SPI 904: The Hero Platform Strategy—How to Grow on Social Without Spreading Yourself Thin

SPI 904: How to Win Big in the Short-Form Era

Pat Flynn: Way, way back in the day when I first started blogging, there was a creator who I saw as one of the first people to really utilize video in their brand. Come to think of it, there were a few that were early on, and for some reason, they seemed to be all in Australia. Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, Yaro Starak, but this person, our special guest today, Gideon Shalwick, also from Australia, has created one of the most helpful tools that I use today to help me get more reach, to help me gain more authority, to help me, yeah, generate more revenue too. And if you are at all interested in short form video, or just videos in general, this will be the episode for you. Gideon Shawwick, I’ve talked about some of his tools before, Splashio was one, and there was another one that helped people create Facebook ads in a more automated fashion.

But this tool, Vubli.ai, is one to help you distribute your one single short form video across all platforms almost instantly. And do it in a way that makes sense. So we’re going to talk with Gideon today about sort of the history of his businesses, but also how we got here with short form video and how to best maximize the opportunity with it.

And we’ll, of course, offer a fun little offer for Vubli for anybody here who’s interested as well, once you learn about it. So here he is, Gideon Shalwick, founder of Vubli.ai. Here we go.

Gideon, welcome to the SPI podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Gideon Shalwick: Hey, Pat. Yeah, awesome to be here. Looking forward to it.

Pat Flynn: It has been a long time since you and I have really had a chance to sit down and connect because we had once done that before a long time ago, back in the 2010s era in the blogger days. And you were a different kind of creator and entrepreneur back then. Tell me what Gideon was like back then.

What properties were you working on? And I know you did a lot with video. You were in fact, one of the earliest to get involved with video. I’ve always known you for video, but it’s changed over time. We’ll get into that, but if you could give us a quick account of what it was like when you and I initially made contact and became friends.

What was life like back then? What was the world and entrepreneurship like back then for all of us?

Gideon Shalwick: Oh my gosh, how things have changed. I think back then it would have been 2008, 2009, right about there that a partner of mine, Yaro Starak, we launched a program called Become a Blogger. And that was all done on video and, you know, one of the little claims to fame we had was that it was the first, we thought it was the first, it was one of the first at least, courses completely done on video.

And I was the video guy, I created all the videos painstakingly, oh my gosh, it was such a painful thing to do back then. But it was all done on video. Yaro was more on the promotion side, but I was on the creation side of the content, but that was sort of my first big success online with that particular training.

And I think that’s probably how we met because, you know, you’re doing the blogging thing, Yaro’s doing blogging, I was doing blogging training. But before that, I had two years of essentially depending on how you frame it, struggling or preparing, you know, for, for what was to come. And because I really quickly got into the video thing, even two years before that, when I just became an entrepreneur, it was 2006.

I started doing video because I wrote a book and I wanted to promote the book. And so, Hey, this, this is YouTube thing. Let me check this out. Maybe I can get some extra traffic because I struggled with traffic. Okay, let’s figure out this, this video thing. And, a camcorder and I started interviewing some of the best people in the industry and just wanted to hear their thoughts for how they became successful.

But I had a camcorder and an old PC and the files were in, I’m not sure if you remember this, I think it was called HDR format. Oh yeah, wow. Okay. Yeah. It was like a compressed kind of a format that worked really quick and well with the old Sony handicams. And the trouble with him was that if you wanted to get them onto your computer to edit them, they immediately increased by 10 times the size.

So the video file size is so big. I had the most awesome project where I interviewed some of the best people in the industry. I had about 12 to 20 interviews lined up and I was going to edit these interviews and what happened was the files were too big for my computer, my computer died, that poor project never saw the light of day.

But in the process, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about video cameras, studio setup, and just how video specifically works online. Because it’s a different beast online to offline. But anyway, that was like, you know, like a two year process essentially to, to get to where I then launched something with Yaro. Did the Become a Blogger thing, and then from there I just did video project after video project, online video project specifically.

And always using video for building audience, but then also using video for delivering product. So my background’s in content, you know, I’ve got a content guy. But yeah, since then, I’ve been moving more into software, which I’m sure we’ll cover later today.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, back in 2005, 2006, I mean, YouTube was just brand new.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: At that point. And a lot of people weren’t thinking about it as sort of a way to become known for things. It was more of a, just a place to kind of be a repository for cat videos and, and funny things. There were some, some personalities and brands showing up. A lot of comedians and stuff were, were on that platform, but education stuff wasn’t really on there.

And it was really cool to see you kind of take that on and lead that in a way. And then I remember Yaro very much he was a big inspiration for me. And that’s how you and I got connected was, was kind of through him and become a blogger and the various projects that you’ve worked on. And you did dive into software.

What was one of the first video related software projects?

Gideon Shalwick: So, one of the things that happened in my career is I started noticing people needing video animations, like logo animations and outro animations and lower thirds and that sort of thing. And it was kind of painful to create and everybody wanted one, you know, and it was just like a cool thing.

So I started a company called Splashio. That was the original thing. And I remember we, I think we created a few animations for you guys as well with a couple of your brands. And, you know, at first we just, we did it all manually and, but then the dream was to then automate that later. And we kind of did, we, we sort of, we were on our path there, but I think we, we were too slow.

