could use it for legal, for finance, for nutrition. So that's a format. Another example of a format we call two characters, one light bulb. So it's the same person playing two different characters. They play the expert and the novice and they break down like a misconception about something. So like Erica Colberg uses it for law. Like what happens in your AirPods break or your flight gets delayed. Mark Tillberg uses it for finance. So those are examples of formats. So in that research phase, all I want you to do is to start recognizing these formats. Start looking into them and saying, oh, this has got 10 million views. Is this a format? So the way you know it, if it's a format, you click on the person's profile and then you look, has that person used that same structure at least five times and broken through? And typically when I say break through, it's a million views. Now it can be larger, it can be smaller. It's not like a hard rule. The format kind of dictates that. Like YouTube, the formats, the views can be less like in the hundreds of thousands. But you want to see, has it been repeatable for success? So that's step one, step two is, now we're going to choose a format. So what format do we want to use? Now people ask me this all the time. And it's one of the things that we do with our clients. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is is this a format that you are super excited about? Like, are you going to love doing this format? And the other thing that I just mentioned is when you're doing this analysis, don't necessarily look for an apples to apples comparison. Like if you want to do man on the street and you're a nutritionist and you can't find anybody else doing it as a nutritionist, that doesn't mean it's not going to work for you. People kind of need to look at it again from the context, not the content. So first like, are you going to be excited about this? And then to your earlier question resource wise, is this a format I can pull off with the resources that I have available to me? And again, there are formats that literally, you can shoot on your iPhone. We have a hand doctor that started at zero followers, blew up on TikTok, got a TV deal, a book deal, and she literally is just shooting content on her iPhone, telling stories to her iPhone. So making sure that you're choosing the format with the resources that you have available to you. So once you've chosen that format, now we have to do a analysis of it. Because most people will look at it and be like, oh, school of hard knocks. He's just interviewing entrepreneurs on the street. I'm just going to do that. I guarantee 99% of the people that do that will fail. Why? Because they don't understand what's really driving the performance of the formats. The format itself is not driving the performance. It's the execution of that format. So when we think about like a simple exercise that everybody can do right now, when we think about the format driving the success versus the execution of it, is you just think about your favorite movie genre, whether sci-fi, horror, whatever it is. Every time you sit down to watch one of those movies, it's not going to be great. I'm sure everybody's had an experience where they have that level of disappointment of like, oh, I love sci-fi, but the movie just sucks. Of course, yeah. So it's the same thing with social media when we look at, again, like the school of hard knocks or in Man on the Street or maybe like Erica Colberg and the two characters, one light bulb, we can't just look at the success and be like, I see what they're doing. I'm just going to do that. So what do we do? Like, what is the playbook? So we created a process called Gold Silver Bronze. So what we'll do is we'll take an account like, school of hard knocks, Erica Colberg, one of those, and we'll create a spreadsheet, and what we'll do is we'll take five to 10 of the top performers. So that's usually in the millions of views then we'll take five to 10 of the average performers and five to 10 of the under performers. And what we're doing is we're watching like, what are the things that are happening in those top performers that are not happening in those under performers? And again, it's less about the content, it's more about the context. So these can be things like, well, what's their pacing? What's, you know, a man on the street, what type of reaction are they getting? What's happening in the first three seconds? Like, what type of captions are they using? What's their facial expressions, their body cues, their environments? Like, what's the editing like? We're trying to spot the difference of like, what happens in that high performer versus that low performer? So we call these things performance drivers. These are things that can drive the performance up or they can detract the performance and cause it to fall flat. Now, any format, even if they're like the top creators, you will see those under performers in there. And that's where most people don't look as they think of like somebody like an Eric Colberg who has millions and millions of followers and don't think that they have any under performers, but they do. And that's really where the clues are to understanding what causes that format to succeed versus what causes it to fail. So once we have that understanding, that baseline understanding, then we can move to the third step, which is creating the ideas. Now, this is where most people start. As you just say, I'm going to sit down and create some ideas for social media and I'm just going to go after it. Without that structure to it, it's not going to work. It's kind of like thinking about, I'm going to come up with an idea for a movie, but never understanding like how