How Brands Can Tell Better Stories In 2026

Transcript

Companies are desperately hiring storytellers. Just look at the proof. Storyteller job postings have doubled on LinkedIn this year, and Google is hiring a storyteller, and they're willing to pay them over $275,000. Why? Distribution is the castle. Storytelling is the moat. Content is the bridge. Not the journalist, not the PR company, not the UGC. The content you create, the stories you tell, the distribution you build, and the narrative you form. That's what you need to focus on in 2026. So in this episode, I'm going to teach you how to position your stories, segment those stories, develop nonstop story ideas, and then how the fastest growing brands on social are telling those stories. Plus examples of each. Let's dive in. So this piggybacks off the episode that we just had, right? I put a headline on the school doc that was the importance of storytelling from a brand's lens. And the reason for that is people don't truly grasp how powerful storytelling is because you go on Twitter and you see tweets from the thread boys. And I was a thread boy once, but I'm an OG thread boy. But at the same time, I was in the game. There's thread boys. The same people that copy our formats now are the same people that copy our content now. They just rip literally the script and they post it, knowing it's going to go viral. Those are now the thread boys we hate, okay? And there's thread boys who will post things like, storytelling is the best marketing, and it gets 10,000 views. Yeah. And then there's no substance. If somebody was to be like, hey, well, what do we mean? It's the best marketing. How would I build my brand? It's just fluff. It's the fortune cookie wisdom, right? There's a fortune cookie strategy. And so this is how I want brands to understand this and to look at storytelling through this lens. Every piece of content that you create and you distribute creates some kind of impression on a viewer, right? And over time, compounded over and over again, that piece of content, that story, is going to create an area, right? That is that story that's formed in someone's head about your brand, whether it's extremely luxury, like Jack Amos or whatever the Josh Amos. Yes. Very luxury, like them, where you step around and anytime you put them on, you have this feeling of, I'm this type of person, right? That impression was created quickly by the individuals in that store, by telling you the backstory of why it was made, how it was made, who has worn it. Those are all stories, right? You heard one big story, but when you break it down, those are all different stories that were told to you that eventually influenced the story that you created in your head. That's what I don't think people understand, is brands create stories so that you create a story about them in your head. Yeah. That is extremely important, and your relationship with the brand through that story. And I think it's a quick opportunity to talk about finding that one minor story as well, because what they've done a really good job about is all their influencer videos, all these people that they'll get and have make an unboxing video. It's a super easy narrative for them to push, which is the scarcity piece. We only make 500 of these. This is the Birkin of sunglasses. I think the Birkin of sunglasses, not that I'm even a Birkin guy, but that does very quickly allow you to understand and build the narrative well, right? If you're someone who's in the market whatsoever for luxury goods, this is the Birkin of sunglasses. Now it's very quick. So that one liner is also something that people should really think about with story finding and how that narrative builds a relationship. We're able to prospect. But I'm there with you. And that feeds the next line, which is to be able to do that at a high level, you need to tell a magnitude of magnificent stories to create that narrative, right? So that association is created to some extent, because that narrative is going to influence how somebody sees your brand, how they feel about your brand, how much they think you should cost, and then also, most importantly, how they're going to describe them to another person, right? Because you could have come in here and been like, this is the most bullshit thing I've ever bought. I now want to get a pair based off how you justified the $1,300, right? $1,700, whatever the price may be. Yeah. But again, it's that one liner, right? You want to quickly get that information into someone's head, like this is the Birkin of sunglasses. And I think it's important to say as well, with how much AI there is and how we're all able to put out beautiful visuals, the story has gotten more and more important. Yeah. And it's one of those things ideologically, what do you think is going to happen? Is that going to continue to accelerate as a trend? There's just going to be more and more slop. So this is why everyone's freaking out about the storytelling. Yes. Hiring is because those people are just going to be exponentially more valuable for the next five years. And so the funny thing is, there's a Steve Jobs quote from, I think, the eighties or the nineties that is so relevant now. Because back then, when he was talking about computers and their computing process and what they're able to do with it in phones and shit, he said, no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story. That is so vital now, to be able to look at AI and be able to look at the images and the visuals that we're able to create and be like, yes, it's a cool visual, but it doesn't mean it's a good story, and there's what we're going to go through, how you can tell a good story. And then there's another quote from Robert McKee where he says, the most powerful way to put ideas into the world is through storytelling. Now, the thought of most powerful way to put ideas into the world, that is content, right? That is distributing content onto some kind of platform, right? And the way I've been describing it is, distribution is the castle, storytelling is the moat, and then the content is the bridge. So distribution is everything, right? It is the castle. If you look at the castle, that is the bridge. When you don't have it, your castle is not going to be as big as the next castle down the road, right? The storytelling is going to be how defensible you're going to be able to be in comparison to other categories, or if you're just producing content to other content that hits people's feed. Content is then the way that you're going to deliver it, right? It's going to be the thing. The volume that you do it in and the quality that you do it in is going to determine how big that moat is, how big the castle is, right? Those stories and the way you distribute it are equally as important. And the reality is, you can either pay for it or you can earn it. If I had a hundred million dollars right now, I can definitely out-compete the, if McCoy has a brand and I have a brand, he's bootstrapping, I'm funded, I have a hundred million dollars in the bank, I could out-compete him on distribution to start. That sounds sexy. He could out-beat me on story, even if I have a hundred million. It doesn't matter. The storyteller is going to win. Yeah. It definitely levels the playing field. But when you think about storytelling, it's what others can't compete with unless they hire these storytellers that they're bringing into their company. But the reality is, the best story is going to win. That's why Nike has always won. It's why they're kind of, they're not losing, but they're backtracking. Yeah. There's people that are catching up. On Running is catching up. If you look at their social and the things that they're doing, they're doing a magnificent job of telling stories within the running space. That's why it feels like On is in that position to be able to overtake Nike, at least in running, with innovation and storytelling, right? But Nike was the OG. They were the best storytellers ever. I just made a video. Lemon apple, I guess. Yeah. Lemon apple. I just made a video. [SPEAKER_00] Unless they hire these storytellers that they're bringing into their company. But the reality is the best story was going to win. That's why Nike has always won. It's why they're not losing, but they're backtracking. Yeah. There are people that are catching up. On Running is catching up on running. If you look at their social and the things that they're doing, they're doing a magnificent job of telling stories within the running space. That's why it feels like On is in that position to be able to overtake Nike, at least in running, with innovation and storytelling. Right. But Nike was the OG. They were the best storytellers ever. I just made a video. Lemon apple, I guess. Yeah. Lemon apple. I just made a video, I think last week, where I was just talking about, oh, it was that. Did you see that video that I made on the mic here? Yeah. Yeah. Where I was doing my little battle rap. You're on the Eminem shit. Hey, mile. I can't, but there was a line I put in there about Nike used to tell us to chase our greatness, right? And failure was just part of the success and X, Y, Z thing. And it's so true that Nike used to make you fall in love with some story and see yourself in some story that made you feel like the only way you were going to accomplish it was wearing that. Anyways, just to reiterate before I get into some specific story time, what widens and deepens your moat and makes your castle defensible is story. So as you start building out your concept strategy, don't just think about ideas. Don't just think about concepts and formats. Think about the stories that you're going to create that are going to make you defensible from the competition and the other content that people see on their feeds. Content is also the biggest way to build the biggest castle and the biggest moat, right? And on top of that, it's your way in. So as we go into 2026, content and storytelling, right? You could publish content that is terrible and not winning. Up the volume, combine it with the storytelling. That's how you're going to win, right? That is very general information, but we're going to get layers deep into that. It is interesting, though, to see a lot of the brands that maybe we've talked about on the pod, or at least that are on DTC Twitter, spend a lot of time tweeting about their success, them being a $100 million, $200 million brand. A lot of people see them as DTC darlings. They're all hyper-focused on org gag. They're all watching the pod, listening to Colin, et cetera, all the people that are talking about content. They're spending a lot of time consuming all of us and a bunch of