Anyway, someone else beat us to it and they took the same idea and did a really good job with it. By that time I met someone else. The co-founders and I said, well, I wanna automate this thing, but I need a software team. So we teamed up together and we said, well, it’s, instead of doing it under Splasheo, the original company, let’s create a whole new company and, and target something else that’s a little bit more specific.

So we targeted video ads in particular, video ads on YouTube. And we said, okay, well, let’s, what can we do? It’s like the five second skip thing was just a thing. It just came out. And we thought, okay, well, really well positioned for that. Let’s create something in this space where we automate the animations for creating a 20 second video ad.

So teamed up with some people for that. And that was called VeeRoll and I’m not sure we were the first, but we’re certainly one of the first people to automate the production of video ads for YouTube and later Facebook ads as well. And it was incredible days because I don’t know what the numbers are today, but back then, because of the ads, the way they were different, not sure if you remember, this was only there for like six months, but when a skippable ad showed on YouTube, the whole video was clickable, not just the link or some other small area on, on the video.

The whole video was clickable. So because of that, we could create our animations so that you could have a call to action where you say, click here or click there or click anywhere on this video to go to my landing page. And we used that in combination with a targeting tool that we built as well. So we could you could do a keyword search and it would show you all the videos that ranked on YouTube for that keyword and all the channels and you can pull those in and then say, okay, run my ad against these specific videos in these channels.

And because of that, we were getting like an 80 percent click through rate, like eight zero, not eight, or 0.8, it was an 80 percent click through rate on our ads. It was just like, I mean, we thought it was just normal back then, but as we progressed, we realized that it was quite a special thing. But anyway, that was VeeRoll.

I did that for about four years and exited that. And then I jumped back into Splashio, and then by that time, you know, the market moved on quite a lot. And with Splashio, we then pivoted to, to turn it into a short form video production agency kind of company. But the vision for me there was always to automate that as well.

Again, I was too slow. And we got the, the manual version of it pretty well dialed in, but we never, you know, we automated a bunch of it. Like it was, when you looked at the software, it looked like a SAS. That was really interesting. It looked like a SAS for the user, but in the back end, it was human beings doing the work, you know?

So, so people would come in and place their orders with our beautiful interface. And there was a lot of software there that we built for that. But then when it came to the delivery. We have human beings doing it and then pop it back into the system and it flicks out an email. Everything seemed automated, like, you almost couldn’t tell it was humans doing the work.

Yeah, that’s interesting. So we never quite got to automating that. Someone else, again, beat us to it and did a really good job with that. And then I thought, well, this is a couple of years ago. And I thought, well, what’s next for us? You know what? What should we position ourselves for? You know, where’s the world going?

This is just when AI was coming out. ChatGPT was just making his entry. We’re about six months into it and I thought, well, the writing’s on the wall. We’ve got to do something here where, you know, AI is going to take over. It’s going to take over all the creative stuff, all the editing, everything. Maybe a little bit too profiteer there, but we thought, let’s do it.

Start positioning ourselves for that. So we created this new brand called Vubli, 100 percent software. So this time we started with software instead of manually doing stuff. Built a team around it and created some software that just looked at one very small slither of the, the pain points when it comes to the whole video marketing process, which is the, the distribution of the contents.

Like, you know, it’s one thing creating the content, but it’s another thing actually distributing and promoting and getting views and, and getting it out there to the world. And that company was called Vubli. Yeah. That brings us to the. The current day and age.

Pat Flynn: To present day. Yes. So AI was really the big unlock for the automation component of this to read and to see and to view these things that people are uploading and then be able to make decisions off that and then have the tool actually create and make decisions based on those things that were uploaded initially.

And I’ve, I’ve had the opportunity thankfully to experience Vubli and all it has to offer and a lot of people know that I’ve been diving pretty deep into the short form world across different platforms from YouTube, TikTok, to Reels, to Facebook. I post the same videos on X and all across the board and it takes time to do that.

I publish the same video but it still takes time and Vubli solved that problem for me. It’s, it’s awesome. And you can have it write the descriptions and titles for you. It understands where to put thumbnails and which thumbnails to use. It’s pretty darn amazing what you’ve been able to do here. And I’m curious because you could use this tool in so many other ways with long form videos.

But you specifically choose to focus on short form and short form only. I’m curious why that decision, because this could be used for other things as well, but why just short form video?

Gideon Shalwick: 100%. We actually started Vubli with long form focus, because we thought that’s where the biggest pain was, because we thought people wanted to upload their videos, but the files were really big, for example, and there were no schedulers back then that could do really large files.

You know, as a, as a creator, you spend so much time creating great looking video. And then if you wanted to use a scheduler, you know, it just it kills the quality or alternatively it doesn’t even accept it. So we actually built Vubli for long form. So you can actually upload like really large files, up to 50 gigabyte large files to the system.

But as we were working on it, we realized that the pain point wasn’t as much for long form creators. I mean, yes, it can help you, but you know, how often do you upload a long form video, like even if it’s a podcast, it’s like once a week maybe, or maybe twice a week. In most cases, that’s like the maximum, so you only feel that pain twice a week.