a script is written or what the structure of a script is or how dialogue works or things of that nature. It's like, we need to have that format and structure first. Then we can come up with the ideas. And I can definitively tell you, it's so much easier to come up with ideas once you have the format. Like when we were talking about Tanner Leatherstein earlier, like that is it worth it format? Well, it's super easy. Like, okay, why just did this in the handbag? Let me buy a thousand dollar product person and deconstruct it. Let me do this, this belt, these things. It makes it a lot easier to kind of understand what the ideas are that fit into that format. Then the fourth step is, we do a single piece of content at a time. Now, why do we do that? Because we want to make sure that we're encapsulating the learnings of this process that we understood everything that we just went through to learn, what the format is, what makes it work, the idea that goes into it. So we produce a single piece of content at a time which is the fourth step. And then the fifth step we review the results. So what typically happens if something doesn't work is one of two things. Number one, you've paid attention to the wrong performance drivers. Maybe you thought it was this thing that was driving the performance like it was the caption, but it wasn't really the caption, it was this other element. Or two, you just didn't execute it properly. So one of the exercises that we give people is, if something didn't perform, is put your piece of content on one side of the screen and then the gold standard from the reference and the research that you did and play them side by side. And often times we'll tell clients to do this before they post so that you can get a real true honest assessment. And if as long as you're honest with yourself, you will see a massive difference in terms of what like a high performer does versus a low performer. So the reason that we follow this process and do one piece of content at a time and analyze it in this way is like, most people are batch producing content. They're doing 10, 15, 20 pieces of content at a time. But the challenge with that is like, if you post the first one and it doesn't work, what are you gonna do with the other 19? Typically you're just gonna post them and there's this opportunity loss for learning from that first piece of content in applying it to the next one and the next one. Now, once you've mastered your format and understand it, then yeah, by all means you can increase the frequency, you can sit down and do multiple posts at a time. But we wanna have this underlying structure and foundation in this creative model. So even if your post doesn't perform, there's no lost opportunity here. You can learn from it, understand, where a fell flat and fix it for the next one. In addition, if something does work, now we have a foundation to understand why it worked because we followed this process and we can replicate it over and over again. A quick shout out to the HubSpot podcast network for supporting success story. Now, if you like success story, you're gonna love other podcasts in their network. One of my favorites is create like the greats. It's hosted by Ross Simmons. Obviously brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You're gonna join Ross on create like the greats, Ross dissect the genius behind histories most remarkable creators and their legendary work. So you're gonna get this blend of history and business and creativity. He has a great voice, always good for a podcast and he has a decade of practical experience. He's gonna break down some of the best creative processes that built influential companies, brands, and stories in a way that anyone can apply. So whether or not you're fascinated by history, creative thinking, or you simply want to improve and systematize your own creativity without sacrificing productivity. This podcast is your perfect lesson. Go listen to create like the greats wherever you get your podcast. A huge shout out to Lingoda for supporting today's episode. Now, if you're ready to master a new language, Lingoda is the online language platform trusted by over 100,000 students worldwide. Lingoda offers live classes with real teachers available 24-7. You can choose from German, English, business English, French, Spanish, or their newest addition, Italian. What sets Lingoda apart the smallest class size in the market? It's just you and up to five other students. Or if you want, you can go one-on-one for personalized attention. Their native level teachers don't just teach language. They share culture too. And you'll speak confidently from day one with Lingoda's flexible scheduling and proven curriculum. Students report being able to navigate real conversations in weeks, not years. And if you're using Lingoda for business, their CEFR aligned courses ensure that you're learning internationally recognized language standards that employers value. Between sessions, you're going to reinforce your skills with downloadable materials and bite-sized practice exercises. And all success story listeners, they put together a special deal. Try Lingoda free with three group classes or one private class. Plus, you save on any course with my link, try.lingoda.com slash success story and code Scott 25. Don't miss this chance to transform your life through language learning. When people, first of all, thank you. I appreciate the breakdown. It's very useful. When people sort of start on this journey, I'm trying to think of, I have a couple of different questions in my head. I only think about which one I want to ask first, because I know that the audience will have questions about a few things. First of all, is this