other individuals as well because they now feel left behind in the content space. They feel extremely like, wow, we prioritized nothing but paid. And it's funny because it's things that you and I have talked about for two years now. I saw a tweet recently. It's like, things that we're going to change in 2026: we're not going to silo organic and paid anymore. Yeah. They're going to be one wall. And I was like, wow, I've been talking about this for two years. And a bunch of other things like that, where organic can be the engine that informs our data points for other channels, et cetera. Yeah. But the next element that I want to dive into is how to position your stories in a way where it's directed to the right person that perceives the story in the right way. Because when you actually break down a lot of the best stories on social, you can formulate them into these buckets. So number one, you're the hero in your journey, right? This can be your founder story. This can be, I'll go into examples, but like Badd on this. Yeah. They're the hero in their journey. It's not the customers. It's not mom or dad. It is them. Hey, I quit my company to start this frozen bean and cheese company, and now I'm achieving XYZ. They went to private equity to launch a few hours of sense. And so when we look at pillars attached to it, it's on the inspirational side. It could also be education, or it could also be entertaining and inspiring, right? So when we think about education, motivation, inspiration, all of those elements that people attach to concepts and make it successful, you want to be thinking about what other layers you can add to these buckets. Number two, you're the hero they're aiming to be. This is the aspirational side, right? This is the person that is going into ALD and is not buying it but is buying the latte, right? Because they're like, I can't really buy ALD, but they see ALD as this person, even if it's a fictional person, that they want to be like. That's a very popular angle in the info space. This is obviously the one where it's like, look at me. I've done this. Come be like me. Yeah. Personal trainers, fitness coaches, trading, sports betting, you name it. Those spheres of influence are coming from social proof and the authority of I've already done this. You want to turn to me. One hundred percent. Number three, your customer is the hero, right? This is me taking, when we worked with RAW way back before they got acquired, we were working on a series with them where they took somebody that was overweight and has always dreamed of being a healthy individual, and we had a lifestyle transformation where every episode was focused on nutrition. By the time of 12 weeks, it was like, can they lose 20 pounds? Can they lose 30 pounds? Right. That positioned the customer as the hero. Jocko is just now doing something similar with somebody that's like 400 or 500 pounds, where they're taking a customer, someone's a diehard customer, diehard Jocko fan, and they're making that person the hero in their own story, but the brand's rich, right? Which makes it super powerful. There's a lot of things that you could layer in. You could layer education. Hey, we're focused on nutrition today. Therefore, to be able to do so, you've got to reduce the amount of fats that you're having because of that X, Y, Z thing, right? You would take those angles. Then there's inspirational and entertaining, right? It's also an inspirational element to see somebody go from maybe 300 pounds to 280, right? And then 282. In the education piece, giving a blueprint for doing that is going to reach a lot of people on the interest, and even those who don't need to lose 300 pounds, but 85. And I am so 85. The next one, you're creating the hero. So this would be a fictional character that you create. I'll go through examples later in the episode where, when we did the Tier campaign, we created this fictional hero, right? This scientist was on this mission to develop a super shoe for people who ran every single day. We developed that fictional character, and by doing so, we created this hero slash character that people could latch onto and we can tell stories through. The next one, your product is the hero, right? Your product is the hero that we're searching for. We can talk about Moisey Walsh. They created detergent for the people that maybe would get rashes from using Tide Pods, or that didn't want to use single-use plastics, or they didn't want to use all the different toxins that are inside Tide, right? Their product is the hero. The last one, your team is the hero. If you're going to be focusing on the people that are on your team or going to be leveraging their brands, you can position the things that they do, sorry, you can position the people that are doing the things that make your brand your brand as heroes, right? And there's two ways to really do this: fiction and nonfiction. There's ways of doing this, and I'll go through this, but there's ways of doing this through the nonfiction lens. They created detergent for the people that maybe will get rashes from using Tide Pods or that were getting, didn't want to use single, single-use plastics, or they didn't want to use all the different toxins that are inside Tide, right? Their product is the hero. The last one, your team is the hero. If you're going to be focusing on the people that are on your team or going to be leveraging their brands, you can position the things that they do, they, sorry, you can position the people that are doing the things that make your brand, your brand as heroes, right? And there's two ways to really do this: fiction and nonfiction. There's ways of doing this where, and I'll go through this, but there's ways of doing this through the nonfiction lens, of course. And that's the easiest way to do it because you don't have to crack the world really to be able to do so. When you go the nonfiction route, you do have to craft a world. When we shot with, even being fiction. Yeah. Sorry. Mythic creative fiction world, or fictional world. So even when I'm playing this little professor role here, we have to create this little small fictional classroom setting to be able to create that feeling of me feeling like a professor, right? It takes more resources. On the nonfiction side, there's a lot of things that you can do. Your story is your moat. The things that you deal with on a daily basis is your moat. Sorry, your story is your moat. And so the things that you face on a daily basis can be your angles. They can be your ideas. They can be the concepts that you're going to build around. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through nonfiction ways of taking something as a pillar and then building an idea off of it. So number one, nonfiction. Let me send this to you. So there's a company called Blackhorse Lane. I don't know if you've seen them. They're a jean company. The first way that you can build around this is your reasoning. So if you have a specific reasoning or opinion as to why you do something, you can build a story around it. I'll give two examples from Blackhorse Lane. They never do Black Friday, and neither does Norc or Patagonia. They never do Black Friday. They just do a quick talking head in the factory: why we never do Black Friday. And they give their reasoning behind it. And there's a lot of people that support it, right? Number two, why we offer free repairs for life. They're, I would say, a fairly expensive jean. When we talk about what you would just talk about at the middle class, they're definitely positioned as luxury. They offer free repairs for life, and they have a strong stance as to why they do that. So if you take your reasoning behind a value that you have as a company or a thing that you stand by or a procedure or something within your company that is a big differentiator, you can take that position, that story, as a content piece. Hey, we've never done Black Friday. There's a lot of companies that have never done Black Friday, but the world doesn't know it because they don't create the content around it, right? A lot of people offer free repairs for life. Or they do, but where people are missing what you're trying to say is that the distribution must have an upsurge. And this, speaking of things that we've been screaming into the sky for years, but it's like, bro, there's no distribution even remotely close in terms of overall potential of who you can reach, how quickly you can reach them. But if they had never made that video, hey, you wouldn't even have heard of the Zarian, right? But then that'd be, it's like you don't have an opportunity, you would care. Yes. And there's just so many things about it that, I don't know, people make a, we see all these enterprise brands all the time. They're like, well, how do we get our message out? Or where do we tell people about this benefit? Well, maybe we'll do some marketing materials in store. It's like, no, dude, just make 10 different variants of a TikTok. 100%. 100%. Number two, why you're different. So if you are, again, we look at Moise Wash to Tide, you look at Midday Squares to Hershey's, you could look at Feastables to Hershey's, or you could look at Joy, right? There's so many examples. But if you look at all the different reasons why you're different, if I got a whiteboard out and I'm like, hey, convince me to love your brand over somebody else. Explain this to me by explaining everything that you do differently or that makes you different than your competitor. Can you do so? This brand called Cam Goods Clothing. Have you seen them? Cam Goods Clothing? What's super interesting about them, they created a video that has 200,000 likes, so probably has, I don't know, 3 million views, 4 million views. And they created this video where it described, this is a, I think it was like a cam press or something like that. And it's like, we package all of our clothing in here, clothing in here. Okay. Why? Two, it was like two reasons. So number one being, most of the clothes comes in single-use packaging. Yeah, right. You get it, you throw it away, whatever. And then number two was, which I guess for him is part of the ending, which we'll go into for another thing later, but it's part of the ending. And then number two, they were like, well, if we can pack food in the can, why can't we pack clothes? And so now they're attaching the story to the can as well. But if that's one of the things that makes you different, makes you really stand out, that now the can is actually the thing that you collect, all of a sudden it's very strong positioning for you against the other brands in the world. Super interesting brand doing some really, really cool. Yeah. The