SPI 905: I’m Ready to Share the Short-Form Formula for Viral Growth!

Pat Flynn: Okay, here are some crazy stats. Video content is projected to make up about 82 percent of all internet traffic by the end of 2025. So, basically, now. Which is insane. And for short form videos in particular, 90 percent of millennials, 92 percent of Gen Z, say they watch short form video content frequently or sometimes. Boomers, who are a little bit older, of course, about 58%.

But of course, for the younger generation, Gen Alpha, and the generations to come, I mean, this is 100 percent of their content in general. Short form content, a lot of marketers say, is the content format that they plan to invest more in next year.

And around 75 percent of video viewing now happens on mobile devices. So here is the thing. If you are not creating videos, you are missing out. And more specifically, if you are not creating short form videos, you are missing out on the easiest opportunity to generate views, to generate an audience, and therefore, build your business on.

Yes, long form video is still king in my opinion, but the barrier to entry to create a well worthwhile long form video to create and of course then to watch as an audience member is much, much higher. The barrier to entry to a short form video audience is at an all time low right now and this is why we are investing heavily into promoting short form video, into creating short form video, and to helping you create short form video as well in many different ways.

For example, inside of our community, we just launched a brand new course. Short Form Formula. Short Form Formula. This is brand new for people who are already community members. You don't have to pay anything extra. That's what our community's about getting access to the latest and greatest stuff. However, if you want to check out the community, head on over to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community of course, and you can get involved there.

More than that, there is a challenge coming your way as well, and this is starting on January 12th, so we want to get ahead of it. This is, of course, the sort of December episode leading up to that challenge, and that begins on January 12th. I'll talk more about that in a little bit. But I want to talk more about short form video and sort of what it's done.

A lot of you know that last year, there was even an episode about this. I started a experiment. on TikTok and shorts on YouTube. And it blew up. This is the Deep Pocket Monster slash Short Pocket Monster. This is a Pokemon channel that is now seeing 10 million views a day. 10 to 12 million views per day. The first 30 days I wasn't getting a lot of views and on day 35 it exploded.

And I've told this story many times and I'm going to continue to tell it again because The audiences are there. And they're there without you having to worry about being perfect. They're there without you having to spend a ton of time in creation mode. But you do have to hit record and you do have to hit publish.

And doing this on a daily basis is going to be the best key to getting started. Do you have to keep it up daily for an entire year or longer? No. However, I am approaching episode 500 of Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed. Not to mention the fact that it is provided a lot of access to opportunities that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

For example, I now have a relationship with Kiki Hernandez from the LA Dodgers who follows my channel. There have been a lot of connections with other celebrities, both sports players and musicians, who are, you know, closet Pokemon nerds who grew up with Pokemon, who are involved in Pokemon, who, you know, now watch my channel who want to work together or collab.

You know, these things can happen, which is so crazy. And what am I doing? Every day I'm doing a repeatable format. I'm opening a pack of cards. It's just built around that, a pack of Pokemon cards. Now I'm not the first person to do that, which is why the Framework, the structure and the way that you present these videos is going to be really key, right?

You want to create a formula that people can get involved with every single day, right? You're not building a relationship in a 60 minute chunk. You're building a relationship across small one minute chunks 60 times within two months. And this challenge that's coming up in January is a 30 day video challenge.

And this is one that we're going to help you figure out what your framework is, what your repeatable format is, and the structure of it is, to help you understand how to quickly create this and put it out there, not just on one platform, but many platforms, and do this in a way that you can fit it into your busy lifestyle.

Because I was able to do this. I was able to do this despite, of course, being a father and a husband, so managing, you know, and helping with the family at home and doing all those things, not just disappearing into a hole and creating these videos, CEO and founder of several companies, not to mention the long form videos that are still coming out on the Pat Flynn channel on YouTube, and, of course, Deep Pocket Monster, which is really, really close to hitting 2 million subscribers.

We might be crossing that path very soon. But just to give you some perspective, that channel started in 2021. If you're still The long form channel Deep Pocket Monster, the short form channel Short Pocket Monster, which I didn't link to, On Deep Pocket Monster, I didn't let anybody know about this. I let the algorithms do the work for me, which they can, they will.

Again, if you show up and be consistent. We're at 2.4 million subscribers now on YouTube, and we should hit 3 million within the first quarter next year. And just to give you some perspective on what this has now opened up, not just the connections to these celebrities, which is kind of cool, but it is provided an additional near six figure revenue, because of the ad revenue across multiple platforms and the brand deals and sponsorships.

Just recently, I can't say any brand names. But, I'm in discussions with different brands around the $35,000 to $50,000 sponsorship deal. $35,000 for brands that want to get in front of this audience of millions now. And, a lot of brands and marketers are now looking towards short form video and short form video creators and short form video influencers, if you want to call them that.

I don't like calling them that. But authorities, people who have reach, are able to generate a lot of revenue now from these brand deals and sponsorships because, again, these brands and companies know that this is where people are. They're watching short form video. And, even if you've never created video before, this is a perfect opportunity for you.

It's a perfect opportunity. It's a lower barrier to entry to get started. You don't need to spend a As much time to create these videos. You just need a good hook. You just need a good hook. Attention spans are getting shorter, so you might as well meet them where they are. I know there's some people, I've even shared this with some people in my mastermind group, and they push back a little bit.

They say, I don't know if I want to do that, because I want to create more noise out there. I want to create longer form content, blog posts, emails, yes, email is still important, podcast episodes, long form YouTube videos, yes. You can still do that, but you are missing out on the millions of people who are out there who could discover you today if you had your content out there.

And once they find your content, once they follow it, whether they subscribe or not, as long as they engage with it or watch it, right? So you have the, not the click and stick strategy, which is what we talk about in our YouTube course, our long form YouTube course, YouTube From Scratch. This is going to be.

A flick and stick, right? Because they're flicking their thumb up and down the sort of feed, and there is no thumbnails. I mean, the thumbnails still are a key component for people who see it on their homepage. If you go to the homepage of YouTube, you'll see a thumbnail of a short, for sure. So thumbnails are still important, but not as important as the first two seconds of your video.

What is moving? What is the question? What open loop are you creating to help people stick around? And what's really neat is with these. Small videos, you know, up to three minutes. I like them just over a minute. It depends on the kind of video or the kind of style that you have and how much time you need to do what you need to do.

But you could take that one video and put it on let's, let's count. We could put it on, of course, YouTube and YouTube shorts. We can take that literal same video. You don't have to create more content to get more potential reach. You can repurpose it by just simply uploading that same video. And don't even worry about creating separate call to actions.

Some people do that across these different platforms, but you don't need to do that. Take the same video. That's what I've been doing. You take that short video and you publish it on Instagram. That's two. So that's YouTube and Instagram Reels. And then you publish it on TikTok, of course. So that's three.

But you also have A Facebook page that you can set up and even if you don't want to engage there, I don't, I don't like Facebook but I have it there because I know I can reach people and there are people who've recently purchased my t shirt that goes along with this should I open it or should I keep it sealed brand who said that specifically they found me on Facebook and I'm just repurposing the same videos there.

And that's just four, right? You can also publish these on X, on LinkedIn, I'm even experimenting on Snapchat. I've made over 10k on Snapchat. Yes, Snapchat. Which, I've recently heard from the people over at Snapchat that they have more combined active users than Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok combined, which I find hard to believe, but then I think about it.

I'm like, Oh, this is where the 13 to 21 year old crowd is. And for Pokemon, it makes sense for other channels. It may make sense for others. It may not, but I wouldn't worry about it. In fact, I feel really old when I'm on the Snapchat platform. I'm pretty good with technology, right? I dabble with a lot of different tech pieces and platforms.

Snapchat is just weird, bro. It is so weird. And I just, I'm still trying to figure it out. You take that one video that you create every day, and if this were easy, what would it look like? How can you do this in a repeatable fashion? How might you batch process this so that you can get ahead? In fact, I know I'm kind of jumping all over the place here, but I recently got back from Hawaii.

I was in Hawaii for Thanksgiving with my family. It was beautiful. It was warm. We had some great food, great scenery, great times. We did a bunch of escape rooms while there for some reason. It was so much fun as a family creating all these memories together. And guess what? I was still able to create content every day because the week prior to that, instead of creating a video every day and then publishing it, I created two videos.

Every day. But I published one, so that by the time the next week rolled around, I had a batch or sort of a bucket or a collection of videos that I could just publish out during Thanksgiving week, and still remain consistent. Completed all that without doing too much extra work. Just getting ahead. Batch processing.

And doing this in short form is so much easier because it's so much easier. Easier to create short form video, right? As opposed to creating a batch number of episodes of podcasts or batch long form videos or batch emails or batch blog posts that takes a lot more effort.

Now, there's three pillars that I want to talk about here when it comes to growing authority online that we want to use short form video for, and again, I want to encourage you to check out our new course. If you aren't in the community already, you can check it out. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/shortform, you could check it out and just kind of read about it, get involved.

Community powered courses are the way to go for sure. But again, the challenge is coming in January where I'm going to challenge you. It's going to be initiated on Instagram, so make sure you're following me on Instagram if you're not. @PatFlynn. You'll see a post leading up to this challenge where you can get involved and we'll send you messages to get you prepared for it.

Free to join. Just follow me on Instagram and you won't miss it. @ PatFlynn. And of course, join the Unstuck Newsletter, all that stuff. We're gonna make sure we announce it there as well. But this challenge will hold you accountable. To give you what you need to create these daily videos and to do that for 30 days.

And the goal is to help you already see some results, an audience that you're building, some momentum when it comes to creation and helping you frame your head around what is this repeatable format that you're creating. This is how you make it easy. It's not random every day. There's some sort of format that you can kind of follow and go from there, whether it's day one of whatever, or experimenting with something for 30 days, or you just kind of check and publish your process as sort of a journal every single day.

There's various ways to go about it. But the three pillars you need to build authority that I've mentioned before are, number one, consistency, which again, short form video is great for because it's small spurts every single day. It's clarity, so what is it that you're saying, this format that you're doing, this repeatable format, and how clear is it that a person should stick around to see what's till the end?

How clear is it of what the outcome is going to be? How clear are you? In what you're trying to say and how you're building a relationship with your audience. And then finally, the confidence. And that can only come by hitting publish. You're going to get a lot of data coming in, more data than you could ever imagine when it comes to these short form videos across all these platforms.

You're going to have more understanding of what works and what doesn't. You're going to be more likely to get to that comfort point much, much sooner by, again, hitting up that short form video process. This is a huge opportunity for all of us today. And as we do here, we don't just say things, we do things.

I always lead by example. And this is why I haven't shared this yet until now, because I've been able to prove it, and stick with it, and develop a formula for it. This is the Short Form Formula. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/shortform, and follow me on Instagram at   @PatFlynn because the challenge is gonna start, it's gonna initiate there, I'll help you keep track every single day where you're at, I'm gonna encourage you, I'm gonna share some wins from the community there as well, and this is gonna go down on January 12th after the new year.