platform specific, meaning that if I execute against this, will there be nuances that are slightly different from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, shorts? Let's start with that. I think it's a very obvious question if you're trying to sort of be everywhere. Yes, so there are performance differences in formats from platform to platform. And kind of my recommendation is, start with one format and one platform master it. You can still post the content on other platforms, but don't really get caught up in the performance of that format and other platforms. Focus on dialing it on that platform first and then see are there certain tweaks and ways that you can get it to perform for others. Now, there's some formats that will perform on others, it's typically all short form, typically long form, doesn't translate, especially when you're talking about taking like a YouTube video and putting it on like TikTok or Instagram or things of that nature. But yeah, there is a bit of nuance to it. Like you think about like TikTok, for example, it's less polished, it's more kind of, it's more kind of feels authentic in terms of the production value and things. Like you see a lot of podcast clips and things work and less polished up versus Instagram, you can see things that are a little bit more polished. But there are nuances to each platform. And you can sometimes you can just do small tweaks to a format to make it work on different platforms. Sometimes it takes a different format. But the one thing I want to stress for people is like, if you really nail it on one platform, you're gonna have more traffic and attention than you know what to do with. It's like, yes, people say have content in every platform and I'm not against posting content and other platforms but focus on getting really good at one. And if you get really good at one, like you're gonna have so much impact in terms of what your goals are, that it's gonna drive a lot of benefit to you. Almost to the point where like I've seen, I actually see it a lot with the YouTubers and this is more a comment on long-form. But when I see people build massive YouTube audiences, you see that audience start to trickle down and follow them everywhere and consume their content everywhere. I do believe that some platforms have more loyal audiences than others. I think YouTube is probably one of the best. But yeah, I think that for, we're talking to business owners that are looking for leads, we're not trying to get somebody that owns like a, whatever, a consumer goods brand, ice cream shop, a car wash or whatever it is they want to do, even a financial consulting, tax advisory, they're not trying to be the next Kim Kardashian, they're trying to grow their business. So we're not looking for followers, we're looking for a business impact, which is exactly what this is gonna do in spades, if you nail it. The other question is if somebody's doing this and that content is working, do they just do this style or this format of content for all of their content, or should they include other things, other styles of content, or does it hurt them if not every single piece is like a knock it out of the ballpark winner? Because even if I look at Erica or Mark Tillsburg, like they do other styles of content as well, as not just their main format that I think got them the majority of their audience. So how much should they do? Do they oversaturate? Is it every single piece? Is it a 75%, 25%, how do you think through that? I would say that initially starting out, just focus on every piece of content being in that format until you master it. Once you've mastered it, you've gained a skill set that can be applied to any format or any piece of content. But the challenges like even clients ask me like, well, can we do two or three formats? I was like, you can do two or three formats, but start with one. And just really master that skill set. Again, it goes back to the analogy of learning a musical instrument is like, if you want to learn a musical instrument, you're not trying to learn three at the same time. You take one at a time. Yes, I like and believe in diversification of content, but I also am a firm believer in like focusing on one thing at a time in understanding the dynamics of what it means to create a successful piece of content. And then once you do through focusing on one format, you can apply that to any other piece of content that you're creating. You mentioned something else about making sure that the content you created the format you choose is not a trend. And you've identified like true formats. But is there a lifespan on these styles of content? Like, for example, the man in the street, that was Daniel Mac and what do you do for living going at the people in nice cars and then school of hard knocks is the same style and they killed it. And I love their channel as well. But will there be a point where it's so overdone and so oversaturated that there's so many man on the street, Simon Squibs, now that all of a sudden it starts to lose its virality factor? It's a great question. And I would say the answer is no. I think it comes down to the execution. So if you think about man on the street, like man on the street was well before social media. Like I don't know if you ever watched Jay Leno the late night show. And I think late night hosts did it before, but Jay Leno did like Jay Walker's where he would he would stop people on the street and interact with them. It's a universal format that it just comes down to the story of how it's executed. Like I think that it typically falls out when the execution falls. So when I see a content creator that is using a format and the performance dips, it's typically because