identity becomes ingrained in it as well. If he is the products that they're putting out, the canned goods, that story now says something about this gibbity cares that send of that out-of-the-box crazy. So when they make a respect to locals or they're doing all these different media, the identity of them is so native to Gen G, to caring and being relatable and actually doing something for people, which is this can. The story allows them to have so many downstream successful pieces of content. The original core story that they define in that narrative is now able to be rubbed with data across the best of their entire soul. Yes. They do another thing too. They give you a flower seat on top of your can. You can tell stories based off the questions that people ask you in the comments. Your content can be literally the comments that you get on E, right, or in your contact. So what if I'm Blackhorse Lane? I'll send you this specific one. He took all the people asking him, hey, why are your jeans so expensive? And he turned it into a content piece. The content piece starts off with all the comments showing it, and then it's like, well, number one, we actually pay affordable wages to everybody that works with us in London. He's like, which I guess is not a normal thing, but this video has 3,000 likes on it. You know what I mean? This is a very, very good performance piece of content. And it's a good middle-funnel piece of content where it's content for your followers, but based on how you package it, it can expand past your followers. It's not going to be a 100,000-like video. It's not going to do a 3 mil view video, but it could be a 100,000-view video, which is a very, very powerful thing. It's probably around that bar. The takeaway here is look at all the common denominators in your comments, right? Look at the questions that are repeatedly asked, the video for being asked questions that you collected all the time, the EO, whatever. There are stories there to be told. His story was, it's not just, hey, it's a What I mean is this is a very, very good performance piece of content. It’s a good middle-funnel piece of content where it’s content for your followers, but based on how you package it, it can expand past your followers. It’s not going to be a hundred-thousand-like video. It’s not going to do a three mil view video, but it could be a hundred-thousand-view video, which is a very, very powerful thing. It’s probably around that bar. The takeaway here is, look at all the common denominators in your comments, right? Look at the questions that are repeatedly asked, the video for being asked questions that you collected all the time, the EO, whatever. There are stories there to be told. His story was, it’s not just, “Hey, it’s a great gene.” It’s, well, if the jeans are very expensive because we pay our employees very well, then again, it’s so easy to think about macro stories, that I need to talk about how Jules changed the world. No, no, no. There are micro stories that we’ve told every single day, and one of them, right? And there’s now affinity attached to horseshit. He does that for his employees. He takes care of, he cares about not only the product, but the craft and the people building it, doing the craft, creating crap. Yeah. Powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Next thing, your transformation. I don’t know if you’ve seen, and this is a more obvious one, but it’s still good to touch on. So sour milk. Have you seen that? It’s one of the crazier brand names. Crazy. And I think it’s a yogurt brand. Yeah. This is one of those, wrong, I’m not sure on the name. I hope it works for you. Sour milk. I like this brand. I do too. The brand is really cool. Brand is really cool. But anyways, long story short, she shared her transformation, right? I’m not going to go too deeply into this one, but in this specific carousel that I shared, she’s talking about how a year of building my first company, a company and filter, it’s been almost 12 months since I’ve quit my job in private equity, started Yoder company and my best brand, and there’s some reflections. So all she’s done here is look at, okay, I’m going through this transformation where I quit my private equity job to launch this company called Sour Milk. You let me share it off in the twenties of the last five months. People are going to resonate today, right? That ominous, a sweat equity favorite, a sweat equity listener, Sam. I don’t know if you talked to Sam in the DM or anything. Flowers all the same. Sam was a dog. So we’ve had her talk for a few times at Cut 30. She is meticulous about what she tests. We should 1000% have her on an episode for Sweat. I agree. She would come in here and drop it just after the game, and not to fuck your light a little, she’s been a guest for Sweat, probably by hands down the best. Their transformation was around Hank and how us, nine-to-five corporate jobs, to start a frozen demon cheese burrito company. Here’s how it’s going so far, right? It’s not only, I am transforming, but I am inviting you into my transformation so that you can be a part of it as well. Okay, next one, your team’s POV. If you’re going to be doing content around employee-generated content, you might as well do it well and do it right and tell a very good story. The easiest, I would say, people to be able to do this are creative directors, art directors, creators. I just sent you a clip. We should, as in Household Distribution, we should be doing this because we’re doing pieces of content every single, we’re doing productions every single week where it’s like POV, work as a creative director. And then it shows, it’s literally just what we call at Cut 30, a 10 shot, where just 10 quick shots with a headline on top of it. That’s all it is. This is a great one. POV, work as a creative director shows how a piece of a product is made. It shows the BTS of it. It shows the final product, right? Very easy. You could be doing this. POV, you’re formulating chocolate for 24 out, for 24 straight out. Yeah, right? There are so many ways and angles to be able to do this, but still, this tells a story. So when we think about storytelling, we have to dumb it down or simplify it a bit so that we understand you can tell micro stories, and micro stories can still perform extremely well. You don’t need to do a hundred-thousand-dollar campaign if you are innocent. I think what you just said is probably the most key thing that holds people back, is they think that storytelling equals this grandiose investment that you need to think about it, right? And you do need to have a lot of different underlying strategy, and you have to know what works and what doesn’t, but at the same time, you need to ship. You do need to just post a lot and iterate. It almost might be more important to be meticulous about testing than it is to put in strategy work, right? Because as long as you can list out those variables that you’re going to be testing, because that’s the angle, maybe that’s the hook, maybe that’s the first frame, whatever it is, eventually you’re going to find something that works. The 10-shot idea, I mean, that’s the other case, right? There are different formats that, if you’re structuring a content strategy, you should make sure you’re getting footage for it, right? This is why you always want to film B-roll, but you also want to be doing a story from your couch or, I think, green screen video, whatever it is, because it just gives you that optionality. But yeah, it doesn’t have to be such a big investment. It really can just be the right trimming audio and wall of texts and some BTS. Tell a great story. What you said is key. When you’re starting and you’re building out a content strategy, all these brands that are going to start doing it, build out a testing strategy first. Yeah. Do not build out a content strategy. You’re not in a place to know and understand what’s going to work. You’ve never had anything work, so therefore you need to test and figure out what works before you say, “Hey, we’re going to do more of this and invest all into this,” to determine what works, right? So that is absolutely key. Anyways, the next one, your enemy. So Moisey Walsh, their entire play at the beginning was how can you make people despise Tide, despise all the big laundry detergents. I would actually say with them, they tapped into everyone hating Kyle already too. There is an element of they made them an enemy with a shared content and made an excellent job building the case for why Tide was evil, but there is a really big trend right now, basically someone saying the quiet part out. This is obviously the microplastics stuff. This is so prominent in health and wellness, is you being a voice for the silent majority. Yes, right? Everyone’s tired of Tide and the monopoly of them and Gain and all these people, Procter people, really have on your shelf. And so we kind of know that they’re probably screwing you, and I’m going to actually vocalize that. I’m going to give you your talking points, basically. I’m going to do the research for you, and in this video, you’re going to have now those three things that you can say to your friends, like, “Yo, you didn’t know that Tide Pods contain these microplastics that ruin your fertility or fuck your hormones,” right? So what’s crazy is, because of exactly what you just said, because of a Moisey Wash video, I’ve told everybody and anybody that I know that, for any reason, we’re on a laundry detergent subject or just a clean products subject, I bring up the fact that there’s ingredients in Tide that are banned in Europe, that are banned in two different screwing you, and I'm going to actually vocalize that. I'm going to give you your talking points. I'm going to do the research for you. And in this video, you're going to have those three things that you can say to your friends, yo, you didn't know that Tide Pods contain microplastics that ruin your fertility or strike your hormones, right? So what's crazy is, because of a Moisey Wash video, I've told everybody and anybody that I know that if, for any reason, we're on the detergent subject or clean products subject, I bring up the fact that there are ingredients in Tide that are banned in New York, that are banned in two different states. They hit me back as one of the hooks. I was like, if it's banned and it's going on my body every single day, there's a problem here. And so I only buy Moisey Wash now, even though it's 40, 50 dollars. He did a really good job too, because not only did they start with the enemy marketing, but he also linked into the scents. Right. So he has multiple depth to one fence. They actually smell amazing. It smells like cologne. Yeah. Have