SPI 901: ⁠How I Went Against My Own Advice and Got 1B+ Views

SPI 901: How I Went Against My Own Advice and Got 1B+ Views

Pat Flynn: I was wrong. I was wrong, and it was mostly because I didn’t know I hadn’t experienced it yet. What am I talking about? Well, to set this up, I’m gonna play part of a presentation that I gave in front of almost a thousand people in San Diego a couple years ago. This was 2024 at Social Media Marketing World, and I gave a presentation about long form video versus short form video.

So I’m gonna play this clip and then I’ll come back after and tell you where I was wrong. Well, I think it’s amazing for reach the algorithms on TikTok and Instagram reels and shorts often can be mind blowing, but I do feel like as far as the user experience is concerned, short form is kind of like a snack, right?

It’s kind of like, okay, that’s yummy. I want more. I want more. And all of a sudden, like an hour later, you’re like. I’ve had way too much TikTok this morning. You know what I mean? And it’s like you don’t even know until it’s too late sometimes. And as a content creator, I don’t want to have my audience experience that.

I want my audience to experience a full course meal when they come across my brand. Right. Something that’s satisfying and it makes you go, oh yes, I can’t wait to go back to that restaurant. Right. And again, as snacks are good, people are consuming snacks. And a snack can be a great way to bring a person into your restaurant, for example, or like a Costco sample.

But I don’t wanna be the creator who has a line of kids come into their house and just, I’m handing out candy and then they move on. I wanna be the person who has the restaurant that people can’t wait to eat at. I wanna have people experience an immersive experience inside of the content that I create for them.

Okay, I’m back in real time and that was a great presentation. I got a lot of amazing comments about it and a lot of people have actually taken action on what I was saying and my thesis of that particular presentation was, well, long form video builds deeper relationships with your audience than any short form video could, and it’s for obvious reasons.

You’re just given snacks. You’re giving people little endorphin hits with your short form content. Long form is where it’s at. It’s where storytelling can create an immersive experience. There’s data in terms of the loyalty of an audience. There’s data in terms of the revenue generated with long form video versus short form video.

So I was brought onto the stage to finish the entire conference, one that was filled with short form video creators to say, Hey, don’t discount long form videos. In fact. There are many benefits and I would recommend doing long form video, and a lot of people have since that presentation, and many people have gone on to do very well with their long form YouTube channels.

However, this is where I was wrong. The statement that was incorrect was that you cannot build a relationship with people in just 60 seconds. The truth is you can. I’ve done it. Many of you have been following along with my short form experiment that started over a year ago. It’s no longer an experiment.

The results were really good currently across different channels like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, shorts, and now even Snapchat, my shorts, which are coming out every day, I’m on day 469, at the time of this recording, they’re seeing 10 million views every single day. It is generated now, for the last year straight, five figures of revenue just from the short form videos alone, and that revenue continues to go up as the channel continues to grow.

I’m now at 2.25 million subscribers on a brand new YouTube channel that is all short form video. I’m at 1.9 million subscribers on TikTok, 1.7 million subscribers on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat are up there too. And guess what? I have built a relationship with people who are watching these 60 to 90 second videos every day.

Because here’s the truth, when you come out with a daily video series like this, like my, Should I Open It or Should I Keep it Sealed series. You know, it’s not an hour long with them every day, but it’s an hour long with them over 60 days. It’s an hour long with them over time, it’s inserting yourself into their life every day.

So the analogy I used of a snack or handing out Halloween candy still holds true. It still holds true that people who view short form video are just kind of like trick or treaters coming over, hopefully getting some good candy, and then they move on to the next house. But what if Halloween was every day, and what if every day on Halloween your audience knew that you had the best candy bars that were their favorite and they came over every day?

Now, hopefully you’re not just giving sugar out every day. And yes, you do need to capture people’s attention. You do need to provide something worthwhile to watch, but hopefully it’s something of value. Hopefully it’s something entertaining at least, and something that brings joy to people’s lives in one way or another.

And there are moments now when I’m late to publish because I usually schedule my daily videos to go out at 8:30 PM Pacific. But every once in a while I do catch myself in a grind where because of life and other things that happen, I’m up a little bit later editing these things and they come out beyond 8:30 PM Pacific.