We wanna start off the new year with a bang, and that, in my opinion, should be with short form video. Now, again, there's going to be a lot of people out there who will say short form video isn't worth the time because you aren't able to build a relationship, but you are. You're not doing this in one long form video with one chance.

You're doing this with many short form videos with a lot of chances because some of those videos that you do are just not going to go anywhere and that's okay. You just hit record the next day and hit publish and then you're good and you kind of just continue to try to build that momentum and eventually one of those videos is going to hit.

And then you find out what it is about that video that hit, and then you kind of lean into that a little bit, and then you go further, and then you can create a sub series, and then you can go from there. And the opportunity far outweighs the risk. With long form, which again, I am I'm not saying don't do long form, but if you've been trying long form, or if you've been struggling to get it done, then let's focus instead on the short form content with a lot more room for error, a lot more room for play, a lot more room for experimentation, and just think about it, after 30 days, if you go weekly, how many chances do you have of something hitting?

Four. One per week. If you go daily, how many chances do you have of something hitting? of finding a stride, of getting data, of learning. You have 30 opportunities to do that, and across an entire year, you have 52 versus 365. So, I know that I sound like I'm a broken record right now, but the short form video is the opportunity that's right in front of you right now.

You are probably consuming a lot of short form video. If you are, and you're not creating, then you're just going to be, you know, in absorption mode, we want to be in creation mode. If you haven't been watching short form video, maybe avoiding it because you dislike the short attention span, the quote unquote brain rot.

My argument for that is, and this was something that I was thinking about as well, it's like, do I want to add more noise out there? Cause a lot of it is brain rot. Right, you see a lot of kids just doom scrolling across stupid things. But how can you show up in front of people and be useful, be educational, be inspiring, be motivating?

How do you stand out amongst the brain rot that's out there? How do you not contribute to the brain rot, but you meet them where they're at and save them from the brain rot? That's what I feel, Short Pocket Monster does. It does, yes, educate on cards and prices, but also is entertaining, and I would much rather build a relationship long term with people there and save them from other people who might be providing misinformation about cards or encouraging them to go down the wrong path.

In fact, many people who watch my channel say it is a way for them to feel like they're opening expensive packs of Pokemon. It's not always expensive, but cards that they don't get access to, and have them feel like they are the ones doing it themselves. In fact, that's why it's filmed the way it is. It's so close to the camera, it's as if when you're holding your phone, you're holding these cards.

So when it comes to consistency, consistency builds that familiarity, that trust. I used to say that short form video is not useful because it's like Halloween. People come to your house, they get the candy, and then they leave. You're not building a relationship with them. But what if Halloween instead was every day?

And what if you had the king size Snickers bar at the end of the block? All the kids knew about, and not only did they know about it and come to your house every day to get that Snickers bar, but they all told their friends about it, because that's what you do. I remember back during Halloween when I was a kid, we would always tell each other who had the best candy so we could all help each other out.

Hey, go over there, they got the Pixie Stix. Remember Pixie Stix? I love Pixie Stix. I used to, it's basically just powdered sugar in different flavors, and I would, it would come in this like little straw and I would just pour it all into my tongue and then just blow out and it would look like smoke was coming outta my mouth.

Don't do that in people's eyes, but I thought that was kind of cool. Anyway, the consistency of you showing up builds that relationship. A lot of people fall into the habit of consuming your content every day. I've seen this not just on my channel, but other channels too, where they say, oh, it's bad time.

Hey, everybody. Good night. We're all here together again this evening watching a person open Pokemon cards. What's the latest one that I've been seeing? I've been seeing a guy who this is the series, he is kicking a rock until it becomes a sphere. I don't remember the person's name, but I follow because I want to see how long this takes, I want to see just how spherical this could, this rock could get.

He has a name for this rock. He kicks it. He shares in the beginning of his video. This is such a great hook. He just says, I'm kicking a rock every single day until it turns into a sphere. And while he says that, You see him weigh the rock in its current state. It's kind of, you know, it might be midway through, so it's kind of roundish, but there's still a lot of jagged edges and he weighs it.

It's like 20.58 ounces. Okay, cool. And then he goes on this rant or whatever. He's kicking it down the street. It stops. He kicks it again, kicks it on a trail. He's brought it to different places and then he weighs it at the end and you see just how much weight this rock has lost. And you're like, okay. And even if you don't subscribe to that you see, because you engaged with it, because you watched all the way to the end, you see the next one, and then the next one, and the next one, and he's, he's on his second rock now. It's a dude kicking a rock into a sphere. Do you see how simple that is? And, of course, that may not relate to your niche or what you want to do, and yes, in many cases, some things like that are like, okay, well, okay, so what?

So he's building an audience. Well, he could have brand deals and sponsorships. For what? I don't know. These companies just want to get in front of audiences, even general audiences. Not necessarily niche audiences. When you cast a wide net on social, you can find some people who will make sense for whatever it is that you're doing.

Now, I'm not saying just kick a rock. Have it somehow relate to what it is that you're doing, of course. But don't worry about being super niche. Yes, the riches are in the niches, but the bets are in the nets. That's not the best thing. I just came up with that. But cast a wide net, you'll catch something.

Okay? So, I think I'm done talking about this because I hopefully have sold it to you here in December. Trying to get you convinced to either check out the Short Form course that we have, Short Form Formula. If you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/shortform, it's going to be there. And get ready because on January 12th, the challenge starts.

It's going to be a 30 day publish a video every single day challenge. I'll tell you exactly where to publish it. It's not going to be on all the platforms. I want to make things very easy for you to start out with, but it's going to initiate on Instagram   @PatFlynn. You'll see it there. Join our newsletter if you haven't already, and get ready for it, because I want to hold you accountable to this.

I want to see some results from you and that you haven't seen before. Just, I want you to get some progress going to start 2026. It's right there in front of you, so don't miss out. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. See you in the next episode.

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.

SPI 903: An Update on LIFE Outside of Business (Turning 43)

Pat Flynn: When I started this entrepreneurial journey in 2008, I was 25 years old. And I'm about to turn 43. That is crazy, even to hear myself say it out loud. I've been doing this for quite a while, and as I turn 43, I wanted to do an episode here that I haven't done in a very long time. This is more of a life update.

This is going to be an episode that has you scrambling to go in front of a computer and implement something really quickly, or develop some new strategy with your team, or start some new business. I mean, perhaps it might do that, but really I just wanted to have this be an outlet for us to connect, and for me to just share what's on top of mind as I turn 43 years old.

And when I think about who I was at 25, When I started my business, you know, I was just about to get married. I had not had kids yet. I was still very much able to eat whatever I want and not see the consequences of that. I was very much able to run around and play a lot of sports without also the consequences of that.

But I definitely have grown wiser. I definitely have approached people and life differently. And the that were important to me back then have changed. However, there are still things that were important to me back then that have remained the same. And I want to first start with my wife, April. We've been together for nearly 17 years now.

And of course, we've had our ups and downs, and we've continued to have discussions about the same things again and again that seem to come up. And this is not unusual in most relationships, of course, but I think what has really brought us closer over the years is has been working as a team, working as a team for a very specific purpose, and that is, of course, our kids. And our kids are getting older, my son turned 16 this December, which is crazy because this is about how old the blog was, and many of you who are old school followers of the channel and of Smart Passive Income from back in the day, you might remember a blog post where I announced his birth, and we were going through some tough times then.

My wife and I were not under any health insurance plans, so we had to pay all of that out of pocket. And it was all thanks to the architecture website I had, my very first business, to help people pass the LEED exam, that we were actually able to survive that. But we were very worried because Keoni was born premature, and we were worried that all the expenses in the NICU and all that stuff, if he was going to be there for weeks, and thankfully he wasn't.

He just came home very, very tiny. 4 pounds, actually, and now he's much bigger than 4 pounds, in fact, his head is way bigger than that, but he's turned into a mature, good, young man, and it's very cool to see. And April and I have bonded, and most of our conversations are about it. The kids, and who they were, and the fun times we've had with them, the memories that we've shared together, and also who they are seemingly becoming, and the things that they may end up doing, and the people that they're going to spend their time with, and hopefully spend some of that time with us.

It's been really interesting now that they've been very independent. My daughter, too. Thirteen years old. She is a teenager. We have two teenagers in the house now. And when I think about just how quickly time has gone, it has been the blink of an eye. So fast things have happened. And I'm very grateful that my businesses have been set up in a way to spend quite a bit of time with them.

And despite that, I still wish there was more. So all I can do, and all we can do, It's just enjoy the time together that we still have, and we do that by playing games and having conversations here at the house. We do that by working together. The kids are both employees of my company, and we also go on a lot of trips together.

And the same has been true ever since the beginning. We don't spend a lot of money on lavish things. I mean, maybe Pokemon cards now, but that's That's sort of a side thing that is blown up, but outside of that, most of our money is spent on building experiences and memories and traveling afar. I mean, we are gonna be going to Japan for a third year in a row this year because we've fallen in love with the culture, the food, the vibe there.

We're also going to head over to Korea, as well, to explore Seoul and a few cities around that area. My daughter and my wife have gotten really big into K pop, and I've gotten brought along with them, and have gotten to know the boys of the Stray Kids K pop group, and I've followed a few other groups, too.

It's just an amazing culture, I follow them for, yes, the reason of their music is great and I enjoy their videos and their dancing, but I also really am getting inspired by the marketing in the K pop world. And I don't want to talk about too much business today, but man, when you think about a new album that comes out, right?

Remember back in the day when an album would come out, there was just one thing you would buy. The album with the DVD or a CD in it. And that's it, that's all. But because there are 8 members of this group, do they launch with just one album? No. The same music is put across 8 different albums because you need one for each individual person on the cover.

But then within that, you also have these cards, called PCs or photo cards, that are a mystery, until you open it up. So they're kind of playing along with the blind bag opening craze, and also the Pokemon card craze, and all that stuff, where you might not know. You might get the rare, I don't know, Sungmin, who's one of the members.

He's my bias right now, actually. A bias being your favorite. Anyway, I could talk for a whole hour about K pop and the marketing behind it, and some of the genius in that world, and I'm actually getting a lot of inspiration from that. But all that to be said the family all joys the same kinds of things together and even though it might not be our cup of tea for each person we all try to enjoy what everybody else is enjoying because especially my wife and I we we aren't going to see them for much longer we're already spending less and less time with them because they're out with their friends my son's gonna get a car soon be gone even more most likely you I've gotten him behind the wheel in some parking lots a couple times, and that's just been such a trip, oh my gosh, a wild ride, pun intended. And I'm just hoping he remains safe and smart, and, you know, I have to lead by example, in the car, not checking the phone, and always trying to be the best example as possible. So that's the family. The family's great.