you used it? I regret to admit on these podcasts, I'm still using some subproctoring cables law because it's easy. Their friction level is so low. Yeah. I'm a last-minute essentials kind of guy, so I don't have paper towels, right? I got the tiniest little bit of a roll left of paper towels. We can live without it. You can let that burn for a little bit. We haven't had paper towels in the office. I know you don't got a microwave in here. Dude, no, we ordered one, and then Amazon did not deliver it. And so we had to cancel that. We never ordered it again. That was the truth. Yeah. Anyways, that's my barrier adventure with Mosey. Fair. He used to be on Amazon. He was on Amazon. That's where I get them. I murdered. That's where I go, but I just have to have it on the subscription. Okay. The next one: your product, but specifically what you can do with it. I'm going to show you one of my favorite examples of this. So look at the text I just sent you. There's a brand called Fairway Village or Far Away, sorry, Far Away Village. Look at these videos. Yeah. What is great? Is this one of the most beautiful pieces of content you've ever seen? 2.7 million likes on the piece of content that I just sent you, 2.1 million followers on IG. This is real. This is, bro, I'm the only one. I don't know if it is or isn't, but AI bells are tingling off. So they also have millions of views on or millions of subs on YouTube. So I have a feeling that it is real, bro. It goes deep. 267 posts. It goes deep. And it's supposed to be this village, right? Maybe I should have done a little bit more research to see if this is real or not, but I don't get all that problem, right. Huh? This is real. It's the coolest thing I've ever fucking seen. Yeah. I'm all in, for sure. Welcome to our rural Azerbaijani village located near the heart of the majestic Caucasus Mountains. Okay. So it's real. Yeah. They're out in Azerbaijan. 1.8 subs on YouTube. Okay. Here's the eight to it out there. This is probably one of the coolest brands, coolest pieces of content that I've seen in a while. So, yeah, do you have any idea what they sell? I see socks on Pintos, but I'm sorry. Yeah, but they sell knives and cutting boards. I was doing a guess, some sort of seasoning or some sort of cooking-adjacent product. Yeah, right. They sell knives and cutting boards. When you consume the content, all you see is what you can do with it, right? They're cutting strawberries. They're cutting steak. They're cutting meats. That is all you're witnessing. You see it on the cutting boards. You see it on the knife, or you see them using the knife. Bro, within three minutes, because I watched three pieces of content, I was like, I need something from them. I had no idea what they sold, but later, how about you making this good? I think you have to sell something. What is it? Bro, I bought it all. Not all of it, but I bought a cutting board. They had a bundle. I bought some knives, and I bought a cutting board, and I was just like, yo, I'm only going to use this for my fruits, because I want to feel like this. You get what I'm saying? Yeah. But this is one of the coolest accounts I've probably ever seen. Yeah. They're fascinating. Yeah. The color, the use of crazy scale, the fact that it does feel like AI because of the use of scale. One of the thumbnails is just a mountain of strawberries. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Dude, it's such a good—they also do a really good job of thumbnails. None of these thumbnails really correlate to the—this is an incredibly sophisticated operation. Yes. You know what I mean? They really know what they're doing. We just turned toward the camera, and you could see. Yeah. They're literally creating clickable thumbnails for their IG that feel like YouTube, right? Right. You know what I'm saying? Look at how many tacos she's holding. Yeah. And everything is very inherently viral. Yes. So this is probably one of my favorite accounts. But again, I know this is an extreme example. All the other examples have been things that anybody can do. And I still think there are lessons you can learn from this, but they're showing what you can do with the product. They never, at least that I've seen, are in your face about our knives. Number three, your heritage. ALD and Jacquesmus. I was trying to do an episode without talking about them. They just do an excellent job of talking about their heritage in a lot of their content. So if you do have some kind of heritage or some kind of roots attached to your brand, leverage them, right? ALD talks about his dad being from Greece and having Greek roots consistently in this content. Jothamus, one of Jothamus' most viral pieces of content was when they recreated pictures that he found of his family and them working in the farms and the fields. And they recreated that for the lookbook, and they told the story and added the heritage and the history attached to those photos for their next collection, which I think was called something heritage, or something along those lines. The next one, your numbers. So this is better for a zero-to-one brand, right, to really be able to share your numbers and what you're doing day to day. If you're inviting people into your journey, they're going to want to know the transparency and the numbers behind what you're actually doing to feel like they're a part of it. Bad Ombedist does a really good job of this. I'll also say this is part eight or part nine of their series. And what's interesting is, when I read you their first hook, which was, I just left my nine-to-five corporate drive to start a frozen bean and cheese burrito company. Here's how it's going so far. That was hook number one. Hook number two, the new hook is, I'm Hank, and 12 months ago, I quit my nine-to-five to start a frozen bean and cheese burrito company. My wife, Sam, and I sold 116,000 burritos in our first year, crushed our projections, and yet we're still broke. It's taken the journey that they've had and kind of transformed it into a way where it's like, okay, we packaged the last year into where we're at now, or we're going to continue this year. A lot of people killed the series off. Super interesting how they're testing here. But what I'm saying is, the numbers part of it is very interesting. They are sharing that they've sold 116,000 burritos. And so as a fan, you're like, go, you guys. And then they're like, but we're still broke. And it's like, I quit my nine to five to start a frozen bean and cheese burrito company. My wife, Sam, and I sold 116,000 burritos in our first year, crushing our projections, returns yet. We're still broke. It's taken the journey that they've had, and it transformed it into a way where it's, okay, we package the last year, each of where we're at now, or we're going to continue this year. A lot of people killed the series off. Super interesting how they're testing here. But what I'm saying is the numbers part of it is very interesting. They are sharing that they've sold 116,000 burritos. And so, as a fan, you're like, go you guys. And then they're like, but we're still broke. And it's like, still go you guys. But shit, I want to know more, right? That curiosity gap is strong. We talked about Poor Boy Coffee years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, a year ago. And he literally has a series where it's called The Numbers. And he just says gross revenue and number of cups sold. That is his series because he compliments his founder series, right, where he's like, hey, I'm trying to bootstrap my coffee brand and see how big I can get it. So your numbers is something that you can play around with. If I want to do Derek's series, I thought about, for me, taking our creative studio from seven figures to eight figures, right? That can 100% be something that people could be interested in following along for that exact reason, right? Because now you're inviting hate too. I think with that, people could be rooting against you to make it for a kind of time. It's underrated, as in inviting the haters. 100%. The next one is your story. So either the problem you found or the solution you needed. So this is one of the most interesting ones that I've found on the internet, which is this girl, Latier. So she used to make rockets for NASA. Now she bakes. And I said hot. Yeah, it came out, but accidentally, just the concept of scientist baker, not anything about the physical. Dude. And her hook is incredible. It's something along the lines of, I used to sketch rockets for a living for NASA, or something like that, and now I'm creating pastries with the same precision that I did rockets. But at least she is telling her story, which is the problem that she found is a problem inside of herself. She felt like she was an imposter living this double life, right? And so that double life caused her to start baking and then taking that same precision that she was giving to these rockets that she was developing and sketching for NASA into the things that she's baking. The next one, again, we'll go to Moisey Wash, but Moisey Wash did one where it was like, why had I started laundry detergent brand at 23? He talks about the problems that he faced with, like, he would go down the laundry detergent aisle and automatically get a headache from the scent. So therefore he wanted to start something that wouldn't give you a headache, wouldn't give me a headache. If I'm getting the headache, then of course the ingredients have to be bad to the point where I have a migraine. Chunky Fit Cookie, which we both know them. Scott was a really good friend. Their angle is starting next big protein cookie brand, right? And so you can just look at your story, and your story is always evolving, which is good for you because that means you're never going to run out of content ideas. They went from doing it in their kitchen to then a small ghost kitchen to now in a giant kitchen. That's a whole narrative you can build around. Yeah. The rabbit hole for people to fall in through. Yeah, bro. And then he's also currently engaged, getting married. All of a sudden, it changes when you go from engaged to married and have a married man build a couple, right? All these dynamics change how you approach your company and change your day to day. And so I make that all relatable to a new set of people. All right. Poor Boy Coffee is another one. His series was, I'm starting a coffee brand to see how big I can bootstrap it, essentially. All this is, is, hey, I have a story. I have this goal that I'm trying to do. I'm going to take my goal and I'm going to position it as a story and then bring people along for that. Your customers are also a story that you can develop around. So