Whereas when you look at the short form world, totally different game, the quality of files or videos are still important, so you can, it’s still important to be able to upload larger files and files that look good, but now the pain point is at least once a day, you know, maybe twice, three, four, like five times a day.

And if you’re just posting to one platform, sure, no problem. You can probably still handle it or maybe someone else can handle it for you. But when you start posting to multiple platforms, that’s where the pain really starts kicking in because now all of a sudden it’s, it’s not just a copy and paste job.

You know, if you want to do a good job with it, you’ve got to create unique titles, descriptions and tags and you know, captions or whatever else for each different platform. Even if you’re using so much Chat GPT, it still takes time to do that, you know, five or six times for each platform. And then the other thing, and I don’t know why this is, but when you go to any of the platforms, you still have to upload your videos from your device.

There’s no, there’s no integration with any of them as far as I know with something like Dropbox or Google Drive or any of the other sort of file sharing services. And what that means is that, okay, it’s a little thing, but if you’ve got to do it five times a day, you’ve got to upload your video from your computer or your device, your mobile phone through your own internet connection.

And sometimes your internet connection is not that great to the social media platform, and then you’ve got to do it. For the next platform and the next one and the next one. So it’s, it’s like a little thing like that, that it all adds up. So the uploading thing, the creating of the, the, we call it meta data training, your title descriptions and tags or Instagrammers call it captions, the text that goes with your video and you’re creating all those things, it all adds up and then for each video. And then if you do it multiple times a day, there’s like, you know, it’s potentially hours of time, you know, so if you do it yourself or even if someone else does it for you. So we thought, why don’t we just remove that pain because it’s, it’s almost like you get so excited about creating a great video and then I don’t know about you, Pat, but oftentimes you get to, you know, you kind of finish and you’re like, yes, I’m ready.

The video is now, it’s going to go everywhere and you get, oh, and I still got to publish it. And then it’s like that final little straw that sometimes breaks the camel’s back. And I know you’re a consistency guy and, and I think for me to be consistent, you’ve got to remove as many friction points in the process as possible.

And so this is one of the major friction points we decided to remove. It’s just like, once you got your video, you just want to, you just want to upload one place and basically, ideally, just click a button and everything gets taken care of for you. And that’s exactly why we built Vubli.

Pat Flynn: That’s the magic wand wish that we all have with things and Vubli is that for short form video. I mean, if you, again, almost at a minimum, you need to be publishing once per day on these platforms, right? And to do that once per day on one platform, some people can’t even handle that. Try to do daily. Daily is great. Quantity is important in the short form world.

There really is no penalty posting too much. Even the CEO of Instagram said as such, the videos will find the right audience at the right time is really what happens. So of course, still, like you said, have a quality video, one that has a good hook and is, you know, going to hold people as long as possible.

That’s always key. Of course, we don’t want to put junk out there, although a lot of people are doing that. But let’s say you did create a great video and okay, you’re publishing. Once on Facebook, and now you have to, like you said, take that video, upload it, then also to Instagram, and then write all the data, all the metadata, the description and caption.

Then you gotta publish it to YouTube shorts, which is a little bit different. And there’s a title for that. And then a certain other way to get a thumbnail on there, which you have to do it on your phone to go to YouTube, not YouTube Studio, but the actual account on YouTube to then select the thumb. Like there’s, there’s so many different steps for each of these platforms that they add up.

And if you then. Publish maybe two videos per day. I mean, you’re just exponentially creating more and more effort and more and more friction. That’s not going to make it easy for you to do that. I think I saw somebody yesterday talk about one of these channels in India. That’s just seeing 9 billion views per day.

For example, they’re posting a hundred videos per day and it’s insane. And I, of course, we don’t want to recommend that. And a lot of it may or may not be great, but quantity is important. So any tools out there like this to help us is, is great. And so what you do is with Vubli, you upload the video once.

You’ve already connected your accounts where you want to post this, a Facebook page or pages, Instagram, of course, TikTok. I think you can, what else can you integrate with? X.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. So YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Reels, LinkedIn and X. So there’s six at the moment, but you know, we’ll add more over time.

We’ve, we’ve had some people asking for Pinterest in particular, quite a few. So we’ll probably add that one next, but yeah, whatever. So, so in terms of, we try and respond to our users and don’t just add things just willy nilly. For example, I was just listening to your, your podcast earlier today on my walk, we talk about your update about short form video and you mentioned Snapchat, but it was a horrible sort of experience for you.

It felt like a boomer, you know, using, using this, this young person tool, but no one’s asked us for Snapchat yet, which is really interesting. So maybe it’s just because we don’t have a big enough user base yet, but I’m sure that’ll get mentioned as well.

Pat Flynn: Sure. I mean, I, I will raise my hand and ask for that because it’s, it would just solve one of those problems, right?

And the interesting thing about Snapchat, I heard this recently, is that it has more active users then Instagram and TikTok combined. Wow. But they’re all between 13 and 17 years old, right? Or like 13 and 21, right? That, that’s different. That’s why nobody’s asking you cause. You probably don’t have access to that audience.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. So is this with your The Pokemon stuff. The Pokemon audience, their younger audience. So they’d be using Snapchat more. Yeah. So I think our audience might be slightly older perhaps at this stage and that’s maybe they’re not asking for it. There’s something interesting you mentioned, Pat, I think I just want to touch on, you know, I forgot to mention that the thumbnail thing as well, cause it’s a relatively new feature for Vubli, but it reminded me of, of, of a bigger idea there.