they've probably come less interested in it or they're kind of slipping a little on the dynamics of it. That doesn't mean as a content creator that you have to just only live with that format. Like if you don't wanna keep doing it, then find something else that you wanna do. It's not like a hard rule or a requirement to do that, but can formats dwindle over time? Sure, some formats can, like it can, but I just wanna say like, you know, like Alex stepped my friend, he's been using man on the street for like three or four years. This is not something, people think social media is so fleeting. They think in concepts of trends that I need to be doing something new every week or every month and it's just not like that. Like also think about like movies, like the foundation of movies and the 3X structure has been used for like 70 or 80 years. So I don't think it shifts as much as it does, but also I don't want people to kind of feel like, oh, I'm getting locked into this thing and I can never like shift or change out of it. Out of all the other things that people pay attention to that I hear a lot about. So hooks, first three seconds, thumbnail, whatever or cover image, are there any retention? Are there any other metrics that are important? Outside, of course, the lagging indicator of success would be leads, revenue, clients, that's lagging indicate. What are some other leading indicators that you can look at or some other leading components that actually make a difference? Well, you mentioned the first one and the most critical one is retention. It's just like how long are people spending with your content? Because again, that's how the algorithms determine what content gets seen by a thousand versus 10 million people is. How long is it able to grab that attention? Now you mentioned like on YouTube, you'll click through on thumbnail and headline is critical because that's the indicator of intent to get into the retention. On short form content, you can look at things like the number of views to reach that you have, which is a good indicator of how good you are at stopping the scroll. So typically we're looking at like a minimum ratio of like 30 to 40% of views to reach to understand like what is happening when people are being seated this content because it's not as straightforward as on YouTube as like click through on thumbnail or headline. With Instagram, there's a lot of talk now about shares because they're dynamic and they're kind of hypothesis is retention is the key or one of the keys to retention is sharing and starting conversations in DMs around content. So that's one of the things that to look at, but at a very basic level when we're talking about video content, purely is like is your content generating enough views? That is an indicator of how good you are at grabbing and holding attention. So if you look at nothing else at a very simplistic level, you can look at that but then you can start diving in granularly of like what is happening in the retention graph? Where are they falling off? What's happening at that fall off point? Like how can I fix that for the next time? You're creating thumbnails and headlines what's the click through percentage of things of that nature. But everything is through the lens of how effective am I at grabbing that attention, stopping the scroll or earning the click and then holding attention once I've gotten it. Amazing, last idea that I just want to float to because you see it a lot with the business to work with. In terms of creator economy influencers, do you see that if, do you see that they still have a place in the future if businesses understand how to create great content or do you feel in the future that businesses are gonna build their own influencers and their own influence kind of like Duolingo has? That's like a great example and how Wendy's does it on Twitter. There's some great examples of awesome business content but do you see that influencers and creators also have a place outside of businesses or do you think they're gonna be more even equity and incentive aligned or just built up through the business may be employees that that business makes famous. Where do you see this economy going if businesses get it? Well, I think I wish that businesses would get it. I think that some business they will get it but I think there's gonna be a place for both. I mean, you even look at, for example, like you look at another, like you look at Nike. Like Nike is a master or Red Bull. They're masters at marketing but they're still doing endorsement deals with athletes and celebrities and things of that nature. I think there's always gonna be the creator and the influencer and I think that there's always gonna be the businesses that get it. I'm hoping that more businesses will get it. I just like the stage to where it right now is like this is still kind of early and they're still trying to apply old principles to these platforms. So I'm hoping over the next five or 10 years more business will grow but there's always gonna be a demand and a need for influencers. Even like businesses that get it, like why wouldn't you use influencers? Like as long as you're really dialing in the performance of each channel that you're doing, like you dial in your organic, you maximize the potential of it but you can still leverage influencers and paid and things of that nature to really amplify and scale even further. I guess I was really thinking along the lines of going forward are we still gonna have these like two separate entities or are you gonna have people that are influencers that start to take equity positions in small businesses and start to work like hand in hand with them as opposed to being these two separate, disparate