Pink's Windows. So there's a series that they do that's called Cop Clean, where they go around ATX, they go around different cities, and they do free cleaning for the people that need help. This is an easy way to either take your community or take your customers and turn them into a story. Where I do think they could do the series better, I will say that they could do it a lot better. What I think they should do is they should try to go to other privileged places and do these top-of-the-memory cleans, but they should get the person first reacting as the hook, like, oh my God, I needed something like this. Then a quick, okay, perfect, I'm going to clean this up, or I'm going to clean this up, we're going to clean this up, whatever. Or not trim. They just do the windows. But things like that, they should foreshadow within the hook and then go into a lot of the satisfying aspects of cleaning something. But this is a great example. You can take your customers, you can take your community, you can take the people involved in the company, and create a series around it where you have unlimited stories. The fact that they're doing Cop Clean every single week, they have unlimited stories with this, right? The next one is your experience. So there's a restaurant that's gone viral many times. Osteria. You know what I'm talking about? I think you talked about them before, right? Yes. Their storytelling is very cinematic. It's very beautiful, but it's all about the experience. It's all about how the food is prepared, what it looks like on the plate, then the ambiance of the location. And so their story is literally their experience from what someone orders to then it arriving on their plate, hitting their table, and just the ambiance that they take in. So if you have some kind of experience that people are going to be a part of, figure out, again, how you can bring that experience to life through a story. So the next one is your lessons. My favorite is Softies Burgers. Have you seen them? Well, I'm putting you on today. These are just deep in the corner, in the trenches of IG. Yeah, this is that algo that hits you at like 11:30. You're like, I need to wake up at seven, but I'm in a great algo right now. I don't want to find my way out. Yeah, and when that happens, this is terrible, I'll scroll until I fall asleep, like until I fall asleep, holding my phone. I just realized you have a mustache. It's at that stage where it's not immediate. This is crazy. This is breaking news. Yeah. I'm never slowly with a mustache. It looks good. How long are you in people? I don't know where things go. There's a lot of twists and currents in life, and my parents, that might be coming soon. I bet you don't know. Oh my God. I got the nearest activations on Saturday night. I remember when you, this is actually probably a story, go pop, when you just started Nibble and things started working well. Oh, I hit that. T-flight it. Yeah, yeah. And it was like one of the first things you did. It was like you went and got your teeth, and I did a professional thing and blow it. It was just signing for. You could probably go into our app, the chip Skype. You could probably go into our episode and find, because you were cheesing for like two episodes. I'm like, twists and currents in life and my parents that might be coming soon. I bet you don't know. Oh my God. I got the nearest activations on Saturday night. I remember when you, this is actually probably a story. Go pop. When you just started nibble and things started working well. Oh, I hit that. T-flight it. Yeah. Yeah. And it was one of the first things you did. It was you went and got your teeth, and I did a professional thing and blow it. It was just signing for, you could probably go to where I'm up. So you could probably go into our app, the chip skype. You could probably go into our episode and find, because you were cheesing for two episodes. I'm like, I was looking straight at it. Yeah. You were like, let me hit the intro Alex. So episode number 32. Yeah. But check out softies burgers, stove burgers. You got to stop. I'm just trying to hit people with examples, bro, that are not just fashion. We tend to lean more towards fashion and muddry. So softies burgers, this burger joint that started as just as a fruit truckers, a pop up. Look at their episodes that they do, the episodic show. It's like episode one, my new problems, episode number two, growing pain, episode number three, right. And so, what they're doing is they're taking the lessons that they've been burning across building this company and launching a retail spot, which wasn't what they, what they did in the past. And they're turning those lessons into the stories that they're telling the world. Right. And they're doing it in a very, very honestly engaging way. If you look at their Oaks, one of them for growing pains, they're both working a kitchen and they look at the camera and they're like, really, you want to film a video right now? You see how busy we are. Dude, when did he get here? You think we have time to do a video right now? Yeah. But it also brings to the idea of growing pains, right? Like, yo, we're deep in the foundation later now. Yeah. We're getting tested right now. We're deep in the company right now, trying to do our thing. Okay. The next one, your process. So Loewe does actually vary with Java ghost. They have this glass blowing kind of piece made from glass blowing that is exceptional. And they have this carousel where they just show how it was crafted from beginning to end, dude. And it's absolutely beautiful. They also have another carousel where they're actually one of the best at creating carousels where they're walking around with a hand car, pushing all the materials to go get it developed. Right. Your process is your store, which your product stored. And so, therefore, you have a robust process and it can even be, you can look at Soppy's burgers. I know I'm talking about clothing in that example. If you could look at Soppy's burger and go, okay, if you're getting meat from the best places. Yeah. I know I said, bro, it might, sometimes you say this, that's in your head. Someone's got to make you define now, what, where is the best place to take me? Don't be right now. We're right. So if you're sourcing meat, I'm fine. If you're sourcing quality meat from different farms, it's organic, it's pesticide free, pesticide free, that is a story in itself. Right. But that's your process. So the process of how I get my grades. So then your plate is multiple stories. Okay. You have the farmers, what the cows eat, what makes it organic, how it's pesticide free. Right. These are all stories that you'd be developing around the process to then be able to just showcase the poll. So the next one is reproduction. So I'm going to send you this video from the lady that has just 75,000 lights as 1.5 million views. It's an absolute banger video. I'm sorry. I said in two things, but look at the one and it's the story of this shirt that is made of orange is literally the hook of that. What if I told you this was made of orange, New Zealand, and the shirt's just right on a hanging on a tree. There's an entire production process that they have to go into detail about. Guess what? The world produces this many oranges and those orange peels every year aren't used. And so X, Y, Z thing. And they go into this ridiculous detail to show how they're making a shirt out of orange. Talk about luxury when you're making shirts out of oranges, but showing that production process, let's say the shirt's $500. I don't know if it's luxury without the story. It's not, it's the takeaway. It's 100% the takeaway. And it's how the story is positioned here too. That is so key because you could either be like, you're making shirts out of oranges. You're broke. But then the way that comes in is like, no, no, no, we're making shirts out of oranges. You're rich. Right. And there's such a positioning in play gear, showing the process and how many details and how many things need to happen to be able to do that, that make it luxury. So your production process, there's a huge angle that you can take here. I know you're short on time. So I'm going to spin through the last, they're speaking in the last way. So now we go fiction. So one, you can create a series. You could create a fictional character that you build a story around. We have one that's coming out with a brand called crafted that's called waterside wisdom. And it's like this uncle, rich uncle, young nephew there. The nephew always goes to hang out with the uncle. The uncle always gives him life advice. And so they're playing a game of chess while the uncle gives advice, life advice, business advice, relationship advice to the nephew. Right. But it's shot, true luxurious, shot in front of Austin, like hails in the background, extremely beautiful. But we created this fictional scene world and character to tell the story associated with crafted about values, about time, about being timeless, about laundry, right? Low house does this as well with their glasses where they like this wise old guy as their main character and they transport all the stories through him by transporting all the wisdom through him. Right. That's a great example. With tier, we created that scientist. So we created this fictional character where the fictional character was dropped off into the desert and he wasn't able to return home until he developed the right shoe. So he was in the lab and they had test subjects, right? We created this fictional character to the point where we could have created a completely dedicated account to that fictional character. So when we talk about stories, it's like you can create this fictional character and then tell the stories through that individual late checkout. There's the same thing. Every character is this fictional character. Late checkouts, the brain where the entire world of the brass video, literally. Yeah. Where the entire world of the brand takes place within the hotel. So all the characters are based off that stay at the hotel. So they're the painter. They have the bell boy, right? These are all characters they build campaigns around, but they all embody what the brand stands for from this creative style that really portrays a specific lifestyle. There's a brand that I think is going to absolutely pop off with one of the coolest websites I've actually ever seen, but they created a series called the rotors man. Is that how you pronounce that? Their whole angle is for those who become more #engineered for success. Rotorist world, rotary world. I'll do two things. Number one being they created this series called the rotors male. The rotors man is an