And on those days, even if I’m just 10 minutes late, I’ll get direct messages across all of those platforms from people who say, where are you? Are you okay? Are you coming out with a video today? Was yesterday’s your last video? Number one, I don’t think people expect me to keep going. I am going to keep going.

It’s doing very well, not just revenue wise, but for building a relationship and loyalty in an audience. One that is, yes, finding my long form content from there. That doesn’t happen right away, but when you show up every day and you are reliable and you are consistent, people start to get to know you. I’m starting to insert a little bit of lore, a little bit about me.

The other day I mentioned that I was in drum corps and I had a number of people. Reach back out and say, oh my gosh, you were in drum core DCI. Which core did you march for? Drum corps is sort of a competition of marching bands without woodwinds all brass and drums. It’s amazing. I’m inserting stuff about my family, stuff that I’m comfortable with and talking about kind of the relationship I have with my wife and just kind of inserting little jokes here and there, and that’s, that’s stuff that I would do in a one hour episode of a podcast sitting down like this and getting to know you, and you getting to know me. This is stuff that we’ve done before. I’m, I’m on episode 901. This has been 16 years of this podcast, but instead of doing it in one sitting, I’ll insert a micro moment here on this day, the next day, a little micro moment, and then another micro moment, and then another fun fact, and then another random thing about me. All the while people know what to expect. Every day I’m opening a pack of Pokemon cards. It may or may not do well for me at the end when I see the price of what I open or not, but I have built incredible relationships, so much so that now people know me as probably more than anything, more than deep pocket monster in the long form challenges we do there, more than SPI and anything I’ve done here, the Should I Open It or Should I Keep It sealed? series is the most viral thing that I’ve ever done. And it’s now what people most recognize me for.

Now in these videos, you don’t see my face, but you do hear my voice, and so this is a very common thing. Now, I’ll be in a store interacting with the store clerk or somebody who works there and somebody will just stop and go, wait, are you the, should I open it, guy?

And it’s now to the point. Get this, this is gonna make you either cringe, laugh, or open your jaw to the floor people to verify that I am actually the, should I open it or should I keep it sealed guy will ask to look at my thumbs. The reason being is because I have sort of weird looking thumbs, club thumbs.

They’re also known as Megan Fox Thumbs. They’re a little bit wider than they are longer by saying Megan Fox Thumbs. They just, I try to make it feel a little bit better. They, they are weird looking. They’re big, not long, just big. And on my videos where I’m opening Pokemon. My hands are very big in the frame, so people are seeing my thumbs.

And at first people started to make fun of me for my thumbs. They started to put throw up emojis and puking emojis and disgusting emojis. They’d say things like, what happened to your fingers? Like, uh, get this off my screen. But you know what? I embraced it. This is what I teach. Embrace your weird. I have weird thumbs.

So I started to call them diglett thumbs. Diglett is a Pokemon that like pops its head out of the ground. It’s shaped kind of like my thumbs. And whenever we pull a Diglett card, I make a joke about my thumbs. I’ve sort of embraced it, you know, and it’s now become a part of the brand. So much so that when people meet me in person, they ask to look at my thumbs and they’ll look at ’em and they, and they go, you are.

That’s you. You are the shirt I open at Guy because of the thumbs, even at my own event card party. An event for, we held this in Seattle not too long ago. We had 8,000 people there, vendors, sponsors, of course, attendees, and a lot of creators in the Artist’s Alley, which is in the vendor area. There’s a bunch of artists and creatives who come into sell their own work.

There was one booth who was selling some covers that were the Pokemon Diglett. It was awesome. It’s crazy. Anytime a diglett is seen on somebody else’s, there’s a Canadian rapper named Baby No Money. bbno$, Baby No Money. If you got young ones in the car with you or something, they may know who this person is.

 bbno$, anyway, he is doing this really cool collab thing with Pokemon, not with Pokemon Company, but he’s doing like a music video with featuring Pokemon. His manager asked me to be a part of it, but I wasn’t able to, to go that day. So that, that’s fine, but it’s just really cool. Anyway, one of the cosplay who showed up for this music video that they were doing or some promotion was  Diglett.

Oh my gosh. I, I had hundreds of people tag me in those videos. It’s you, it’s your thumbs. Just because of that, and I’ve talked about this before when I wrote Superfans and I’ve spoken about superfans here before. You heard me talk about it yesterday or last week at least, you know, on SPI, people knew and have always known that I’ve been a huge fan of Back to the Future.