One thing that has been a really, really good purchase. I'll just, I'll just tell you, you know, like I said, we don't normally spend a lot of money on things, but there was one thing that we purchased that has been tremendous for just the bonding that my wife and I have together.

And that is a hot tub. We actually spent money on a hot tub that is an above ground hot tub that goes in the backyard and you know, has a cover and everything. And thankfully we live in San Diego. So the weather's not crazy and we don't have to worry about things like freezing over or whatever, but it has been amazing to have that be sort of a ritual for us to go and just chat.

I'm not on my phone, she's not on her phone, there's no television on, we're just outdoors looking up at the stars and having conversations about life. And that's been probably my most favorite thing that has happened lately with just my wife and I. The conversations that we've been having out in the backyard.

And every once in a while, I'll catch a falling star and it's just beautiful. And to be outdoors and to actually utilize the backyard and to be in like a warm pool of water. It's great. It's so great. I highly recommend it, if possible. So what else has been happening in my life? Well, I've talked about family.

Let me talk a little bit about health. Thankfully, I am in fairly good health. I had once gotten a DEXA scan a few years back and was getting a little bit into the obese side. Even though I didn't really look it or feel it, the numbers didn't lie. The DEXA scan that I had showed me that I was teetering toward 28% body fat, and this was just a result of poor habits.

So I've been working hard over the past number of years to reduce that, and I've been able to get it down to 18% and I haven't had a DEXA scan in a while, but I feel great. I have a lot of energy. I have been eating fairly well. I have been exercising fairly often, and what I've realized is that as long as I just don't overdo it one way or another, I'm gonna be okay.

There was once a point where I overdid the workouts, and I, not starved myself, but I just kind of kept myself from foods that I wanted to eat. And didn't enjoy life as much as I could've. Because I was just trying so hard to get RIPPED. Right? But I just want to be healthy at this stage in life. And thankfully, I've done a few things like when I'm on meetings, if I don't have to be in front of my computer, I take those meetings while on a walk.

I walk around the block and usually I'll get a nice heart rate up and get those conversations done. I'm in a much better mood anyway when I'm moving around. So that's been really helpful across the board. I still work out twice a week with a trainer. That's important to me because I wouldn't do that unless that person was going to be there.

Now this trainer is on FaceTime. His name is Jeff. You might have met him or have heard about him before and I know that he's going to call me at a certain time twice a week and I have to be in the garage with my free weights or else I'm going to get in trouble. So having that accountability has been really, really important and very, very good for just my health and energy and creativity have been much needed this year with a lot of the work that I've done on the Card Party front, on the Pokemon stuff, and the stuff that's happening with SPI, and Superfans and all the things have required so much of my level of energies that I've absolutely needed to stay on top of myself as much as possible in terms of health.

So very, very happy about that. I haven't overdone it and I'm not six pack ripped. I'm not chiseled, but I'm also not obese, and I'm not slow, and I feel like that's been great. So just trying to find balance in that has been key, because I've always teetered too far to one side or too far to the other, where it's gotten even to the point where I've, you know, injured myself because I've tried so hard to get ripped, or, you know, follow the best workout plan, and, you know, all that stuff.

I have been taking creatine, which has been really helpful. I find that supplement to be useful for various reasons with recovery as well as energy and creativity. I'm not saying to take creatine, but definitely research it, do your research and talk to a physician if you're interested or curious about that.

But that's been the one supplement that I do take every day in addition to protein shakes and gosh, the hardest thing to do, but the most useful thing and most beneficial thing has been hitting my protein numbers. Keeping track of my protein, hitting my protein numbers has been huge. That's been really key.

Another thing that I've gotten very excited about over the past couple of years that I continue to now have be a part of my life is anime. I was never really an anime kid growing up, but now anime is very mainstream, and it is so good. There are so many great animes out there, and if you haven't explored animes, no, it's not cartoons.

I mean, yes, it is animated, and it's drawn, but the storytelling is absolutely insane. Across so many different titles and there's a lot of great titles that you may have heard of already like One Piece which is way too long I mean, there's nearly 2, 000 episodes of that thing and I had to stop after 800 even though it started to get really good It was just too much and I wanted to explore more.

So One Piece is crazy long although I believe they are coming out with another series starting from the beginning But without the failure episodes to help people get caught up much faster. So that should be coming out at some point fairly soon. Demon Slayer, absolutely incredible. Attack on Titans, crazy, wild, what a thrill. But the number one anime that I've been, I've just fallen in love with has been Frieren and I highly recommend you watch it. It's called Frieren Beyond Journey's End, and the story is, I mean, it's immaculate. I've seen it six times over already. Thankfully, it's only, I think, 25 to 28 episodes, and season two's coming in January, which I'm really excited about.

But this story is one that's made me cry. It's one that has made me reflect on life and the things that I'm doing and the prioritizations that I have. And I even got to a point where I bought a figurine of the main character, whose name is Frieren, to be a daily reminder for me to enjoy the time that I have with the people that I'm around.

The reason it's called Beyond Journey's End is because it actually takes place very uniquely at the end of a journey. After this party, I'm not going to spoil too much for you, or really anything, it's in the first episode, all of this, they come back from their journey defeating the Demon King. They've defeated the evil demon, and now they're coming back, and they're being celebrated, and Frieren is pretty unique because she's a mage.

She's a mage elf, and so she lives a very, very long life. I mean, thousand plus years, right? Whereas the other members of her party generally are human and they pass. And she's just like, yep, whatever. Like something that takes 10 years for her just feels like a week to us. But of course, she realizes that she misses them and that she didn't take advantage of that time that she had with them because the human life is so short.

And so she goes on this new journey and she tries really hard to enjoy the moment and to be a good person knowing that for who she's with, it's not going to be that much time relative to how much time she has. And the battles are incredible. The storyline is great. It's, it's not super fast paced, but it's clever and it's just very, very sweet.

So it is on Netflix. I highly recommend you check it out. If you give it a few episodes, you will be hooked and it is an incredible watch. F R I E R E N. Frieren. So yeah, anime's been great. It's been something that the entire family's been able to watch. It does often bring lessons and teach lessons.

Hunter x Hunter was another great one. That was almost my gateway anime.

I love that I'm here on the podcast just talking about anime with you. I can just kind of chill out today and I don't have to be quote unquote on. I mean, I'm always me, but I get to relax a little bit today. It's my birthday. My birthday is coming up, December 6th, so I wanted to share this episode with you and just kind of unwind a little bit.

It's been a year. It's been a great year. It's been a year full of wins. The launch of Lean Learning and becoming a New York Times best selling author, that is still crazy for me to say out loud and hear. New York Times best selling author. Just thank you so much for supporting that book. It's still available, we just crossed 100 ratings, and I haven't even asked for ratings and reviews, so this will be the one time that I ask this year.

If you haven't done so already, please leave a review on Amazon, it goes a very long way, and I do read them all. You know, I'm very happy with the response to the book. I continue to get messages and direct messages from people who've read the book and have implemented some strategies to actually learn things that they've wanted to learn for a very long time.

And I love that. It's become just such a joy to see the results of this work that I put in. You know, put in the hard work now, reap the benefits later kind of thing. I've been very happy with the way the Pokemon channel has grown and the Shorts channel, how that's blown up. Man, the incredible opportunities that that has put in front of me has been insane.

And not just business opportunities, but opportunities to meet people who I would have never thought I would have met. In fact, I'm going to tell you this now. Just last week, I got a DM from Kiki Hernandez. And if you don't know who Kiki Hernandez is, he is an L. A. Dodgers player who recently won the World Series, who is a now rookie Pokemon card collector, and he reached out to me!

For help! This is insane! Plays for the Dodgers! This is the second time a Dodgers player has reached out to me, and has known about me, which is kinda crazy. The first time was actually prior to the Pokemon stuff, and that was Trevor Bauer. who was in San Diego. I ran into him at a lunch that I was at, and he used the SwitchPod, and that was our entry into our relationship and conversation, and unfortunately, a month after that, he was accused of some not great things that, years later, we eventually found out were absolutely false.

I don't want to go too deep into that, but his career was ruined as a result of this person who just basically targeted him and made up all this stuff, and, yeah, his career was forever changed. Genuinely, a great guy, the moments I had with him, and Kiki's been pretty cool to chat with as well, it's just, it's just odd that these professional athletes, and it's not just these people, I met Pat O'Connor from the Detroit Lions when I was there, opening a pack of Pokemon on Ford Field!

I was invited for a second year in a row this year to open up a pack of Pokemon on Ford Field. And during pregame, Pat O'Connor, defensive lineman, or defensive end, he came over and said, Pat, I'm a big fan! I gotta show you my collection sometime. I was like, what? What is happening here? It's just been so much fun, because one thing that I've done, It has been optimizing for fun.

I want to optimize for fun. For such a long time, I was optimizing for views, I was optimizing for revenue, and scale. Right? Scale. Bigger. Let's grow the team. Let's get bigger and make more money. Cool. But what am I sacrificing as a result of that? What am I saying no to by optimizing for scale? Rather, how might I, and this comes from Michael Hyatt, who said this at a recent retreat, how might I optimize for peace?

At 43, that word means so much. Peace. What is peace? How might one achieve that? A lot of times, I sit In the car, and I think I've shared this as a quote unquote productivity strategy, and that is to actually not worry about being productive, when I'm in the car, I drive in silence. And it's weird, because I can hear parts of the car that I've never heard before, and I'm like, is that okay?

You know, I hear the engine revving, the wheels turning, I'm not listening to an audiobook. I'm not listening to a podcast. I'm internalizing everything that's just in my head already. I'm not allowing new things to come and change to that direction. I'm allowing myself time to digest the content that I have consumed.

It's like a shower thought, but in the car, and I have clothes on. But it's so incredible, the things that happen when I'm driving in silence. I am peace. I'm in meditative mode. I sometimes in an incredible creative mode, where connections are firing and things are making sense like never before. Because I finally had time to allow myself to think about those things.

But a lot of times it's just, I'm just sitting there with myself and I can just smile. And that is a moment of peace. I'm at peace when I have a fishing line in the water and I don't have anything else in the world to care about or think about than just me out in nature next to water with the potential for something crazy to happen.

A big fish to strike that bait and to pull my pole down. What kind of fish? I don't know. How big is it? I don't know, but I love that feeling. One thing I've wanted to do a little bit more of, and I hope to do more of as I get a little older, is golf more. I used to golf all the time in college. My roommate Dylan and I would hit the back nine in the Berkeley Hills.

There was a golf course there that we just kind of knew so well. I mean, we were terrible on every other golf course, but I mean, we could hit, if we were doing the back nine, we could birdie or par every single hole pretty much every day and continue to golf even after college. But after, you know, Getting married and after having kids, that was one thing that I purposefully put to the side, because that was a lot of time away from the family, a lot of, you know, selfish time, me time, that I was willing to say no to, so that I could say yes to something else, but as I've gotten older, and as I've gotten more time back, golf is something that I would love to bring back into my life.