individual that embodies the type of people that are going to shop at this brand to watch. They just have a lot of sense art guy. I think so. Yes. And so all these fictional characters are created to illustrate the values of the brand. So if you look at the episodes, right, let me pull it back up again. If you look at the episodes and you read the captions for each one of these videos, is this a launch brand? Yeah. So rotors man confident within while helping others when that's episode two. Episode one was rotors man loyal to one, kind to everyone. This is a series that takes place inside of an elevator and there's multiple people within that you pronounce that? Their whole angle is for those who become more hashtag engineer for success. Rotorist world, rotary world. I'll do two things. Number one being they created this series called the Rotors Male. The Rotors Man is an individual that embodies the type of people that are going to shop at this brand to watch. They just have a lot of sense art guy. I think so. Yes. And so all these fictional characters are created to illustrate the values of the brand. So if you look at the episodes, right, let me pull it back up again. If you look at the episodes and you read the captions for each one of these videos, is this a launch brand? Yeah. So Rotors Man, confident within while helping others, that's episode two. Episode one was Rotors Man, loyal to one, kind to everyone. This is a series that takes place inside of an elevator, and there's multiple people within that elevator, and the Rotors Man does something to illustrate or to bring to life the idea of loyal to one, kind to everyone. Second part, hit their website and tell me this is from out. Yeah. Rotors World. Is this not like, it's not a functional website from the POV of, would I want to navigate this site every single time? No. But when you actually talk about it being sick, it is hands down one of the coolest websites. And we'll talk about world building. There's a lot of AI too. Yeah. But they're doing it in a way where it's like the us cruise. You know what I mean? Like it's actually really, really cool. So again, if you have these specific values as a brand, you can help illustrate those values through a fictional character that you identify as example, the Rotors Man. Last one that I have is this brand, Oldest Road. We created a series with them called Campfire Stories, where we brought in this fictional storyteller, and that individual is telling either stories of, well, what are their customer segments? It's like luxury travelers, or not luxury travels, but people that travel to take timeless pieces with them. Right. And so in that, we created Campfire Stories where it's these same people telling some of the crazy stories that everybody has, crazy travel stories. Right. And some of them have the wildest travel stories. And so we're taking all of them in from different customers, and then we're going to a range. You're creating this campfire and literally creating this storytelling setting. And he's a storyteller for all of these. And so we can create this fictional storyteller to be able to tell these stories. And so this gives you the ability to be very, very creative. When I look at the nonfiction side, this is very much zero to one, zero to five territory. And once you start really building brand equity with people, it doesn't mean you can't do those things. If you do them, you just have to do them at a very, very high level where you're building a fiction world that you can add those layers in there. Right. As much as I love Canned Goods Clothing, they're never going to be seen in the same light as Jacquemus or even as an L Wood in this case because of the luxury of the content, the production value of the content. But where they're at right now, it's exactly what they should be doing. But in two years, let's say if they're as big as L Wood is now, they can definitely still tell the same stories, but through a much higher production lens. When you get into the fictional side, that is when you can do a lot more world building. You could introduce these characters. You could introduce these settings. You can introduce fake characters. You could introduce real characters. You could build worlds and sets around real characters, et cetera. You can still do these things on a budget. There's a brand called Currently Running who does this on a budget. He's a single guy building this brand. But at the same time, he is a cinematographer. He's a photographer, right? And so he has this upper hand on everybody else that he's competing against, that he can take the most beautiful visuals. He can tell stories because he can do it himself. He doesn't need three people. He doesn't need five people. Right. And so all of that to say, when somebody does tell you storytelling is the best marketing, listen to this episode and do everything that this episode says, because you execute against the ideas here and how to position a story, and then the actual examples of, you could just take your reasoning for doing something and turn that into the story. You can take your transformation or somebody on your team's POB and transform that into the story. You have endless stories that you can build around. If you have these very, very, and the more stories that you tell next year, just the higher probability of you winning and you outcompeting the person who's leveraging AI, who's just doing UGC, et cetera, and not telling these amazing stories associated to a player. Yeah, that's all I got. I know that was a lot, so I appreciate you bearing with me. No, that's a good one to bookmark and review for people. All right, y'all. that story as a content piece. Hey, we, we've never done black Friday. There's a lot of companies that have never done black Friday, but they, the world doesn't know it because they don't create the content around it. Right. A lot of people are the free repairs for life. Or they do, but like where people are missing what you're trying to say is that the distribution must have an upsurge. And this, you know, speaking of things that we've been, you know, screaming into the sky for years, but it's like, bro, there's no distribution even remotely close in terms of overall potential of who you can reach, how quickly you can reach them. But if, if they had never made that video, hey, you wouldn't even heard of the Zarian, right. But then that'd be, it's like, you don't have an opportunity, you would care. Yes. You know? And like, there's just so many things about it that, I don't know, people like make a, you know, we, we, we see all these enterprise brands all the time. They're like, well, how do we get our message out? You know? Or, or like, where do we tell people about this, you know, benefit? Well, maybe we'll, you know, and do some marketing materials in, in store. It's like, no, dude, just make like 10 different variants of a, of a TikTok. 100%. 100%. Number two, why you're different. So if you are, again, we look at Moise Wash to, to Tide, you look at Midday Squares to Hershey's, you could look at Feastables to Hershey's, or you could look at Joy, right? Like there's so many examples. But if you look at all the different reasons why you're different, if I, if I got a whiteboard out and I'm like, hey, convince me to love your brand over somebody else, explain this to me by explaining everything that you're, that you do differently, or that makes you different than your competitor, can you do so? This brand called Cam Goods Clothing. Have you seen them? Cam Goods Clothing? What's super interesting about them. They created a video that has 200,000 likes. So probably has, I don't know, like 3 million views, 4 million views. And they created this, this video where it described like, this is a, I think it was like a cam press or something like that. And it's like, we package all of our clothing in here, clothing in here. Okay. Why? Two, it was like two reasons. So number one being, most of the clothes comes in, uh, in like single use packaging. Yeah. Right. You get it, you throw it away, whatever. And then number two was, which I guess for him is part of the ending, which we'll go into for another thing later, but it's part of the ending. And then number two, they were like, well, if we can pack food in the can, like, why can't we pack clothes? And so now they're attaching the story to the can as well. But if that's one of the things that makes you different, makes you really stand out that like now the can is actually the thing that you collect all of a sudden, you know, it's very strong positioning for you against the, you know, the other, the other brands in the, in the world, super interesting brand doing some really, really cool. Yeah. The identity becomes kind of ingrained in it as well. Like, you know, if he is the products that they're putting out, the canned goods, like that story, it now says something about this gibbity cares that send of that out of the box crazy, you know? So when they make a respect to locals or they're like doing all these different media, that's what the identity of them is so native to like Gen G to, you know, caring and, and being relatable and actually like doing something for people, which is, you know, this can't, it's like, the story allows them to have so many downstream successful pieces of content. The original core story that they define in that narrative is now able to be rubbed with data across the best of their entire soul. Yes. They do another thing too. They give you like a flower seat on top of your, on top of your can. You can tell stories based off the questions that people ask you in the comments. Your content can be literally the comments that you get on, on E right. Or in your contact. So what if I'm black horse lane, I'll send you this specific one. Somebody, or the, he took all the people asking him and like, Hey, why are your genes so expensive? And he turned it into a content base. The content piece starts off with like all the comments showing it. And then it's like, well, number one, we actually pay affordable wages to everybody. And that works with us at London. He's like, which I guess it's like not a normal thing, but this video has 3000 likes on. You know what I mean? Like this is a very, very good performance piece of content. And it's a good middle funnel piece of content where it's like, it's content for your followers, but based on how you package it, it can expand cast your followers. It's not going to be a hundred thousand like video. It's not going to do a three mil view video, but it could be a hundred thousand view video, which is a very, very powerful thing. It's probably around that, that bar. What