Which is why in 2015 when Back to the Future was hitting its 30 year anniversary. It’s, it’s 40 year anniversary this year, but 30 year was was big because in the Back to Future 2 movie, Marty goes into the future in 2015. So that was the same year and it was awesome and I got tagged so many times on different videos and social messages because everybody knew that I was a fan of Back To Future anyway, why am I saying all this?

Because I was building relationships with people. In that case it was with the podcast, with long form video with my books. In this case it’s with a 60 second video every single day.

We’re gonna be talking about this more in the future, the importance of short form video. Now, I wasn’t quote unquote late to the game. I mean, technically I was, if you’re looking at the calendar, but I was studying, I was learning, I was trying. I was experimenting. I was failing. And it took a few tries to get a formula that worked, and as I started to learn and dissect what was working and what wasn’t, I implemented and executed on this channel that is now doing 10 million views a day, almost 5 billion views across all platforms since it started last year.

Again, it’s just even insane for me to say that out loud. But what have I learned? Well, these are things that we are teaching right now to the SPI community. We have some workshops coming up, and even a course in the works for people who’ve asked for it. They said, Pat, can you teach me short form video?

And I said, I need to master it first and learn. I’m learning, I’m, I’m calculating, and let me prove it first before I teach anything. That’s what we love to do. We don’t love to teach stuff that we don’t know ourselves yet. This is why I haven’t told anybody about book writing really yet, because I hadn’t done the traditional route yet.

Well, now I have. We hit a New York Times bestseller and that opens up that idea for content in the future. But right now, that’s not what you need. Most people need some help with discoverability and short form videos. Definitely that. That is the platform to be discovered. Other platforms like podcasting are to go deeper.

That is the restaurant you invite people to after they find you. But where might they find you? They find you because you have some Halloween candy to hand out. AKA, your short form videos. And yes, they can be repurposed on all those platforms. It could be the same video across all of them, but different platforms lend itself to different strategies.

And I think if you’re gonna start with one or two, it would be YouTube shorts, 200 billion views a day on YouTube with just shorts alone, which is insane. That’s overall, that’s not me. It’s only growing and then Instagram is is likely the other place. If I were to start, I would recommend doing a video series daily.

I think that’s very, very important. Yes, it requires work, but I, I do love the idea of daily for a few reasons. Number one, you get more reps. I wouldn’t expect big growth right away. If you’ve heard me talk about my experiment before, you might remember that the first 30 days I was hardly seeing any views, but I was learning, I was getting 30 points of data.

If you imagine a person instead publishing weekly, they only have 52 points of learning over the year, and any one of those points of learning could be the game changer. Now, think about somebody going daily. They have 365 days of learning, of implementation, of getting faster, of fine tuning of data coming in to then understand what to do next.

Coming up with a series makes this a little easier. Part of my struggle when I first started on these short form platforms was I was kind of creating random videos every day, whatever the trend was, whatever I was just feeling that day or whatever question I wanted to answer, it was completely haphazard, completely random.

A series creates a structure around what it is that you’re creating, which makes creation easier, and it also makes consumption easier. They understand what they’re subscribing to because remember, people don’t subscribe because they liked your video. That is not the action to take for thanking you. That is what a like is for or a heart.

A subscription is specifically for people who want the next part or to see what happens next. ’cause here is the big principle that I wanna leave you with here in this episode, which is very important because this is where we’re at today. As much as I dislike short form, because I feel like it creates shorter attention spans because it’s not something you’re able to go deep with, and I like to go deep with my audience. You can go deep over time, but here’s the truth. People don’t follow videos. They follow stories. So what story are you going to tell?

A series that I’ve found recently on both TikTok and Instagram that have been very intriguing from different people, I think one actually inspired the other. There’s a series about these women who are individually trying to get better at public speaking and they’re doing this in public day one of trying to speak for 60 seconds without filler words. Day two of trying to speak for 60 seconds without filler words. One woman I saw was on day 17 and she was still struggling a little bit, but there was so much support in the comment section.

She had tens of thousands of subscribers by simply just starting a series where you know exactly what the goal is. You wanna see the progress, you wanna see where they fumble. You want to know how they are like you and what are they learning, and how you might be able to get better too. That’s the cool part about short form video as well.