I played a tournament last year, a fundraiser for my son's band. And that was something that like was really, really fun to get back on the greens and hit some balls and have them go every which way and ask myself, what could I do better next time? It was just so much fun, and I've been going to the range every once in a while.

I was very, very lucky that when I was in Portland for FinCon, I was invited by Philip Taylor, the creator of FinCon, as well as Sean Ogle from Breaking 80, and I got to see a few other people there too. Corbett Barr was there. Remember Corbit Barr? He was one of the first guests on the podcast in 2010, and I got to see him again.

He is retired and that was really cool. We got to play golf together. He was on our team and it just was such a great time to be with a bunch of friends playing golf and talking about life and in a very similar way, talking about optimizing for peace and what we're going to do as our kids got older and what was going to keep us excited and where did we want to go and how were our families?

Like all that stuff was so fun. And so I want to do more of that. I want more time with friends to just chat, not necessarily to plan a new business venture, although that will always happen. I feel like I'm an entrepreneur at heart and there will always be new opportunities that I feel like I can lend myself to, to serve in some way, shape, or form.

I'd love to do more of that in the world of advisership, which I've been doing. I've recently signed on as an advisor to a few other companies, including Kick. Kick, which is the AI bookkeeping tool, which has been on an absolute tear lately. I'm so proud of that team and everybody over there. It's just been really fun to see that tool take off.

It's been great to see Circle take off and continue to do well and their numbers, their team, just their motives. It is just so fun to be a part of it in a way where I'm not actually working on the day to day, but I can still influence the direction of the company and offer my advice and expertise. I've also been getting a lot of inquiries from people in other spaces like the collectible space and crypto space, and I say no to all the crypto related things, but it's just really neat that people feel like I have the business opportunities for them or the business experience, which creates an opportunity that I can say yes or no to.

So I feel like when it comes to the future though, one thing that I have been thinking a lot about is my finances. And recently, I mean, in the past couple years, I had seen this drive toward AI related things, and, you know, I'm not going to talk about AI and how I feel about it. I love it and hate it at the same time.

AI art and AI videos just are why? Why does that exist? Whereas AI tools and large language models which helped me do things faster, be more productive with my work, help me get more creative, help me become more creative, those things I adore and use every day. Tools like Poppy, just, I have to use every day for the work that I do, and it's awesome.

It's just great. If you haven't used Poppy yet, definitely check it out. SmartPassiveIncome.com/Poppy. Anyway, everything is AI-ified right now, right? And I just knew that there were going to be tools required, resources required, knowledge required in order to continue this AI-ification that was happening.

So I invested in some companies. I'm not going to share the exact companies. I mean, there's one that I think most people who are into AI are investing into, and that's NVIDIA. I invested quite a bit of money into NVIDIA early on, and it's done very, very well. Same thing with other AI related companies, and I'm talking, you know, 600 returns on some of those investments.

That's been something that I've been really enjoying. Not day to day trading or day trading and, you know, putting in and pulling out every single day, but more longer term opportunities. I was very, very early on in Tesla. I don't have any shares in Tesla anymore. I sold, but it's on a tear as well now. But I do have some other more tech related investments that have been doing extremely, extremely well.

And so I'm very grateful for that because I'm putting my money to work. And I think that's important. I've got a lot of advice. I have a really good advisor who has been putting money into places that I didn't know anything about until they introduced them to me and I did my research and I really said, let's do it.

And those have paid off. Of course there's gonna be corrections and things like that. But again, at 43 I have I have 22 years left to invest in at least the retirement side of things, to ride any waves and to just continue to just dollar cost average most of those things and continue to add and hopefully max out contributions every year and I've been trying to play it smart.

I've been seeing the results of just slow growth, then leading into medium growth, then going into rapid growth. You know, I started investing in mutual funds back when I was 21, right when I got my first architecture job. I knew that investments were going to be important. It's really cool because the kids are much younger than I was when I started investing, and they're investing.

They have now had two and a half years Into a Roth IRA that they each have from the work that they do in my company. There's some tax saving things that we're kind of doing, and it's, you know, you, we don't have to go into that right now, but there are legal ways to have your kids be employees of your company in order to sail on taxes because they don't have to report below a certain amount.

And what we're doing is we're using that money that they're getting to, A, fund their Roth IRAs, B, also help them learn how to spend their own money, and we've seen and noticed that they are a little bit more careful about what they want to spend their money on, and they see the consequences of spending money on small things that don't really matter when, down the road, they have a thing that they want to buy that they don't have enough money for?

Well, they shouldn't have spent all that money to begin with, and it's their money. So that's been really neat to see, and even Keone's been a little more interested in investing as well, because he's seen me do it and see it perform very well. So he's starting to dabble into that too, which is really, really cool.

So just kind of getting them familiar with stuff that it took me 20 plus years, 30 plus years to understand and even just like get involved with. I want to get them to experience those things sooner than later. You know, the grades are important in school, extracurriculars are important, we want their options open, but we never say when you go to college, we say if you go to college, because we want it to be something that they choose if that makes sense for the life that they want to live.

Maybe they are going to travel after high school, who knows? But we want to make sure that they are set up for success. We want to implore into them entrepreneurship qualities, entrepreneur like qualities, but we don't want to tell them that they have to go to college, because that's what we were told.

And although I don't regret any of that time, I do enjoy the time I spent at Cal learning architecture, and of course architecture led to getting laid off, which led to the business of teaching people how to pass an architecture exam, so, you know, I wouldn't take anything back, but today, it's not always the right answer across the board, and we just want to give our kids the options to choose what they want to do and hopefully have them have good enough grades and extracurriculars.

You know, what's really interesting is we're hearing stories now about kids who get perfect SAT scores and have perfect grade point averages, I think there was somebody who recently had, like, an 11 point grade point average, which I didn't even know was possible. And they weren't able to get into any Ivy League schools, because a lot of these schools now are looking for well rounded children, or young adults.

People who have experiences, but it's obvious that they're doing it because they have a passion for it, or they have some interest in it, not because their parents told them to do it, or they think that that's what's gonna look good on a resume. It's just a very different time. You know, there are certain things that I wish they weren't growing up with, like phones and access to the internet.

Or at least have limited access to the internet. There's so much stuff out there that is just brain rot, right? But at the same time, there's also opportunities as well.

The one thing I want to share, the final thing I'll share is, you know, I'm reminded of a good friend of mine who recently passed, Dan Miller.

He was a coach and a mentor to so many people in the entrepreneurial space. And I think I've shared this once before, but I want to share it again, because it really made an impact on me. And as I turn 43 and add another notch to the years of my life, when I last heard from Dan, he sent a video, and he sent a private video out to a few people, I was one of them, and in this video, he was on his farm, and he was smiling, he was smiling like he always does, and he said, you know, I have some bad news, he had developed a cancer that was rapidly spreading, and he only had a couple more weeks left to live, and he was saying this with a smile, and he said, you know what?

I have lived the life I want to live. Everything that I wish I could have done, I've been able to do. He was able to spend a lot of time with his kids, he was able to help so many people. And he said that, when I go, I'm gonna die happy knowing that I've done everything I wanted to do, and I've left the world in the way that I wanted to leave it.

And I was, I just broke down. I was like, bro, what a way to freaking go. To get to the point where you can die happy. Holy crap. And it really made me think about, what am I doing with my life? How am I optimizing for peace? How am I getting to that point where I could one day say that? You know, of course you want it to live still, as we all do.

We want to be there to see our kids grow up, and our kids kids grow up, and our kids kids kids grow up, etc. Man, what a way to go, and it was so inspiring, and it was the exact message I needed to hear, and even though he is no longer with us, he's still serving, and it's incredible. So shoutout to you, Mr. Miller. Dan, you are a real one, for sure. I'm pouring a little champagne on the ground for you right now. Just thank you. One of the homies. Seriously, though. I mean, it was so inspiring. And so, I think about that. I'm like, if I were to go today, would I be like, yeah, I lived a good life? I think so. But I also know I have so much more to give.

I have so many more fun adventures to have with not just my family and some of you, but more people who I don't even know yet. I have many more things to say and to share. I think there's a lot more value I could share out there in this world. And I have a lot more things to learn. I want to learn how to do so much more.

But I'm going to do it in a Lean Learning fashion, right? Because I wrote the book on that. Speaking of book, I'm very excited for the future because we are looking to the past. To find things that can help you in the future. And one of those things is that book, Superfans, that was written in 2019. I keep going back to this book.

It's been almost the theme of the last few episodes here, but it's been the theme because I feel like this is exactly what not just we as business owners, both new and old, need. It's what the world needs. A way to think about developing communities and developing a following that is one that is for genuine human reasons.

And I feel like we as creators should learn about superfans and creating for superfans. Again, pushing that message from Kevin Kelly back in 2005 when he wrote 1000 True Fans. And I feel like we have this ability here at SPI to push that message out there to the right people, to help you find your fans, to help you find those people who are going to be lifelong customers of yours, and to help you utilize that and those superpowers that you have to design a life that you want to live so that you could die happy, you know what I'm saying?

So anyway, thank you for hearing me out. Kinda all over the place in this episode, but it was just like I'm just gonna turn the mic on, and I'm gonna hit record and go, because I'm turning 43. 43. My son is gonna turn 16. My wife and I are gonna be 17 years together. My daughter's 13. She's like interested in boys now.

I'm like, oh my gosh what is happening? What is happening? Great things are happening. Except maybe the boy thing. But it depends on the boy, I guess. Anyway, I'll stop talking. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, and I'll see you in the next episode. Hit subscribe if you haven't already.

SPI 902: How to Turn Your Following Into Revenue (At All Levels)

Pat Flynn: In episode 900, we talked about superfans the path to superfans. A person isn't a fan of you the moment they find you, they are a fan because of the moments that you create for them over time. In the last episode, 901, we talked about short form video. A great way to start to build a following, to start with that casual audience, activate them into that next level, then turn them into a community member, and ultimately a superfan.

All these episodes from this point forward are in general going to relate to each other and the Superfans system and the idea of having people who just find you turn into a superfan, which again does not happen overnight. Now, one misconception about the Superfans system is the fact that many people believe that you can only monetize once you have a superfan.

Now, of course, when you have a superfan, again defined as somebody who will go out of their way to get access to the thing that you are offering whatever it might be, to travel from afar to go and see you in person at an event or some gig that you put together. Right? The superfan who will market your product without you even asking the superfan who will defend you from trolls and haters out there on the internet before you even hear about them.

That is a superfan and you don't need very many of them to do some incredible things in your business and to grow your business because they'll bring new people in kind of mid tier, if you will, not from scratch, but with that recommendation and trust already behind it, which is why it's so powerful to think about superfans.

And if you haven't done so already, go back and listen to episode 900. That will be the basis and foundation for a lot of what we're gonna talk about from this point forward. Now, a lot of people, like I said, think that you can only monetize once you have superfans, because that's when you get those people to buy the things without you having to work too hard to sell because they, they've, they're already sold.