I'm, the takeaway here is look at all the common denominators in your comments, right? Look at the questions that are repeatedly asked, the video for being asked questions that you collected all the time, the EO, whatever. There are stories there to be told. His story was, it's not just, Hey, it's a great gene. It's well, like if the genes are very extensive because we've, we pay our employees very well, then the like, again, like it's so easy to think about macro stories that I need to talk about how Jules changed the world. And like, no, no, no. Like there's micro stories that we've told every single day, that in one of them, right? And like, there's, there's now affinity attached to horseshit. Like he does that for his employees. Like he takes care of, like he cares about not only the product, but the craft and the people build it, doing the craft, creating crap. Yeah. Powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Next thing, your transformation. So I don't know if you've seen, and this is a more obvious one, but it's still good to, uh, to touch on. So sour milk. Have you seen that? It's one of the crazier brand names. Crazy. And I think it's like a yogurt brain. Yeah. This is one of those one wrong. I'm not sure on the name. Like, I hope it works for you. Sour milk. I like this brand. I do too. The brain is really cool. Um, brain is really cool. But anyways, like long story short, she shared her transformation, right? Like, like I'm not going to go too deeply to this one, but in this specific carousel that I share, she's talking about how like a year of building my first company, a company and filter, uh, it's been almost 12 months since I've quit my job in private equity, started Yoder company and my best brand and there's some reflections. So all she's done here is look at, okay, I'm going through this transformation where I quit my private equity job to launch this company called sour milk. You let me share it off the in the twenties of the last five months. People are going to resonate today, right? That ominous, a sweat equity favorite, a sweat equity listener, Sam. I don't know if you talked to Sam in the DM or anything. Like I'm flowers all the same. Sam was a dog. So we've had her talk for a few times at cut 30. Uh, she is meticulous about what she tests like we should 1000% have her, uh, on an episode for sweat. I agree. Like she would drop, come in here and drop it just after the game and like, not to fuck your light a little. It's, uh, been a guest for sweat. I probably like by hands down, like the best, um, their transformation was around Hank and how us is nine to five corporate jobs to start a frozen demon cheese burrito company. Here's how it's going so far, right? Like it's not only I am transforming, but I am inviting you into my transformation so that you can be a part of it as well. Okay. Next one, your team's POV. If you're going to be doing, um, content around or employee generated content, you might as well do it well and do it right and tell a very good story. So, you know, the easiest I would say people to be able to do this are creative directors, art director, art directors, creators. Like I just sent you a clip. If I, you know, we should like, as in household distribution, we should be doing this because like we're doing pieces of content every single, you know, we're doing productions every single week where it's like POV work as a creative director. And then it shows it's literally just like what we call it cut 30, like a, uh, a 10 shot where just 10 quick shots to the, with, you know, headline on top of it. That's all it is. This is a great one. POV work as a creative director shows like how a piece of like a product is made. It shows the BTS of it shows like the, the final product, right. Very easy. You could be doing this POV, you're formulating chocolate for 24 out, you know, for 24 straight out. Yeah. Right. Like there's so many ways and angles to be able to do this, but to still like this tells a story. So when we think about storytelling, we have to dumb it down or simple, uh, uh, simplified a bit so that we understand you can tell micro stories and micro stories can still perform extremely well. You don't need to do a hundred thousand dollar campaign. If you are innocent. I think, uh, you know, what you just said is probably the most key thing that holds people back is they think that storytelling equals this grandiose sort of investment that you need to, uh, you know, think about it. Right. And, and you, you do need to have a lot of different underlying strategy and you have to know kind of what works and what doesn't, but at the same time, you need to ship, you know, like you do need to just post a lot and iterate. And I mean, it almost might be more important to be meticulous about testing than it is to like put in strategy work. Right. Because as long as you can list out those variables that you're going to be testing, because that's the angle, maybe that's the hook, maybe that's the first frame, whatever it is, like eventually you're going to find something that works. Uh, the 10 shot idea. I mean, you know, that's the other case, right. Is like we, there are different formats that if you're like structuring a content strategy, you should, you know, kind of make sure you're getting footage for it. Right. Like, this is why you always want to fill B roll, but you also want to be, you know, doing a story sign from your couch or I think green screen video, whatever it is. Um, cause it just gives you that optionality, but yeah, I, it doesn't have to be such a big investment. It really can just be like the right trimming audio and wall of texts and some BTS. Tell it a great story. What you said is key. When you're starting on, you're building out a constant strategy, all these brands that are going to start doing it, go out a testing strategy first. Yeah. Do not build out a content strategy. You're not in a place to know and understand what's going to work. You've never had anything work. So therefore you need to test and figure out what works before you say, Hey, we're going to do more of this and invest all into this to determine what works. Right. So like that is absolutely key. Anyways, number two or not number two, the next one, your enemy. So Moisey Walsh, their entire play at the beginning was how can you make people despise Tide, despise all the big long G detergents. I would actually say with them, they tapped into everyone hating Kyle already too. Like there is an element of, they made them an enemy with a shared content and made an excellent job, like building the case for why Tide was evil, but there is a, um, a really big trend right now is basically someone saying the quiet part up out, you know, this is obviously the micro plastic stuff. Like this is so prominent in health and wellness is like you being a voice for like the silent majority. Yes. Right. Everyone's kind of tired of Tide and you know, the monopoly at them and gain and all these people proctoring people really have on your shelf. And so like, we kind of know that they're probably screwing you and you know, I'm going to actually vocalize that I'm going to, I'm going to give you your talking points basically. Like I'm going to do the research for you. And in this video, you're going to have now those three things that you can say your friends, like, yo, you didn't know that like Tide pods contain this microplastics that ruin your fertility or like struck your hormones. Right. So what's crazy is because of a, is exactly what you just said because of a Moisey Wash video, I've told that everybody and anybody that I know that for, if for any reason, we're on a lot of your detergent subject or just like clean products subject, I bring up the fact that, you know, that there's ingredients in Tide that are banned in New York that are banned in like two different states. They hit me back as one of the hooks. I was like, if it's banned and it's going on my body every single day, there's a problem here. And so I only buy Moisey Wash now, even though it's 40, 50 dollars. Like he did a really good job too, because not only did they stop with the, uh, or not only did they start with the enemy marketing, but he also linked into the sense. Right. So he has a multiple depth to one fence. They actually smell amazing. It smells like cologne. Yeah. Have you used it? I regret to admit on these podcasts. I'm, I'm still using like some subproctoring cables law because it's easy. Like they're the friction level is so low. Yeah. I'm, I'm a last minute essentials kind of guy. So like, you know, I don't, I don't have paper towels right. I got like, I got like three, I got like tiniest little bit of a roll is left paper towels. You know, we can live without, you can let that burn for a little bit. We haven't had paper towels in the office. I know you don't got a microwave in here. Dude. No, we ordered one and then Amazon did not deliver it. And so we had to cancel that we never ordered it again. That was the true. Yeah. Anyways, that's, that's my barrier adventure with Mosey. Fair. He's used to be on Amazon. He was on Amazon. That's where I get them. I murdered. That's, that's where I go, but I just have to have it on the subscription. Okay. The next one, your product, but specifically what you can do with it. I'm going to, I'm going to show you one of my favorite examples of this. So look at the text I just sent you. There's a, a brand called fairway village or far away, sorry, far away village. Look at these videos. Yeah. What is great. Is it this one of the most beautiful pieces of content you've ever seen? 2.7 million likes on the piece of content that I just sent you 2.1 million followers on IG like this is real. This is bro. I'm the only one. I don't know if it is or isn't, but AI sets is for tingling off. So they also have millions of views on or millions of subs on YouTube. So I have a feeling that it is real bro. Like, yeah, I mean, it goes deep 267 posts. Like it goes deep and it's supposed to be this village, right? Like maybe I should have done a little bit more research to see if this is real or not, but I don't get all that problem. Right. Huh? Is it, this is real. It's the coolest thing I've ever fucking seen. Yeah. I'm all in for sure. Welcome to our rural Azerbaijani village located near the heart of the majestic caucus mountains. Okay. So it's real. Yeah. They're, they're out in Azerbaijan. 