groups. I don't know. I mean that's honestly it's one of the core focuses of our company going forward. We're kind of an incubator for identifying talent, grooming talent and then either partnering them with businesses from an equity stake or helping them cultivate their own business from it. But I think you hit it spot on is like you look at some of the most successful businesses and it spawned out of that type of relationship. I mean at the highest level you look at Elon Musk and what he's done with his businesses and the amount of tension and growth of that has driven. So I definitely think that there's gonna be more of that type of model in the future. He's spoken about a lot of different topics regarding to sort of what's worked for you in the past and what's worked for you now as well with hook point and some of your clients. What are some new ideas? Some social media opportunities that maybe I didn't ask you about that you're looking into now that you think could be opportunities for businesses in the next six months, one year I know things move fast but what are some new things that you're researching? I mean one of the big things that we're researching is AI and we've built one of the largest data sets of qualitative analysis of what content goes viral and we're very excited about the future of the visual aspect of AI, less about where chat GPT is today and more about what Sora and Google are building for a visual standpoint. I don't know how quickly that's gonna happen. I mean it seems to move very quick but I think in the next few years you're gonna see amazing kind of tool sets of your fingertips that are going to lower the barrier of entry for creating content in different formats so that you're not reliant on, even the higher production formats you're not solely reliant on that. I think that's gonna present a unique opportunity. The one thing I will say about AI is a lot of people think it's the solution and it's not a solution, it's just a tool. So it's like the analogy I use is if everybody tomorrow woke up and was using AI to create social media content there's gonna be winners and losers. Just because you use the tool doesn't mean you're gonna be successful. So it definitely wouldn't rely on the future of AI solving your problems of performance and your content but more how you can learn and leverage these skillsets to become a master story teller. I've actually seen it do the opposite in the short term where it actually hurts content performance because people are too reliant on it. Yes. Exactly. Some of the copy that you see, some of the captions, it's just garbage and then you see AI, generative AI tools, dicing up video without people even looking at what that 30 to 45 second clip happens. Yeah, it's open. Yeah, which is a great tool. I use Opus tool, I can find timestamps but then after I find the timestamp I'm still finding a hook and I'm still going in, I'm still editing, like I'm not just clipping it and posting it I've seen channels post 10, 15 clips a day just directly from Opus and you can tell and it looks like garbage. So yes, 100% it's a tool. Yeah, you're using it as a tool, you're an expert storyteller so you know what to look in the output and you know what the prompt should be so you can leverage it successfully but I agree with you. 90% of people using AI are using it the opposite way. I'm just like, oh, it's gonna figure it out for me. That's never the answer. If people want to connect with you, if they want to work with hook point, where should they go? Socials, website, give anything else? Like are you writing a new book? I mean, I don't have a book. Yeah, I just launched a new book called The Guide to Going Viral that breaks down the entire model. Amazing. And just for your listeners, we're giving it away for free. I worked on this book for two books. It's not like an ebook or something like you can go and buy it on Amazon but I'm gonna give it to your listeners for free the PDF so that they just go to hookpoint.com forward slash clary your last name. They can download the PDF for free. And it's like it details the entire model that we talked about today. And if they just want to learn more about working with us, then go to hookpoint.com. They can reach out on Instagram. My name is Brendan Cain. I'm LinkedIn as well. Amazing. Last question I like to ask. And this is more of, I mean, you've had an incredible career. You've built a massive business. A lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show. And I like to pull out one piece of advice at the end of these shows just because we spoke a lot about tactics, but obviously success is not just about tactics. So, I'd have everything that you've done in your life. If you could pass on one lesson to your kids, one of the most important lessons, it could be business lesson, it could be life lesson, whatever it is. What would that lesson be and why? I think it's to work on yourself. Like, you know, as entrepreneurs, as business people, we're so focused on optimizing and scaling the business when a lot of times the core focus first should be optimizing yourself. Like, what are the things that you need to work on? What are the past traumas you've experienced? How do you overcome them? Really, because everything that, every experience that we've had, good or bad drives how we perceive the world and the decisions that we make. And the more we've worked on ourselves, the more we understand how and why we do things, the better that we can show up and the more impact that we can have through the decisions, through our company, through our customers, through our employees, things of that nature. So, I would say that that would be the piece of advice that I would give.