They're already sold on the model, the system, and you, because of the trust that you've built. But the truth is you could monetize throughout the entire journey. You can generate revenue before a person becomes a superfan, before they become a part of your community, even before they subscribe. How? Well, that's exactly what we're gonna talk about today.

So we're gonna go back up the pyramid. Remember we start with level one on the bottom. It's like a pyramid or a triangle, and you divide it into four sections. And the largest, the base of your triangle is actually level one, and that is your casual audience. And you can monetize there in a few different ways.

So let's go over that monetization strategy now, the revenue generation opportunities in level one. And we're gonna go up this pyramid together. So level one. You can of course, generate revenue through platform ad revenue. That is, if you are on YouTube, you're generating revenue through AdSense. The ads that are inserted before or within or after your video.

The same thing applies to TikTok and Instagram a little bit, and also Facebook. Facebook has been coming up, especially in the short form content world, although you can even generate revenue through the stories that you share on Facebook, they're in fact throwing a lot of money in there. So if you aren't on Facebook, on a Facebook page.

I said a Facebook page, not a group, but a page can be monetized for the, Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed? Series that I did, my short form series that I still continue daily. We are at episode 483 at this point of a daily video series, and again, it just takes me 10 to 12 minutes to edit per day.

I batch process that to get ahead. More on shortform later. We're gonna be talking a lot about short form and we wanna get you involved in some challenges to help you go daily and do it. With the time that you have. So anyway, Facebook has been paying a lot, and I started my Facebook page for should I open it or should I keep it sealed not too long ago.

And it's generating four to $5,000 a month just by repurposing stuff that I've already done, repurposing those same videos that live on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, just posting them there. I'm not even really engaging and man, it's crazy. So Facebook, this is platform ad revenue. In many cases, you'll have to sort of unlock the monetization opportunities there.

I know on YouTube for example, if you have 500 subscribers and a certain number of hours, think 4,000 hours of watch time, then you are able to unlock platform ad revenue and the revenue changes, depending on the type short-form video, is gonna get a lot less. RPMs or revenue per thousand is how they measure it.

RPMs. Long form video will get a much higher RPM, however, short form video can happen much faster and you can go much wider with it much more quickly. So I am seeing anywhere between 15 to 20 K per month on short form revenue, whereas on long form for certain channels, I'm seeing anywhere between 60 and a 100 K per month.

Which is amazing, but the work to put those videos together, and of course there's a lot more depth to it with the titles, thumbnails, the storytelling, all that kind of stuff. But both of those things combined do very, very well, and that's just platform ad revenue. Those are people who not even are necessarily subscribed to those channels.

Of course, the more subscribers you have, the more people will see your recurring videos or your daily video series or however many videos you come out with, and it just continues to stack and stack. And there is a quantity game on these levels, right? This platform based strategy where just the more the merrier, even the CEO of Instagram I saw on Brock Johnson's podcast recently said, or, or at least Brock reported, that the CEO of Instagram said there's really no penalty for publishing more.

The videos will find the audiences that they were meant for if they were meant for an audience. So again, work on that hook, all those good things. Platform ad revenue can be generated at level one. My second revenue model here and is one of my favorites is affiliate marketing. So if you talk about a product, if you are recommending something, you can generate an affiliate commission.

And this is where, especially on places like YouTube and long form and short form videos on YouTube you could potentially showcase a product or a software or something that you are an affiliate for. You get revenue from the ad platform or the platform's ad revenue. In addition to any customers who come through your affiliate link, you can generate a commission as well.

So you're almost like double dipping there. And we have courses on affiliate marketing. We've had several podcast episodes in the past about affiliate marketing. We'll insert some stuff in the show notes page, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session902 for links to resources related to all of these things that I'm talking about today.

And again, we're talking about generating revenue across the entire sort of pyramid of fandom. Right. Now, there's a third way to generate revenue at the casual level, and what's cool is in some instances you could triple dip, triple dip. You could generate revenue from platform ad revenue. You could generate revenue from affiliate commissions.

In the same video potentially generate sponsorship or brand deal revenue, and that is where a company will pay you a certain amount of money to get in front of that audience. You'll have to work out that deal privately or work through a third party company, a middleman to help you with those deals. And yeah, you can get paid a certain dollar amount based on the performance.

A lot of times I wouldn't recommend having it be based on the performance, but rather an average of your previous six months worth of videos. And of course it's a lot harder to get brand deals and sponsorships when you're just starting out, which is why this is last. But it is something that can be added on even after you build your subscribership and following and have superfans, you can then add on brand deals and sponsorships and charge quite a bit. To give you some perspective on Deep Pocket Monster, my long form YouTube channel, we have charged upwards of, and it's not in every video we say no to more than we say yes to, but we wanna work with companies that we do believe with or do believe in and wanna work with.

We've charged up to $35,000 for a 60 second integration into a video. Yeah. So it can, it can grow quite big. And that's all generating revenue at level one. Again, the casual level. But how might you be able to generate revenue at level two when a person not only finds you, but then subscribes and follows?

And again, it doesn't matter how they do that, it could be through your email list, which is preferred 'cause then you have direct access to them. It could be through literally hitting follow or subscribe on any of those platforms. And now your videos will be shown up when they. Check out who are the who it is they're following.

Or better yet, when you come out with a new video, it pops into their feed because they've engaged with your channel one way or another. When you're at this level, the active subscriber base everything from level one of course applies the platform ad revenue, the affiliate commissions, the brand deals and sponsorships, those become even better.

But here at level two, this is based on these revenue opportunities are based on finding solutions to their problems. Or inconveniences, something worth their time and or money to solve a problem. So everything from level one, but also your own products, this is where people who subscribe, they now trust you.

They're warm leads as as we call them, and if you have a solution to a problem that they have, and this of course, lends itself to you really knowing who these people are, who are following you now, what are their problems, pains, issues, dreams, hopes, fears, et cetera. And creating solutions for that. It could be a software, it could be a course, it could be coaching, it could be consulting, it could be a service of some kind.

You actually doing whatever it is that they need done for them, right? Accounting, bookkeeping I'm just kind of thinking off the top of my head. All kinds of different services could be put into this place in the pyramid, and this is again, why it's important to build your email list, to build that subscriber base.

That email list also acts as insurance because what if. Your entire business is based on these platforms and the ad revenue from them and the brand deals and sponsorships, and then all of a sudden you wake up one morning and poof, it's all gone. The algorithm changed, the company goes under or gets bought out, and everything changes or you wake up and your account got hacked or got deleted for some reason, which has happened to me before, and it is such a pain to go and get those things back. However, if you have an email list, it's not quite as painful because if for some reason you can't get those things back or those platforms go away, you can always set up shop somewhere else.

And even if you don't, you have direct line of contact with your subscribers to do anything, right? To start your own services or to coach, or to consult or get support, et cetera. At this level, you are not quite yet at the level where you see a lot of people generate revenue, which is the Patreon model, right?

The community and membership model that happens in level three, which is the next level above. This is where the revenue generation is not always just based on the problems that those people have and then the solutions that you offer. But it's also based on now connection to you, right? This is where higher ticket offers or you know, more white glove type services can be offered and also connection to one another.

So this is the access level. So of course now at this third level, some of your active audience members will wanna be a part of the community. They know that there's people like them in the community and they wanna connect one way or another. So everything from level one and two applies here. But you could also generate revenue through an online community, whether that's a paid community or a community where you bring people together that better promotes the things in level two and level one.

But we, of course, here at SPI have community and it is a recurring revenue for us. That's, it's been an amazing thing to have recurring revenue in the business from people wanting to get access to each other, and this is where you hear that common phrase, which is people come for the content, but they stay for the community.

Imagine bringing your people together and facilitating interactions and creating friendships and partnerships and awareness of each other inside of your brand in some way, shape, or form. Maybe it's on Circle, maybe it's in another place. Once people find their people, they don't wanna leave. And this is why churn rates are important to think about how you can continue to keep those people connected with another, with one another to help continue to give them access to things that they might need.

Higher level offerings, higher level coaching, higher level consulting, higher level courses, et cetera. This is where events can come into play. I host an event called Card Party, and it's happening three times in 2026 from May to July. I don't know why I said it like that in September, and this is where thousands of people in the Pokemon community come together, but it doesn't have to be thousands of people.

It could be a small group. Back in the early days of SPI in 2012 to 2014. My buddy Chris Ducker and I hosted an event called One Day Business Breakthrough, and it was for 25 people, but we charged, I think we charged like $700 or $699 for a 24 hour experience. 25 people came and we masterminded. We broke down their businesses and built them back up together, had a nice dinner and that was it.

And we were able to generate some really good profit from those small events. Now, those events, of course, were in person and they take a little bit more time to put together and coordination. But it's some of the most fulfilling stuff that we've done because it's actual people, human beings coming together.

And today, in this age of AI and things, not knowing what's real and what's not the human to human connection is gonna be that much more important. Now, the final revenue model here inside of level three, which is the connect model or the connect level, right? Connected community is of course the Patreon model.

People are just starting to become fans enough to want to just support you with some dollar amount, like a pledge. They want you to continue to do what you're doing. This could be a YouTube membership. This could be a membership to a Patreon where people, depending on how much they pledge, get access to different things.

It might just be $5 a month and that's it. But imagine a thousand people paying you $5 a month. That's $5,000. Per month from just showing up and continuing to do what you do and people wanting to show up and support again, that only happens a after you've taken them through this journey up this pyramid.

It doesn't happen right away. People don't find you and go, yeah, I'm gonna start paying you monthly for something. They wanna pay you back for what you've given them over time. To that phrase again, fans aren't created the moment people find you, they're created by the moments that you create for them over time.

So this is a good model. The Patreon model, if you wanna call it that, because it is something that doesn't necessarily require you to create anything new, but it can only happen at this level. You don't have to create anything new. You just are getting support to continue doing what you're doing. So that's the connect level and revenue generation opportunities there.

And of course, like I said, level one, level two applies here as well. Affiliate marketing. Imagine the trust that you've built with people in your community and you say, Hey, everybody. I worked out a deal with this company who I'm an affiliate for. We got a special deal just for those of you in this community.

Here it is. It makes the community members feel special. You're getting likely a higher conversion rate. The connection you have with the company is even strengthened because those conversions are higher and they want to continue to work with you and you're getting all these exclusive deals. Magic really starts to happen, and this is where your brand really starts to differentiate itself.

Yes, there are other people talking about the same things, but the connection to the people makes it so unique because your group of people, your fans, your community at this point are gonna be different than other people's communities because of you and because of how you approached it, because your vibe attracts your tribe.

Alright, now let's talk about the tippy top of the pyramid of fandom, the superfans level. Now, of course, everything below applies. Everything we just talked about just becomes heightened at that level. There's less people here at the superfan level, but there are some special things that you can do here to monetize and to do things that can even generate more revenue than all of the stuff below combined.