And that is what we’ve often seen with clients who come from not using Vubli. To then using Vubli is that they would either do a terrible job with the text that goes to the video or they would like they were just like really terrible copy for example and then copy and paste that same text to each platform right because they think So, in other words, they wouldn’t do it properly at all.

Like, they would just have some random or, you know, mediocre text and then copy and paste that over. So, either do it bad or not do it at all. And the same thing with thumbnails. People would either go, ah, this is too hard to do it individually for each platform. And so they’d either not do it at all or do a terrible job, you know, in either case.

So, and I think that’s where Vubli can really help is like, you know, for each platform it does it individually. So, it creates unique content in your own voice. And that you can train by the way as well, we’ve opened that up as well, we’ve completely opened up our AI prompt so you can personalize it 100 percent for you and make it suit 100 percent for your situation.

But then it’s also different for each platform. So for example, and you probably noticed this, I think you mentioned how TikTok was kind of a weird platform, platform for you, right? And the reason is because the audience is different there and Snapchat, again, different audience. So, so why write the same content for them, for people on YouTube, if it’s different people on TikTok, you know, you need, you need to tailor it specifically for each platform.

And I think that’s really useful. So with Vubli, it allows you to do that very quickly with, you know, using AI, which means you get a better result. So not only does it get done, but it helps you get a better result as well, because A, you’re going to be more readable for your different audiences, it’s going to be more attractive for the different audiences, because it’s specifically written for that audience, that platform in your own voice. But also it means that you’re actually doing it as opposed to just the copy and paste sort of job that sort of looks terrible and the results are evident. You know, people coming in from just a terrible version using Vubli where it’s specifically looking for keywords that are search engine optimized and this sort of thing and specifically each platform it all helps and builds to help your videos become more discoverable.

It’s just not just about time saving. It’s also about getting more exposure. And then the thumbnail thing, the more I looked into that, it’s like, I can’t believe it. This is the weird thing, and this is within the context of short form. Now, it feels like I haven’t done any, any Like data research on this, but it feels like a lot of people are missing out on a huge opportunity there.

Like if you look at, if you look at YouTube long form, you’ll know this, all the big creators know this. Your thumbnail is almost the most important thing for discoverability for your videos, right? Your thumbnail, your title, and then your content. It’s like in that order, right? So we’ve got these big creators for long form spending all this time on their thumbnails.

For long form, but then you’re going to look at the short form. It’s just like, there’s no thumbnail. It’s just like this random shot that YouTube chose or that, that Instagram chose or whatever else. And there’s no thought behind the thumbnail. And most people think, okay, sure, but that’s who cares about it because most people just do the thumb scroll.

So there’s no thumbnail there anyway. Not true. Not true at all. The thumbnail shows up in ways that you wouldn’t expect way more. Like if you go to YouTube right now. To both, actually any of the platforms, if you go to both desktop and mobile, the thumbnail of your short form videos show up everywhere.

Everywhere.

Pat Flynn: They’re heavily promoting it. I mean, it’s like, you see two or three long form videos and then a whole array of short form video thumbnails from people that you’ve watched or people that YouTube thinks that you want to watch. And it’s a particular frame either from that video or an uploaded thumbnail and so it is a huge lost opportunity for sure for some additional reach in ways that you might not even know is happening.

Gideon Shalwick: A hundred percent. So that’s one of the key things we wanted to solve as well. It’s like upload one thumbnail. And then get it added to all the different platforms in one go. Now I must say, there’s a little caveat here, YouTube is the only weird one where the API doesn’t allow us to add it 100 percent but it will get you 50 percent there.

So basically you still select your thumbnail within Vubli and what we do is we actually add it as the first frame in your video. Some people like that, some people don’t like that. But then what, what it does for you is when you open up your YouTube app and you go into the edit for that particular video, then basically just select the first frame and automatically already has it locked onto the first frame when you open up the editing screen and you just hit the checkbox and you’re ready to go.

And then your thumbnail is perfect on YouTube and all the other ones, we figured that as well. So it automatically will show you YouTube without you having to do anything else.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, it’s obviously important on Instagram. A lot of people go to your Reels feed or your video layout in your profile, and they’ll see those, right?

So that’s key, especially, you know, for my Pokemon channel, you could see clearly how important it is because I’m showing off the pack before it’s opened. In fact, Before, when I was just uploading the videos, and it was still working, I was getting views, I saw a lot of people comment and say, Oh, you spoiled it for us.

We can already see in the thumbnail that you open the pack that you say, Should I open it or should I keep it sealed? Well, you’ve already answered it on the thumbnail because you’re showing us the inside of the pack. So I was like, Oh, I guess people can see these things. I mean, there’s proof right there.

So, going back to the thumbnail and using it, and I’ve also found that when there’s some action happening or there’s some like for me in the card space when I’m holding the pack but somebody else Is holding the pack and there’s like some exchange happening or some movement or some action that’s happening those seem to do much better and then it ties to the beginning of the video where i’m actually in person negotiating with somebody about that thing.