It’s almost more real. In one sense, yes, a person can sit down at your restaurant and have this beautiful meal, and I still don’t get me wrong, long form video still is king. We’re getting millions of views on Deep Pocket Monster, and it’s the revenue, the loyalty, the fact that I can host an event for 8,000 people without spending one single dollar on marketing the long form videos play a huge role. Also, the emotional connection and relatability that we can bring into those stories is huge. That is something that I don’t think could ever be replicated in short form. But short form is different for different people, and it is in many cases a different audience.

These are people who are going through little quick endorphin hits or dopamine hits and scrolling in bed or on the toilet or wherever they’re at. They’re just kind of going from video to video to video. So the strategy is a little bit different, but the truth is. Yes, a restaurant can take them somewhere, but a, a restaurant often has a little bit of a staff in there to clean it up, to make it the best presentation that it could possibly be.

You don’t wanna see anything other than perfectly clean, right? As far as the restaurant’s concerned, I mean, you’re eating there, you want it to be sanitary, of course. But when it comes to these short form videos, most of the ones that do well don’t have the best video quality. You’ll notice most of the ones that do well don’t have fancy editing or text or fancy graphics popping in and flying in on the screen and explosions and anything like this.

They’re just raw. They’re real. They’re a moment of a person’s life that you’re now able to be a part of. They’re genuine, they’re authentic. I think that’s the most important part about this whole short form. Pat, should I do short form? Should I start a short form video series? Yeah, but you don’t need to go all out with it and make it perfect because then it’s not going to work.

You have the opportunity right now to pull out your phone and just start right now. And what’s really neat is that here at SPI, as you know, whenever we discover something or we prove something like the power of short form video, we love to teach what works. We love to share it, and we want to bring people together to do that.

So look out for some information very soon. In fact, depending on when you hear this episode, there might be some dynamic ads attached to it related to an upcoming challenge. And if. We aren’t in that era yet. We will be very soon. So make sure you follow the Unstuck newsletter at SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck because we’re gonna be sending emails out about some challenges for you, free challenges that you could be a part of to try to create a daily video for 30 days straight.

And it was interesting, it was just kind of fate that today I saw a random Instagram Reel with Gary Vaynerchuk. It was a person who stood in line to met Gary at an event. I don’t know if it was like a special VIP line or something, but they had a few minutes to chat, and this gentleman comes up to Gary Vee and he says, Gary, I have to confess something to you.

He said, what? He said, Gary, you told me to go on social media and post something every day. And Gary’s like, yeah, how’d it go? And he’s like, well, it didn’t go anywhere. Gary’s like, okay, well did you stop? And he is like, no. And here’s what happened After the first 30 days when nothing was happening, I just gave it time.

And he eventually said that he’s got now an Instagram following of 200,000 subscribers or followers, and it’s all because Gary encouraged him to start. Great job, Gary, and we wanna do what we can here with the connections that we have to you and create a forum and a place for you to connect with others, to hold each other accountable, to be motivated to complete a 30 day challenge.

If this was something that you really wanted to make happen and you’re like, I don’t wanna commit to it forever, then okay, great. Let’s do this together for 30 days and let’s see what happens. Give yourself a chance. So either head to the show notes page, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session901, and you can find some information about our upcoming challenges there.

And even as, as a team, we’re like, Hey, let’s just go all in on this. I mean, I mean we teach so much stuff, but what if we just focused on this and making the challenge better and better every time for everybody? Whether you are just starting out or you wanna boost what you have already started the challenge to go 30 days consistent, to create a series, to create a framework so that you start out like I did with 45 minutes to an hour every day, and then it turns into 10 minutes a day because you’ve just gotten so much better because you got the reps in just like learning a language, just like learning how to walk, like anything.

This is why we’re doing it daily. So again,  SmartPassiveIncome.com/session901. You should see some information about an upcoming or concurrent challenge that we’re gonna be offering again, for free for you to go and do this too, because with that consistency, with the clarity of your framework and the series that you’re going to do, whether you continue it or not, you will learn and get something out of it.

This is going to be. A huge, huge opportunity for people and again, it’s gonna be free. So again,  SmartPassiveIncome.com/session901 for more information. Thank you so much for listening in and I was wrong. You can build a very strong relationship and a loyal audience, but you can’t do it with one video here in one video there. You gotta stay up and show up. Cool. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Have an amazing day.