Not because you're taking advantage of the superfans, but because they want to take advantage of what you have to offer, that only they would be interested in. So let's talk about what these things are at the superfan level. Obviously, everything that we've already talked about applies here. Superfans are gonna be more likely to be the ones to join your community.

In fact, many of them will come from your community as well. They will be the ones to pay for the higher ticket offerings and to pay for access to go to the events and not just go to the events. And here's the first thing. They would pay for VIP access. At these events, I mean, even back in 2019 when we had FlynnCon back in San Diego, we had 500 entrepreneurs come to spend two and a half days with me and my family and my team to learn all things they needed to know about entrepreneurship.

A certain percentage of those people, I don't know off the top of my head, but there were dozens of VIP tickets sold that were significantly more expensive, and they were the superfans, the people who wanted. To take the pictures, to get the autographs in the book and all those kinds of things to get front row access at the workshops and on stage or at the stage events.

Those were the superfans, right? The higher end experiences at your events or in your communities or within your offerings are definitely something the superfans will pay for. And again, just a small percentage, but this is the, this is the you know, if you, if you, if you start at the lower levels, right, you have, let's just say, a hundred thousand people who come across your stuff. Then of that 10,000 people will join your email list. So 10% and of that 1000 people, you know, join your community or get access to the other things. One person who's a superfan might pay 25K for the all inclusive one day, fly to San Diego, hang out with me in the city. And guess what? This is something we once offered and it worked. We had a $15,000 experience. We had a $25,000 experience, and these were things that filled out from, again, superfans from the brand. And that one experience was the same as, or earned the same as several hundred sales of some of our lower ticket items. So this is how you get the, what they call the ascension ladder of offerings, right? This is the top, top, top stuff, the super high ticket stuff, whatever that might look like. And you can personally design that for certain people. These are the people who would likely pay, again, a little bit more to pay not only the annual fee for your monthly or quarterly offer, but also pay additional for the additional access the calls with you. The one-on-ones the you know, fly you over to their business to consult with their employees kind of situation, right? Again, at a much, much, much higher offer.

Something that they would be willing to do. Now again, not everybody who's a superfan a can afford that, but through that, that's where you get the people who would even be open to that. So again, these people who are superfans are so important. Not only are they willing to spend more money with you, but they're willing to give you more feedback.

And this is sort of the amazing bonus byproduct of building for Superfan are these people who are at the top of this pyramid with you, not only will you have a lifetime value that's much higher, but there's a lifetime value to what they could offer back to you in terms of feedback and information and being a group that helps you launch your community.

When we teach community building in our community and business blueprint inside of our community a lot of community things going on here, we teach a model where you take your superfans and they become the first members of your community. If you are going to indeed be promoting and selling into a community, you bring your superfans in because it's gonna be populated right from the start, people are gonna already start to have conversations. They're already gonna feel like they're seeing and meeting with each other, and this is where you then can take those superfans to help you then promote the community to everybody else who might be just a little bit connected to you or even just a brand new subscriber.

They're gonna wanna join the other people who are there and active and communicating and engaging. Right. So again, if you haven't already done so, go back to episode 900. That's gonna be a staple episode moving forward, where you will go through a journey of what it's like to build an audience for the first time, perhaps with short form video, and have them connect with you through an email list and through subscribing and following to then building that relationship with you that could lead to not just them wanting to chat with you and communicate with you, but to communicate and find other people like them, and this is where the magic happens in the brand, that connected community where people start to have an identity of, oh, I'm a fan of so and so. I'm a fan of you, or name of brand, and this is why just last week at the time of this recording last week, I launched a merch line for Should I open it or should I keep it sealed?

And the cool thing about this merch line is if you don't know, our videos are me opening a Pokemon pack and there could be a good card or maybe not a good card. And this is, again, 483 day straight of this. We launched a merch line, which has a college style shirt that says, S-I-O-A-O-S-I-K-I-S, which is the acronym for should I open it or should I keep it sealed?

That's part of the brand language that I use inside of this. Should I open it or should I keep it sealed? Videos? You know, welcome to episode 480 of S-I-O-S-A-K-I-S. And people, when they first hear it, they're like, that's hard to say, but then they get it, and then it becomes part of the brand language, the culture within the brand that we're creating in the end.

This is just short form video. Speaking to the last episode where I was wrong about the fact that you can't create loyalty or fans from short form. You can't. But instead of one 60 minute video, you have 60 one minute minute videos across two months, right? And you show up daily, you become almost a ritual. Anyway, I simply launched this shirt to our YouTube subscribers.

First, our, our, our members, in fact just kind of the people who are at that connected level in the YouTube community. Now, the cool thing about this shirt is you buy the size you want, but you don't know which shirt you're gonna get. You might get the base shirt, which is the white shirt with the black lettering.

You might get the hit shirt, which is a one in three odds, which is the black shirt with the yellow lettering or the gold lettering. And there's a chase shirt, which is one of 50 odds. And these words, hit and chase are part of the culture of, you know, opening cards. So this is this, these are words that people are familiar with who are in this space.

So I launched it by simply sharing one post to the members of the channel, and the next day there were already 700 shirts sold already. As of today, four days later, after then, now launching it publicly on the back end of a video of one of the daily episodes, we have already 1700 shirts, actually 1800 as of I'm looking at the numbers right now over $40,000 in sales.

Four days, and you hear these stories of creators and influencers who have millions of subscribers. There was even one famous, one of a person with 3 million subscribers on Instagram who sold 33 shirts and that's it. And they were crying because their audience wasn't buying their stuff. It's because they weren't creating a real connection.

Sure. They had subscribers, and I'm not saying they bought those subscribers. They probably earned them, but they just kept them there as a casual audience member. When you level up your audience from casual to active, active to connected community into superfans, it doesn't really matter what you launch.

What matters is you've built that relationship and you can now generate revenue in a way that actually provides value to those purchasing. Everybody who now is opening those should I open it or should I keep it sealed? Shirts gets to play the game too. Many of them have already shared that video of them opening it on YouTube and on Instagram and on TikTok, some of them getting the bay shirts, some of them getting the Chase shirts.

And it's been really neat to now see this viral effect from the video series that they've watched initially and through the daily relationship that I've been building with them, or the relationship that I'm, that I have been building with them on a daily basis. So those shirts are almost sold out. If you wanna check out that merch drop, you can go to SIOIOSIKIS.com

I know that's a mouthful, but break it up into SIOIOSIKIS.com or you can go to DeepPocketMonster.com and and see it from there. Anyway, Superf fans, baby, that's what it's all about. And like I said, you can monetize at all these different levels. You don't have to wait until you have superfans to monetize, but when you get Superf fans, my gosh, you can do so much with it and you can bring so much joy to so many people and a lot of those superfans will bring more people into your brand for you.

Go superfans. Go get superfans. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hit subscribe. If you haven't already come, come join us, come connect with us and it is gonna be my job to help you find your stride here. And I hope that one day, if not already, you will become a superfan of what we do here and you will have superfans of your own.

Thanks so much. Appreciate you.

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.

SPI 900: Why Superfans Are Still the Fastest Path to Success

Pat Flynn: Welcome to episode 900 of the SPI podcast. This is insane that we have come this far, 900 episodes, and I think back to July of 2010. I mean, it's almost 2026 now. I've been at this for over 15 years. We are now on the home stretch to 1000 episodes, and thank you so much for listening to any minutes of this podcast.

I appreciate it so much. So I wanted to do something very special today. I wanted to bring back out of all the things I've ever spoken about, the number one thing that I've been asked to speak about, the number one thing that has helped me create a bestselling book, and the number one concept, principle, thought, idea, and presentation that I wanna offer you, that is the most important thing any brand, business personality, online authority, personal brand can think about today. And that is the idea of creating superfans. And I do wanna give credit to where credit is due. Kevin Kelly, who wrote an article back in, I think 2005, titled 1000 True Fans, has been absolutely game changing, life changing for myself, my business, my other channels, and every other part of the internet, really, because the idea of creating experiences and helping people become superfans of your stuff is the secret to winning.

Especially today because what makes a person a superfan? Connection. Relatability. It makes them feel something. A product, a brand, a person. It doesn't matter what it is. You know what a superfan is, right? A superfan as defined by Kevin Kelly is that musician who their superfans wait eight hours after the show backstage just to get an autograph or a glimpse of that person.

It's a person who, with a product, will stand in line for hours or in fact, camp overnight just to get the thing, or if you are an online business, it's the person who just, the moment they get that email, they don't even read the sales page. They don't even care what it is. They are such a superfan that they'll click that buy now button and they cannot wait to use your product to support it and to share it.

A superfan is somebody who will step up when somebody's being mean to you. When a troll shows up in your comments or in your community, they're gonna be there to defend you.

Before you even know they exist, building a business for superfans is the secret to success because today everything is feeling less real.

Everything is artificial. I mean, literally artificial intelligence, Sora videos that you can't even tell what the difference is between a real video and a not so real video, which the implications of that, especially legally and just safety wise is very, very scary. So people need to feel like they have something they can connect with.

This is just human nature. And so when I first came up with the concept of really bringing the 1000 True Fans concept, the principle that Kevin Kelly wrote and put out there into the world and bringing it to life with a how to behind it, because that was something that was lacking with that article. I loved that article.

It inspired me. It basically said if you had a thousand true fans, people who, for example, just paid you a hundred bucks a year. That's less than 10 bucks a month for whatever it is that you do. Your craft, your art, your music, your creative, whatever it might be, that's a six figure business right there.

And when that math was presented to me in that article, it was just, it was just like, wow, why am I trying to get millions of subscribers, millions of followers, let me work on creating a fan a day for less than three years. And it really, again, brings into perspective what we should be creating communities, relationships, connection, belonging, attention, these things are important.

So in this episode 900, I just wanted to reiterate the Superfans concept for you. Many of you have gotten access to my book, whether it's the physical copy or the audio version, which goes off script a little bit like I always do. But Superfans, I mean, I've, I know I just published Lean Learning and it's some of my best work and I love it and I'm continuing to promote it, but I wanna bring back Superfan because superfans is super important. And when it comes to building a business today, if you're not creating that connection to your audience.

If you're not building those experiences, those memories, then you're doing it wrong. You know, superfans aren't created. The moment people find you, they're not created the moment they get something from you the first time. They're created by the moments that you create for them over time. And you don't have to be the Backstreet Boys or the Stray Kids, or Stranger Things or a Pokemon creator in order to have superfans.

I had superfans with this podcast all the way back in 2010, in 2011. I've had superfans of my speaking and who've followed me to see me speak on stage and continue to get value from me. I've had people become superfans of the SwitchPod. An invention that Caleb and I have put together doesn't matter what it is, as long as you understand the principles behind it, you can win.