So there’s sort of a story being told with the thumbnail there versus just a random frame. And you know, a lot of the ones that I click on that I see are ones where it’s a person’s reaction or there’s some curiosity in there. A lot of times people do go so far as to, and I’m curious your thoughts on including text on short form thumbnails.

I know that’s sometimes in important long form, depending on the context and situation, but do you think it might be worth adding and maybe going into Canva, for example, to just add some text on top of a thumbnail if you have that opportunity or time?

Gideon Shalwick: Great question. I think the answer is probably depends on your audience as you’ve got to test it.

I think that’s what it comes down to. I will say this with one experiment I ran, I basically had every video where it was very text heavy. In fact, I blurred myself out in the background and then I just had, if you can imagine the vertical mobile screen size, and it was basically just text kind of filling up the whole thing.

And I thought, you know, like reading is one of the most captivating things you can do because when people read, they don’t see the letters. When you read properly, you don’t see the letters. You create a picture in your head of what you’re reading. When you read a book, you know, you don’t remember the letters, right?

You remember the picture in your head that you create. And so I thought, if I’m good with creating text that can invoke a visual image, you know, that can oftentimes be stronger than the actual image itself. But then I showed it to one of my mentors, Aaron Soghi, amazing guy. He’s got like 700,000 followers on TikTok and he recommended I should test without any text at all and just, just to see what would happen.

Cause then you get the face there and so it allows you to be a bit more creative and create some more variability as well. I didn’t get around to that yet for that particular experiment cause that experiment just ended at that, when I got that advice. But I think that the bottom line is I think it’s worth testing, you know, like test with text.

Test with text plus image and then test with just image and see what happens.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I’ve had in some thumbnails that I’ve created, I’ve had time to like put an arrow pointing to the thing that I want to make sure people see or are looking at, especially if there’s a situation where there’s a lot of things happening on a thumbnail, because it’s the frame from something that’s happening, I want to draw attention to where I want attention drawn. And a lot of things that we teach inside of our community related to thumbnails for a long form is about sort of like less is more, you know, don’t tell the whole story. Just kind of create something of curiosity so that people will click through. So anyway, we’re getting into tactics now, which I’m curious.

So let’s keep going with this. By the way, if you want to check out Vubli, check it out. You can get, I believe, your first three months at 50% off if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli, you can sign up for an account there, and again, kind of just upload once and then distribute everywhere.

That’s great. It almost makes the short form videos feel, in a way, like how podcasting kind of feels. You just upload it once to your host and then it kind of gets distributed out there, and you can fine tune it to the different platforms. I’ve had a really good time experimenting with it, and I’ve even provided some feedback directly to you, Gideon, that you’ve already made changes about, which is really cool to see.

And that’s why I love working with companies like you. And, you know, full disclosure, Matt and I have come on as advisors to the company as well, because we see this being something that will be utilized very, very heavily for people who are getting into short form, which we continue to talk about, and we’ll be running some challenges earlier next year to help people do this and distribute these videos far and wide, hopefully.

So I’m having a lot of fun with it. Anyway,  SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli. Go ahead and check that out. That is an affiliate link, of course, and thanks for that special deal for our people. Gideon, that means a lot. What do you see working out there for creators? Obviously, get them on as many platforms as you can using tools like Vubli, but what other tactics are people using to grow their short form presence?

Gideon Shalwick: A couple of things that’s come up, which I think it’s worth mentioning. One is the whole debate with, should you focus on just one platform as opposed to spreading yourself too thin with, you know, multiple platforms at the same time? That’s one thing. And the other thing that’s, that’s cropped up a few times, which is kind of debunked all small spoiler alert has been debunked quite a lot, which is whether your reach gets affected with using, you know, third party tools too to distribute your content. So if that’s of interest, we can cover that.

Pat Flynn: Why don’t we start there? I mean, that’s literally the number one thought I had because there was once a time, especially on, I think it was X, back when it was Twitter and Facebook and other tools, there were a lot of distribution tools that when you would use, it always felt like your growth or reach was stunted because these tools preferred you to post natively on those platforms.

That was just ingrained in my head for a very long time, but you had mentioned, and I’ve also come to learn that this is debunked. Can you talk a little bit more about why it’s no longer the case?

Gideon Shalwick: It’s a very interesting little story with quite a bit of a history. So in different layers, I should say as well, it’s different layers, which sort of makes it a complex story.

Basically back in 2010, there was an article that came out of someone that tested their content. I’m not sure if it was just the video content, but testing the content with a scheduler and they saw a massive reduction in reach when they used a scheduler compared to when they did it natively. And, and then this article kind of went viral.

And to this day, to this day, people still quote that article from 2010. So what happened was, just full disclosure, I did this research through ChatGPT, but you can, you know, it provides you with a link so you can go and check it out. You can do this for yourself as well. What happened was apparently that was a bug in Facebook’s API.

And then they fixed it. They had an update and then that problem went away. But people talking about it didn’t go away. So that was one thing that happened that was really interesting. Okay, so there’s one layer. And it was only Facebook and this is 2010. Now the next layer is these different kinds of content.