So I'm going to reframe this for you. I'm gonna bring it back and rehash this presentation for you that I've given multiple times, and whether you've read Superfans or not, we're gonna talk about it today. And it starts with this idea of the pyramid of fandom. If you consider everybody who's ever come across your brand or whoever will come across your brand, I want you to visualize a pyramid divided into four different sections, and of course the bottom section is gonna be the largest section, and that's where people enter your brand or get introduced to you and they're introduced at the bottom, which is your casual audience.

This makes up most of your audience, and when you put things out there on social media, short form video when people are finding you for the first time on YouTube. If people discover your podcast, if they just somehow hear about you on Google or ChatGPT or a friend, they're coming in at this level, the casual audience level. And it's our job to convert people from an a casual audience member to an active audience member.

This is where somebody now becomes a subscriber of yours, a follower, a perhaps even customer. You might have thought that customer is at the top, but no customer is just a part of the journey, and in many cases, it's just the start of the relationship building process for a lot of people. But that start can turn into something amazing.

This is where you have people who now know you exist and what you do and, and the kinds of things that you create and come up with, and that's great. Casual audience members. They're just kind of getting what they need and they might leave, but again, we need to hold them and bring them into an active audience where now they are looking forward to some of the things that you have.

They understand what value you have to provide. They may share some stuff, they may not, but they know you exist and want potentially more of it. Where the magic really happens is when you understand that you need to now convert those active audience members that are sort of flying solo in your space, to now feeling like they're a part of a connected community.

We wanna convert them to a community member. And a community member doesn't mean somebody is just now having a one-way conversation with you and you're having a one-way conversation with them. It's a conversation amongst each other. This is where people start to feel like there are other people like them that exist, and that's very, very important. I've told the story many times when back in 2013, I was in St. Louis doing a presentation at the Financial Blogger conference, and I had rented out like a pizza joint and we were having pizza salad and some beers, and I was kind of going around meeting everybody.

All my fans were there. I invited them for free food and just to network and meet with each other. And at the end of the night, there was this one woman who I hadn't met yet. I hadn't even seen her all night. And I felt really bad because I had set this up to meet people. And when I met her on the way back to the hotel, I said, Hey, I'm sorry that we didn't get a chance to chat, but we can chat more at the hotel.

And she said, Pat, excuse me. I don't want you to be offended by this, but I didn't come here to see you. And at first I was a little taken aback. I was like, okay, why did you come? And she said, I came because never do I get a chance to find other people like me. And she went on. I listen to your podcast every day. I see you on YouTube and I appreciate it, but I don't have access to people like me where I'm from. So I wanted to take advantage of that. And I met so many amazing people here, and I've already met some people who were gonna partner together on some campaigns in the future, and I was like, oh my gosh, I was going about this all wrong.

This was really my first grasp in 2013 at the idea that we as creators, we need to be the facilitator of our communities. We need to be the ones that step up to set this up and to create a safe space for people to connect with one another. It's not about us. We are not the hero of the story. Yes, we might be the people who have the resources and the ability.

We are the connective tissue between this community. But people come for the content and they stay for the community. They stay for each other. They wanna know that they are not alone. And you know that when you get involved in anything, you wanna know that there are other people like you there. If you walk into a party solo, you kind of feel timid. You're worried about whether or not you'll belong there, but as soon as you see a friend or somebody who is wearing the same costume as you, or, I'm recording this on Halloween Day, by the way, which is why I'm thinking about Halloween, but any sort of connective tissue becomes an immediate, the guardrails go down right now.

I feel like I can be a part of this, and that's what we wanna do with our people online. This is why we've been talking about community for so long. This is why we tout about it, why we demonstrate it with our own SPI Community. When you build superfans, the other beauty of this is that no matter what happens, no matter what happens with technology, if your brand were to go away, if you were to get hacked like I did also in 2013, you'll be fine.

Your superfans will come with you. Now, it doesn't end with the community. Because there are people who are a part of a community, but they're not quite yet superfans. Some people will naturally become superfans. They just create a habit of absorbing your brand and hearing your voice and being a part of the community, having conversations.

It just becomes a part of their life, and in many cases, those people will just naturally become superfans who will wanna support you because in supporting you, they're supporting themselves. But there are some things we can do to convert some of those people to superfans, to the sort of mega fans who will go out of their way to help and support you who are incredible. Not just because yay, they'll pay more money for stuff. That's just the byproduct. That's actually not the primary reason why you need superfans. They will become a part of your marketing team without you even asking.

They will also be there to call you out to get you back on track when you're getting off track. And I found that to be probably the most valuable part of having superfans in my brand, which is when people are starting to notice that you're veering off course, it doesn't feel right to them. And they will tell you, they will let you know because they're being protective of that brand, that brand that you've spent so hard building.

And it's again, the connection to the superfans that can bring you back on course. And you don't need very many. You don't even need a thousand when you're starting out. You just might need a couple people in your community who feel like they belong, who will now protect you and your brand and where it's going.

And I think that's really, really important. So how do we convert people from one part of this pyramid to the next? Well, let's start from the bottom. Your casual audience. Remember, these are people who've just found you in some way, but they don't really know who you are or are connected to you. They just kind of maybe got a piece of content from you or heard about you.

There's a few things you can do. Number one, the better that you can speak the language of your target audience, the more likely they are to really resonate with what you have to share and then wanna follow. Because you can have the best information in the world. You can have all the right strategies to help a person, but if you're speaking at a different level or if you're not sharing the same language, then it's not even gonna feel like it won't connect.

Yeah. I used to follow this redheaded, I dunno why I'm saying it this way. This dude, he's got red hair. He's on social media. What a weird way to introduce this person. I don't know his name, but I've followed his videos because I got caught on his feed and it's this guy, he's kind of a ginger looking guy, red hair, and he goes on these websites where he connects with people on the other side of the world, people who are trying to like learn English and like he'll connect with a person in China.

And he'll have a conversation in English and you can tell that the person on the other end from China is practicing their English and then all of a sudden this guy who you wouldn't expect busts out in like fluent Chinese, Mandarin. And it just like blows the mind of the person who's from China. They cannot believe it.

And you can immediately see, you can immediately see the guardrails go down. They just connect. They're now flowing. They're in a conversation and yes, it's very impressive that this person who you'd think that they only speak English 'cause they have a thick sort of New York accent, boom. They go into hardcore Mandarin and you can just see the connection because they're sharing literally the same language.

Now, I don't mean sharing the same language for you in the sense of well speak English 'cause most people speak English. No. I mean, you might have a different language that might make more sense for you in terms of like language of the world, but what I'm talking about is language of how is a person dealing with the problems that they're dealing with, what are the kind of words they use?

How do they describe their problems? It was Jay Abraham who said, if you can define the problem better than their target customer they will automatically assume you have the solution because that connection happens immediately. So I'm talking specific words. There's a reason why my book Will It Fly was titled Will It Fly, How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money. Wasting time and wasting money were the number one struggles that new business owners had a reason why they never took action because they didn't wanna waste time or they didn't wanna waste money. So I just took that language, put it right on my book, and it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, because it really resonated with them.

So learning the language of your target audience is key. How do you learn the language of your target audience? Go to where they are and listen, ask questions, have conversations just like it doesn't have to be that hard. If this were easy, what would it look like? You know that question. If this were easy, what would it look like?

Well, you would just listen to conversations and hear the words they're saying. This is why when people ask me, Pat, what would you do if you were just starting out in a new niche? How would you best serve that audience and generate revenue faster? Well, it's not about creating a course first or writing a book or consultation, like I don't know what they might want.

I don't know how they're going through life and what they need and what their struggles are. So let me put myself into places where they are. So I would spend money to go to events where that target audience exists and just have conversations and keep track of them after a conversation, start to create a spreadsheet of the different stories I collect and start to become a collector of experiences so that I can provide solutions to perhaps negative experiences or give them more of those positive experiences that they talk about.

That's what I would do. So that's one way to really connect with a casual audience is you speak their language and that could be done on your website, on social media and the videos that you do and the stories that you tell on your podcast and the emails that they receive in these subject lines of those emails as well.

Because if people aren't clicking because of the subject lines, they aren't reading the emails. So you could see how important that language is.

Another great way to get a casual audience member to become an active audience member is to get them a small, quick win. When you think about video games, right?

If you remember Angry Birds, I don't know if anybody plays Angry Birds anymore, but very popular game. The first level, you have three angry birds and you kind of fling them with a slingshot into a little structure that has these green piggies on them. And the first level, there's like one bad piggy. That's it. On a structure where if you hit any part of it, you're gonna win. It's easy, and then what happens? You get points and stars, the little music plays, and then you move on to the next level, and all of a sudden you're on level 490 and you forget to pick up your kids from school. The power of a quick win.

Charles Duhig actually, who wrote a book called The Power of Habit, has a whole chapter on the power of the quick win. Literally something that within the first five to 10 minutes after discovering you, they can do something that they weren't able to do before. The example I always use personally is the one with Ramit Seti.

Ramit's been a guest on the podcast several times, and just to be frank with you, I was not a fan of his at first because he was a little off putting. He was a little aggressive back in the day. He would kinda make fun of a lot of people who were more in the sort of, how do you say, the extreme coupon saver world, which I wasn't one of those people, but I was just like, man, that's kinda harsh.

Anyway, that's a part of his brain. That's just who he is. And then one day I read an article of his, on his blog that was essentially a script. Where you could call your cable company or your phone bill company and you read the script out to them and you could save money on your bill. And I did that during lunch one day when I was still in architecture.

This was way back in 2007, I read this article. I followed his steps and within 10 minutes during lunch one day, I was able to save like 25% of my cable bill. And over the course of a year, and that's hundreds of dollars. That's something that I didn't have before that Ramit taught me how to do in just a few minutes, and it worked and it was after that, I dove deep and hard into all the rest of his articles, and I learned a lot from him.

I learned what it means to live a rich life, not rich in money, but rich in experiences and things that matter to me, and also being okay with spending money on things that matter. But then saving lavishly and not spending on things, on the things that don't. And I wouldn't have gotten into his work and purchased his books and even purchased a few courses of his if it wasn't for that small quick win.

So what's the equivalent of that in your world? Something that you could provide somebody that maybe they were just trying to get and they just weren't able to get before, or something new that they can discover through you. From there, you can take them on this journey together, but it starts with a quick win, especially today with so much noise out there, so much just overwhelm and just heaviness out there in the world.

If you can get them a small, quick win, I mean, they're gonna continue to come back. There is some science behind this as well, right? That reptilian part of our ancient brain that gets a reward and we just wanna keep going back to that same place where we get that reward over and over and over again.

It's a powerful thing and with great power comes great responsibility. So hopefully you use that for good.

Alright, let's move up this pyramid a bit. Let's imagine now a person is a subscriber, a follower. They follow you on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, wherever it might be, they are a subscriber of your email list.