Which is, there’s text content, there’s image content, there’s video content, but very importantly now, more recently, there’s short form video content and we know that kind of all of them, like even with YouTube, they had two different algorithms, I’m not sure if it’s the same one now, I think they might have combined things or marriage is a little bit better, but essentially it was two algorithms running separately and then you’ve got TikTok, which, you know it’s only short form.

And then you’ve got Instagram, which was IGTV and then became Reels. And now Facebook was posts and then Reels. And I think now they’re calling everything Reels or something like that, right? A lot of changes has happened. And to make a claim that one size fits all in this, this context is not really fair.

So that’s another layer, like these different algorithms for different things and different rules, different things. So just, just to inject something here. From what we’ve seen, and also from the research I’ve done, we’ve seen zero effect of using a third party tool on your reach. Zero effect, and in some cases, from the research I’ve done, you might even get an increase in reach, and the reasons are a little bit fuzzy on that, but from what I can tell is that one of the reasons is that when you’re using a scheduler, you’re more likely to keep on going and being more consistent.

And as a result, then you get more rich. But one of the key findings we found was that, and this might have a real effect, is when people use a scheduler to post their content, what sometimes might happen is they might schedule their content and either schedule it during a time that they’re not there, they’re either asleep or they’re thinking, Oh, it’s getting scheduled and I don’t have to be there.

And what we’ve noticed with all the platforms, I’m not sure all of them, but certainly X and YouTube, Instagram. Maybe all of them, is they’re looking for those engagement signals very soon after you’ve posted, so if you’re using a scheduler and you post your video and you just leave it, you’re sleeping or you’re on holiday or whatever else, and there’s no one either from you or from your team to then interact, like, say someone leaves a comment, like, I know on X that’s really important, I think they recommend within the first half an hour or an hour, if someone leaves a comment, you’ve got to get back right away, like, as quick as possible, that sends a really positive signal to the algorithms, so if there’s zero engagement from you, then of course that’s going to affect your reach, but that’s got nothing to do with what tool you’re using to post your content.

So there’s all these different layers, and I’m the bottom line is, from all the research I’ve done, it always comes back to this. When you’re creating the content, the most important thing to help you get reach is the quality of your content and how well you engage with the audience, regardless of where it came from or where it was published from.

So it’s a really interesting debate and I know it’s top of mind for a lot of people who think, oh no, you know, another, yet another layer, I forgot to check this yesterday, but it’d be a very interesting number to find. Is the scheduler industry as a market, how big is that? And you look at all the bigger players, they’ve been around for a long time.

And the big question in my mind is, if you are getting penalties for reach, why are these companies still around? Surely they wouldn’t survive, you know, if when the users post content, they that would stop getting rich, but people keep on using them and they are multi million dollar. Like I said, I wish I found, I have a number, maybe we can find that number afterwards, but what that industry size, it is huge.

It’s not a, it’s not an insignificant market size for those sort of companies. So, and yet another layer just to sort of maybe the final layer that I could add is why the heck would these platforms provide APIs in the first place to help people post their content. They want to give people as many options and possibilities for posting content and API is just one of those reasons, one of those methods that they’ve created to help people post their content. So why would they want to restrict? You know, it doesn’t make any sense to me at all. And like I said, we haven’t seen any evidence ourselves from our users.

We haven’t seen any evidence. So, but you know, studies are getting done all the time and sometimes the results are biased. The hard thing to find is an unbiased study from academics, say, for example. I think there was one or two done, but it was a long time ago. And like I said, short form is a whole new game again now, so.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s interesting. It reminds me of some early studies that were done about eggs and cholesterol that were published that then put this thing in a person’s mind back in the seventies and eighties that eggs were bad, like don’t have too many and high cholesterol, et cetera, that like we just kind of assumed is truth when, you know, new studies have been done that have debunked that or have gone deeper and realized that, okay, that wasn’t necessarily right.

So, I mean, in the same way, I think all of those arguments kind of lean toward okay, the tool itself is not going to be the problem. If there is a problem, it’s going to be your content and, like you said, the engagement, which leads us to that second part that we talked about, which was your first prompt, which was, should you just stay fully engaged on one platform and be fully present there?

What are you losing by spreading yourself too thin? Because you can’t possibly reply to every single comment on every single platform. Is it worth it to still do that? Obviously, you have a tool to enable us to be everywhere. Are we losing out because we are everywhere?

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. And that’s a great question.

I’ve, you know, like I said, at the start of this interview, I’ve always been a content guy, because that’s how I cut my teeth back in the day. So I come from a content background and I remember teaching this as well, where I would, where people would ask me, where do you start? There’s so many different platforms, you know, do I post on all of them, et cetera.

And I always tell people, pick one, master it, and then add another one once you get bandwidth. So that was the advice I’d given in the past. The advice I give now, now that we’ve got automation and AI, is that the game has changed? So things change all the time. Like I noticed you, you changed your position on long form versus short form, for example, right?

So you’re allowed to change, you know, because the world changes, the only constant is change. So the advice I have now is focus on one platform as your hero platform. But, use tools like Vubli, or anything else that you want, to help you still post everywhere else as well. I mean, why not? If it doesn’t take any extra effort, and you can do a good job with it, why not?