Great. That's fantastic. And that's, that's a very important thing to do. But how do we then make them feel like they're a part of a community? How do we make them feel like they belong and that, that they're just not alone on this journey, but there are other people like them there. Again, this is where magic happens.

This is where people start to form groups and have an identity as a fan of your work, right? Not not just musicians and like Swifties and believers and direction, or in the world of K-Pop, right? With Stray Kid, there's the stays. That's what they call their army of audiences, right? The BTS Army Beyonce's beehive.

You can have a similar thing too, and you don't have to necessarily name your fans and sometimes they name themselves, but the principle of, and that idea of identity is really important here. So they need to know that other people like them exist. So a very easy way to help people feel like they're a part of something, even before you build an actual community, like with something like Circle or you connect these people together.

Just the mere fact that they know other people like them exist is step one. And this might mean using your platforms to share the stories of other people in your community. This is something that we love to do and it actually, it's a brilliant marketing strategy. If we're talking about the success stories of people in our community, in the SPI Community, it shows people on the outside the kinds of people that are succeeding in our community.

And guess what? It also shows them how they succeeded. AKA with the community. So it actually self promotes itself. It's almost like a flywheel, which is really cool. I invite people who have been very successful within our brand onto the podcast like Dr. B, and you might remember Dr. Shannon Irvine from last week.

She was a student of mine and now she's written this book and it's amazing. So by showcasing the success stories of those inside of your community, even just one at a time, even though you're not able to do that with everybody, especially as your brand grows. It is in a sense doing it for everybody because you are showcasing and spotlighting a person just like them.

So do that. Showcase your audience. Read StoryBrand by Donald Miller. That is a brilliant way, almost a play by play on how to make your customers, your students, your subscribers, the hero of the story. And when you share that hero's journey, and a hero, of course, doesn't just have great things happen to them all the time.

They go through challenges. They have dragons, metaphorical dragons that they need to slay, but they also have advisors, a guide, an Obiwan Kenobi, right? That has helped Luke Skywalker. You are the Obiwan Kenobi. And so when people see this hero's journey that you are again shaping, and it's a great way to tell content or showcase content in a story format.

People love story. The before, after the struggle, the relatability there. And then when they see the person that is just like them, get through something that they are going through, they're going to wanna get the same kind of help. From where? From you. So this is Brilliant. StoryBrand by Donald Miller, or Building a StoryBrand is the name of the book by Donald Miller.

Probably the best book that you could read right now for where we're at in the world on how to market because your customers, your students are the hero of the story. This is why we love showcasing and bringing people from the SPI Community here. This is why. And I'm not just talking about like, have them come on and tell a testimonial, right?

Have them come on and unpack the struggles that they went through and the transformation that they went through. And what about the work that you do with them was the most impactful for them. And when they say this in their own voice, in their own words, in the same language that their audience will respond to, it's just like magic.

It's just like magic. So, consider that right now as an exercise. Think about who in your audience has transformed in some way, shape, or form because of you. How might you capture that in some way? Maybe you have a podcast or you can tell their story in more of a video essay style or documentary style sort of video.

Another way to make people feel like they're a part of community is to actually, in fact, bring your community together in some way, and there's some easy ways to do this, right? Again, if this were easy, what would it look like? You can have them come in together in a. Small little community, like a group, a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group to find each other, to connect with one another.

Over time, you can upgrade it and get in into a more serious and more professional community. Like on Circle, like what we have at SPI. But you don't need to start there. Maybe it starts in a WhatsApp group or a text message string. These connections just immediately start creating bonds. And what's really cool, especially if you start creating things that have, for example, a recurring payment, monthly payment, quarterly payment, annual payment to stay in the community.

As soon as people find each other, they're in, this is what we know and why we connect people together as much as possible, and what allows us to have some of the lowest churn rates in our community, that are in the industry because we know and understand the importance of connecting people together.

And yeah, it takes a little bit of work. It's not just like automatic, but we have to notice patterns and the kinds of people that are in our space and we connect them together. But it, it is so worth it. It's so worth it. So think about how you might go about creating easy ways for your people to connect with one another.

One thing I love to do is go live. I remember going live during 2020 during the pandemic, and I had a show on YouTube called The Income Stream, and it was 365 days straight of going live every single morning. It provided some rhythm and a cadence for people who were going through some struggles during that time where nobody knew exactly what was gonna happen or how it was gonna go down.

But it provided some stability and those people who showed up every day at 9:00 AM Pacific for the income stream, during that year, March, 2020 to March, 2021, we did not miss a day, we bonded. We became a family. People got to know each other. Some of those people actually, when things opened back up after the pandemic, they flew out to meet each other.

They bonded so well. And of course many of them are now still a part of the brand. And when we showed up and created the SPI Community, they're a part of that as well. You could go further and even bring people together in person. You can facilitate situations like that. I do that in the Pokemon community.

Just last month we had, actually, it's October 31st, so no, earlier this month I hosted my fourth event called Card Party fourth in three years, and we had 8,000 people. Just about 8,000 people show up. To talk about Pokemon and Nerd out about Pokemon to buy, sell, and trade Pokemon to build new experiences and memories with relation to Pokemon in this thing that, again, yes, it's quote unquote my event, but it's not even about me.

I'm just the mc. I'm the host. It's about the people who are there, the fans meeting the other creators who are there with the vendors and the sponsors, all creating this sense of just community within the space. And so, no, I don't just talk the talk here with this kind of stuff. I walk the walk and I think anybody knows that, who has dove in deep into the kinds of things that we execute on over here, and I think that's really important for you to understand as well when it comes to your stuff.

There's so much information out there. You could say anything that you want. But what are you demonstrating? What are you actually doing to show up and to actually prove the things that you're saying? Anyway, I don't need to talk more about that. I wanna share some more ways that you can convert your active audience into a connected community.

One thing I love to do, and the beauty of having a actually online connected community is you can crowdsource from your community, you can have your community feel like they are a part of the process, they're integrated into the brand and actually help influence the brand in some way, shape, or form. Now, I'm not saying you have to just let your people run the company and have it go any which way, but even giving little moments of time for your audience and your community to feel like they have a say in something and to actually have a say in something is really key.

It could be similar to what we do. We have town halls in the SPI Community where we have people who are big fans come up and share suggestions, share even criticisms and things that we could do to improve the situation and the experience that people have, which I think is amazing. We call on our audience to ask what they wanna learn about next, and that helps influence what our next accelerators are about, or what our next courses can be about.

By the way, we are very soon to be launching a short form video course because, guess what? People have been asking for it. So it's already, it's already partway filmed because it's very, very much a hot topic right now and we wanted to create that for you. So yeah, get involved in the SPI Community, have access to all of our courses and and material, and that's gonna be the next one that comes out very, very soon.

You can have people just vote, Hey, I have a book coming out, which of these three covers do you like best? And just get them involved when you get people involved, they get invested. Lemme say that one more time, because this is a very important principle of a successful community. When you get people involved, they become invested. And that, that in a sense also means they will invest or could invest or be more likely to invest, not just with money, but with time into your brand, into marketing it, into supporting it, into defending it, and again, having it feel like it's a part of their lives, which it is at this point.

And from there, we're at the tippy top of this pyramid. Now we start at the bottom casual audience. That's part one. We have converted them into now the active audience, which is part two. Then the connected community, which is part three. And the smallest part of the pyramid. But the most powerful are the superfans.

And I've said this already, but your superfans will promote your brand without you even asking. But think about what that means. Somebody within the brand who's a follower, a fan, subscriber, community member, they're a superfan. They start talking about your brand with their audience, with their people, with their families, with their friends, their community, and think about where that person who heard about your community from this superfan comes into your brand. Now, they're not coming in as a casual audience member anymore. They are very likely to come in already higher up because it is a recommendation coming from someone who has already built trust with them. The trust factor fast forwards that success, and so this is the power of superfans.

They're coming in, not at the bottom anymore, anybody who comes in from your superfans, they're coming in more closer to the top already. They might even come in already a community member because your superfan has already done a lot of that legwork and trust building for you. This is what is so powerful about even a small group of superfans, and like I said earlier, some of your community members will just automatically become superfans, but there's a few things you can do and what are my favorite things to do?

And every time I share this, I share this on stage too. It blows people's minds because it's free and it's easy, and it all is about the principle of just time and attention. That's it. So here's one thing I still continue to do on Fridays. I'll go on a walk with my dogs and I have my phone. And I go on Instagram.

Instagram just makes it very easy. I could do this on most other platforms, but I just choose one because I wanna make it easy. You can't do this with everybody, but some things, and at this point in the pyramid, pun intended, it shouldn't be scalable. It's just something that you gotta do and will create fans.

You go out and you reach out to people who've interacted with you. Maybe they've replied to a post, or they've shared something, or they sent you a dm, you reply back with a video. Not text. Maybe audio could work, but I think there's so much power when it comes to a person seeing that you took the time to send them a message, especially if they, if it wasn't prompted, like I love just going to random commenters and then sending them like a random follower on Instagram and sending them a 32nd video, just thanking them for being a follower and for being active in the community and even prompting like, Hey, what are you working on right now that I can maybe create some content about? That goes a very long way. No other motive than just reaching out and letting them know that you know that they're there. And this is one of the most powerful things that you can do.

If you can do this also with people who are seemingly more active in your community. If you already have like a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group and you notice there's a few people who are just rock stars in there, reach out to them, recognize them. It will blow their mind. And so on this dog walk that I do where one hand I have a leash, the other hand I have my phone, I can get through 30 to 60 of these in about one walk.

Usually I get a reply back and they're so grateful, they're so thankful, and they're like, I can't believe you took the time to send me a video. It was only 30 seconds, but it feels like everything. That's how you can get a superfan to really feel the love and wanna give back because this is, what is it really all about?

It's about connection, and you've just made an incredible connection with a person who didn't expect it. It is those small, unexpected surprises that go further than the bigger campaigns and things like that, right? Think about this. A spouse who says, I love you every night before they go to bed.

Goodnight, honey. I love you. Goodnight, honey. I love you. Goodnight. It's the same thing every night, right? It doesn't mean you love them less, but it's just expected. It's routine. But think about the person who on a random Tuesday at 3:48 PM sends a long stem rose or a box of chocolates or something to your spouse's work for no other reason.

It's not an anniversary, it's not a birthday. It's just because. Boom. It's those small, unexpected moments that create the connection that will last forever. So how might you create those small, unexpected moments for your audience? I wanna thank you for 900 episodes for giving me the motivation and the encouragement to keep going.

To all the guests that have been on the show and to especially all the superfans out there who have continued to follow through the journey, through the different phases of SPI, through the blogging days, to the podcasting days, to the video days, to now the Pokemon days, the community days, and who knows what days are coming, but no matter what, I just wanna say thank you so much for everything because this has been such a joy.

900 episodes after 15 years. My son is turning 16 soon. He's gonna get behind the wheel soon. My daughter is a teenager now as well. Thank you for 900. Here's just some more. Have an amazing day. Cheers.