You know, why not? Because we ran this experiment as well, and I think you saw this too, sometimes you might post a video on YouTube, and it does something totally different on Instagram. Or totally different on TikTok. So it might, it might be mediocre on YouTube and Instagram, and then all of a sudden it goes viral on TikTok, and you go, what the heck happened there?

You know, it’s a different audience, you know, different algorithms, etc. So why should you limit yourself to just one platform if there’s massive opportunity to be had elsewhere? Without any extra effort, it’s like a no brainer. And that’s part of the reason why we built Vubli, because I recognize that. I come from that position of focus on one thing, you know, because you’re, what’s that book called?

The One Thing, right? Amazing book. It is your, from a strategy perspective, having that laser focus on one is your, is your best chance of success because you’re honing your resources and it just increases your chance of success, right? So my advice doesn’t change. It’s like, keep doing that, but select a hero platform, and the hero platform is simply the one that you focus most of your attention on, but then use something like Vubli to still post everywhere else and garner that additional exposure and reach.

And as you grow, you build your team. Just because you start with one platform and just because you have one hero platform doesn’t mean you only have that focus on the one platform forever. You know, as you grow, things develop, and you start getting more money coming in, your team starts growing, you can, for example, at one point have one person in your team just dedicated to one platform, if you wanted to, that becomes their hero platform.

So I think, I mean, obviously you can get great success with just focusing on one platform, absolutely, if you’re just one person and that’s all you want to do, 100%, but my argument is, with all these other audiences out there, why not? Why not access them as well if it doesn’t take much or any extra effort?

Pat Flynn: Here is a story from my end that will support this as well. I had not posted on Facebook specifically because I just am not a big fan of Facebook in general. However, I recently, and by recently I mean three months ago, started to notice that there were a lot of Facebook pages claiming to be me, Deep Pocket Monster, and they were getting to the point where they were Reaching out to audiences, pretending to be me, and then scamming people.

And people were losing money, and that didn’t make me happy. And a part of the problem was just, I was not on that platform to have the official brand there. So I said, okay. I don’t want to be here, but I have to be here. I’m going to show up and I’m just going to republish my content that I’ve been publishing everywhere else.

I’m going to publish the same videos. I literally don’t have the time to engage there. But at least I’ll have the main Deep Pocket Monster Facebook page. I can use that to get rid of all these other ones that are fake, because I can prove my identity and all that stuff. And I have the IP and X, you know, et cetera.

So I set up shop there and three months later, I have done very little engagement there. I mean, every once in a while, because I’m there, I’ll see a comment, I’ll reply to it, but it’s nowhere near my hero platform like Instagram and YouTube are. 200,000 followers now on Facebook. Wow. $150 to $200 a day in additional revenue from simply posting the exact same video with zero engagement.

And people are still replying to comments, saying they enjoy watching, saying that they now watch me on Facebook. A completely new audience that wouldn’t have found me otherwise. Yes, in an ideal world, I would also engage there and show up. I could probably generate more revenue and more fans there, if I were also present there.

But I just, I just can’t. So do I take all the videos off? Of course not. They’re there, and they’re serving the audience. Because the videos themselves are entertaining and now I have this following there, which also as a byproduct, now I have another property that when I’m doing a brand deal or sponsorship, I have another place to post those videos and more followers and more views coming in, right?

Those views add up. It’s 25 to 30 million additional views per month that I can now sell. Yes. In a way, which is awesome. Again, another benefit, right? Imagine you have only one home platform that’s providing 100 percent of your, your revenue, your followers, et cetera. Imagine you have half the amount of followers and zero engagement on so many others, but that’s still so many more new followers and eyeballs on your videos that you could add into your sponsorship package. That’s huge. That’s absolutely huge.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. And you know, short form, and this is why I love short form videos so much because it’s, it’s such a, it’s such a different beast, you know, look, it’s, if you think about the way that people consume short form, they don’t always engage.

The difference in engagement is how long they watch. That’s the engagement. It’s not a comment, it’s not a, like even, it’s not a subscribe. Like it’s subscribing is now like really low down on the list. And that’s why you can get a very successful, like a TikTok, TikTok is probably known more for this. You can get a channel or a TikTok page or whatever with not many followers, but you go and look at the channel and go, huh, millions of views, millions, you know, and maybe not for every video, but each video almost seems like it’s treated independently of your previous existence or your previous track record. It’s like, right. It’s like, no, here’s the new video. Let’s see how it goes with the audience. Let’s treat this video as an individual unit. And if it’s awesome, let’s flick it out there. Why not? You know, why, why limit someone’s channel based on their subscriber rate, you know, a number of subscribers.

So, and for me, that makes it really exciting for pretty much everybody because it means it levels the playing field. No longer do you have to have like a hundred thousand or a million subscribers like you used to do in the, in the day to be able to compete. You know, now it just comes down to how creative can you be and how consistent can you be?

How awesome can you create the content, and how consistently can you post that? And, and so the creativity of, you know, there’s plenty of tools to help you with that, but when it comes to consistency, we’d like to think, we wanna help you there. So we’ll remove at least one of those pains to help you be more consistent.

Pat Flynn: And that consistency is exactly what combats my initial thought about short form, which was you can’t build a relationship with an audience with 60 seconds, right? It takes time. I used to, and a lot of the audience knows this because I’ve used this analogy a lot, I used to use the metaphor that short form videos were like Halloween candy, right?

People come to your house, they get the candy, then they leave and they move to the next house. They don’t remember you. Right, they might get a nice candy and then move on and then they don’t see you until next year, but the truth is, if you are consistent, and for example, if you’re publishing daily, it’s not just a Halloween thing, it’s an everyday thing.

Every day they’re coming to your house, and maybe if you have the king size candy bar, then they’re gonna remember you, and they’re gonna come back the next day, and then come back the next day, and then talk about you, because it’s not one 60 minute video, it’s sixty one minute videos for 60 days, right? And it’s like You can build a relationship.

In fact, a lot of the people who watch my channel, the short form channel, if I don’t publish at 830 p. m. Pacific time, people wonder, what happens? Where are you? I’ve now become a part of a person’s ritual or day. A lot of parents come up and say, hey, it’s like a fun thing my son and I do every day before we go to bed. We watch one of your videos every day. And it’s just such a cool thing because it is consistent. And that’s why you have to keep hitting publish. You have to keep showing up. And that’s more than why. Showing up across the platforms, all of them if possible, and again, Vubli is a great tool that can help us do that, is a great thing.

So I’m all for it, this is why I’m happy to be an advisor and an affiliate and to have you on the show and to push this out there because we can take this one message and this thing that we do that we put our time and effort into and put it out there in front of people who maybe wouldn’t have followed and found us otherwise if we just kind of limited it to one or just two platforms.

So, Gideon, this has been really, really great to have you on and to talk about a tool that is so useful right now. If everybody wants to go and check out Vubli, you can get 50 percent off your first three months if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli and you’ll see the deal there. And a little bit more about the tool.

It’s very easy to use and onboard all the technical stuff that’s required is there’s tooltips and things to help you through that. And again, Gideon and his team in there are there to help you as well. And it’s always improving. So I appreciate that. Any final words of advice for the short form creator that’s out there, whether they have been creating content for a while and are trying short form, or maybe they’re a brand new creator and short form feels like a kind of easy entry into content creation.

What tip would you have for success, Gideon?

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah, I think the, the tip I’d have is to, something that I learned from you, and that is the consistency thing, but also something that I’ve recently been, I’ve known about this lesson for many years, but I haven’t implemented it properly. And that’s from Nathan Barry from Kit, creating flywheels and building momentum.

And the thing with that is that the mistake that I made in the past was that I thought I was building momentum, but I ended up just creating dots. Dots, dots, dots and straight lines. And then a dot would finish, a line would finish. And it wouldn’t have a feedback loop to start again. And the key difference was to then say, Hey, if I want to be consistent here, I’ve got to create a flywheel, if I want to build momentum, I’ve got to create a flywheel, I’ve got to close the loop.

You know it’s, it’s, it’s one thing creating one video. But it’s another thing to create a system that allows you to create one video or post one video a day or two videos a day, five videos a day. So it’s about, you know, thinking not just about the video, but the system behind it to help you build something that can create momentum.

And, and a big part of that is to remove as many friction points as possible from that process. And the posting and distribution part of it is one of the big key pain points. So if you can remove that friction point, it’s going to mean naturally that you’re going to build that momentum a lot easier and a lot faster as well.

So, yeah, for me, the bottom line with this stuff, if I look at you and your success, it’s consistency. I mean, your first 60 days with, was it Short Pocket Monster? Yeah, short pocket Monster, yeah. Was 35 days. Nothing. Right? But you posted every day the number 35 boom, 750,000 views, and then all of a sudden your flywheel was spinning.

So the, the first bit is a bit more tricky and hard, but then as you build, that momentum builds sneak into that breakthrough point. So that’ll be my advice. Build a flywheel and, and that helps you be more consistent, which helps you build that momentum and helps you get to that breakthrough point.

Pat Flynn: I love it, man.

Thank you so much for today. Appreciate you. I know all the way on the other side of the world might be what? What time is it over there for you right now?

Gideon Shalwick: Oh, it’s nine o’clock in the morning here.

Pat Flynn: Oh that’s not too bad. It’s 3:00 PM here. That’s perfect. Yeah. And you’re off, you’re in Australia.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. That’s it.

Pat Flynn: Very cool. Gideon, thank you so much for this. Appreciate you and everybody appreciates the hard work you’ve done to make things easier for us. So thank you again.

Gideon Shalwick: You’re welcome. Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Alright, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Gideon, always a pleasure and a wealth of knowledge coming from him.

And just to see the focus on short form video, I mean, this completely makes sense. Again, it’s exactly why Matt and I became advisors to the company, why we’re an affiliate for it, why we wanted him on the show today to talk to you about this. So if you go, again, to SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli, you can get 50 percent off the first three months there if you want to check this out.

If you’re doing any short form videos, go You might as well publish them out everywhere and do it in a way that doesn’t take too much time and helps you do it in the right way. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli. Check it out. And thank you so much for today. We’re going to continue to talk about superfans and short form video and get you going, especially leading into 2026.

We’re going to make next year the best year ever for you. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out. Cheers. Thanks so much.