1.8 subs on, on YouTube. Okay. Here's the eight to it out there. This is probably one of the coolest brands, like coolest pieces of content that I've seen in a while. So yeah, you would, do you have any idea what they sell? Uh, I see socks on Pintos, but I'm sorry. Yeah. But they sell knives and cutting boards. I was doing a guess like some sort of seasoning or some, some sort of like cooking adjacent product. Yeah. Right. They sell knives and cutting boards. When you consume the content, you just like, all you see is what you can do with it. Right. They're, they're cutting strawberries. They're like cutting the state. They're cutting needs. Like that is all you're witnessing. You see it on the cutting boards. You see it on the night or you see them using the night. Bro, within like three minutes, because I watched three pieces of content. I was like, I need something from, I had no idea what they sold, but later, how about you making this good? I think you have to sell something. What is it? Bro bought it all. Not all of it, but I bought a cutting board. They had a bundle. I bought some knives and I bought a cutting board and I was just like, yo, I'm only going to use this though for like my fruits. Cause I want to feel like this. You get what I'm saying? Yeah. But this is one of the coolest accounts I've probably ever seen. Yeah. They're fascinating. Yeah. Like the, in the color, the, the use of like crazy, that's scale. The fact that it does feel like AI because of the use of scale, like one of the thumbnails is just a mountain of strawberries. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? And oh, dude, it's such a good, they also do a really good job of thumbnails. None of these thumbnails really correlate to the, uh, this is an incredibly sophisticated. Yes. Operate. You know what I mean? Like they really know what they're doing. Like, I mean, we just turned towards the camera and you could see, yeah. Like they're literally creating clickable thumbnails for their IG that feel like YouTube. Right. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like that, look at how many tacos she's holding. Yeah. And everything is like very inherently like viral. Yes. So this is probably one of my favorite, favorite, uh, accounts, but again, I know this is extreme example. All the other examples have been things that anybody can do. And I still think there's lessons you can learn from this, but they're showing what you can do with the park. They never, at least that I've seen, they're not like in your face about our knives. Number three, your heritage. ALD and Jacqueline was, I was trying to do an episode without talking about them. They just do an excellent job of talking about their heritage and, and a lot of their content. So if you do have some kind of heritage or some kind of roots attached to your brand, leverage them. Right. ALD talks about his dad being from Greece. And like having Greek roots consistently in this content. Jothamus, one of Jothamus' like most viral pieces of content was when they recreated pictures that he found of his family and like them working in the farms and the fields. And they recreate that for the look book. And they told the story and added the heritage and the history attached to those photos for their next collection, which I think was called like something heritage or, you know, something along those lines. The next one, your numbers. So this is better for a zero to one brand, right. To really be able to share your numbers and, and what you're doing day to day. And like how much, uh, like if you're inviting people into your journey, they're going to want to know like the transparency and the numbers behind what you're actually doing to feel like they're a part of me. Bad Ombedist does a really good job of this. I'll also say they, you know, this is part eight or part nine of their series. And what's interesting is when I read you their first hook, which was, I just left my nine to five corporate drive to start a pros and bean and cheese burrito company. Here's how it's going so far. That was the first, that was hook number one. Hook number two, the new hook is I'm Hank. And 12 months ago, I quit my nine to five to start frozen bean and cheese burrito company. My wife, Sam, and we sold 116,000 burritos in our first year. Crush our projecting, crush our projections, returns yet. We're still broke. It's taken the journey that you know, that they've had, and it kind of transformed it into a way where it's like, okay, we package the last year, each of where we're at now, or we're going to continue this year. A lot of people killed the series off. Super interesting how they're testing here. But where I'm saying is the numbers part of it is very interesting. They are sharing that they've sold 116,000 burritos. And so as a fan, you're like, go you guys. And then they're like, but we're still broke. And it's like, still go you guys. But shit, like, I want to know more, right? That curiosity gap is strong. We talked about poor boy, poor boy coffee years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, a year ago. And he literally has a series where he it's called the numbers. And he just says, uh, gross revenue and number of cups sold. Like that is his series because he compliments his founder series, right? Where he's like, Hey, I'm trying to bootstrap my coffee brand and see how big I can get it. So your numbers is something that you can, you can play around. If I want to do, you know, if Derek series, I thought about for me is like taking our creative studio from seven figures to eight figures, right? That would, can 100% be something that, you know, that I could people be interested to me to follow along for that exact reason, right? Because now they're gonna, you're inviting hate to like, I think with that, like, people could be like, rooting against you to make it for a kind of time for it's underrated, you know, as in inviting the haters. 100%. The next one is your story. So either the problem you found or the solution you needed. So this is one of the most interesting ones that I've, I've found on, on the internet, which is this, uh, this girl, Latier. So she used to make rockets for NASA. Now she bakes. And I said hot. Yeah, it came out. Uh, but accidentally just, just the concept of scientist baker, not anything about the physical. Dude. And her hook is incredible. It's something along the lines of like, and now making, uh, I used to sketch rockets for a living and now for NASA or something like that. And now I'm, I'm creating pastries with the same precision that I did rockets, but at least she is telling her story, which is the problem that she found is a problem inside of herself. She felt like she was an imposter living this double life. Right. And so that double life caused her to start baking and then taking that same precision that she was, she was giving to these rockets that she was developing and sketching for NASA into, you know, the things that she's baking. The next one, again, we'll go to Moisey wash, but Moisey wash did one where it was like, why had I started laundry detergent friend at 23? You know, he talks about the problems that he faced with like, he would going to, uh, uh, he would go down like the laundry detergent aisle and automatically get a headache from the set. So therefore he wanted to start something that wouldn't give you a headache. Wouldn't give me a headache. If I'm getting the headache, then of course the ingredients have to be bad to the point where I have a migrate. Um, chunky fit cookie, which we both know them. Scott was a really good friend. Their angle is to do starting next big, uh, big protein cookie brand. Right. And so like, you can just look at your story and your story is always evolving, which is good for you because that means you're, you're, you're never going to run out of content ideas. Like they went from doing it in their kitchen to then a small ghost kitchen to now like in a giant kitchen. Like that's a whole narrative you can build around. Yeah. The rabbit hole for people to fall in through. Yeah, bro. And then like, he's also, uh, he's, he's currently engaged getting married all of a sudden, like it changes when you go from engaged to married and have a married man, build a couple, right? Like all these dynamics change how you approach your company and pre-unchange your day to day. And so I make that all relatable to a new set of people. All right. Um, poor boy coffee is another one. His series was I'm starting a coffee brand to see how big, how big I can bootstrap it. Essentially. All this is, is, Hey, I'm going to, I have a story. I have this goal that I'm trying to do. I'm going to take my goal and I'm going to position it as a story and then bring people on along for that. Um, your customers are also a story that you can develop around. So pinks, pink, pinks windows. So there's a series that they do. That's called cop claim where they go around ATX. They go around different cities and they do free, free clean for the people that need help. This is an easy way to take either take your community or take your customers and turn them into a story where I do think they could do the series better. I will say that they could do it a lot better. Um, what I think they should do is like, they should try to go to other privileged places and do like these, these top of the memory clean, but they should get the person first reacting as the hook. Like, oh my God, like I needed something like this. Then a quick, like, okay, perfect. Like I'm going to clean this up or I'm going to clean this up. We're going to trim this up, whatever, or not trim. They just do the windows, but things like that, they should, they should foreshadow within the hook and then go into like a lot of like the sat spine aspects of cleaning something. But this is a great example. Like you can take your customers, you can take your community, you can take the people involved in the company and create a series around it where you have unlimited stories. The fact that they're going to cop clean, um, every single week, they have unlimited stories with this. Right. The next one is your experience. So there's a restaurant that's gone viral many times. Osteria. You know what I'm talking about? I think you talked about them before, right? Yes. Their storytelling is very, very cinematic. It's very beautiful, but it's all about the experience. It's all about how the food is prepared, what it looks like on plate, then the ambiance of the location. And so their story is literally their experience from what someone orders to then it being, you know, uh, arriving on their plate, hitting their table, and just the ambiance that they take in. So if you have some kind of experience that people are going to be a part of, figure out again, how you can, you bring that story to life or sorry, that experience to life through a story. So the next one is your lessons. The, my favorite is softies burgers. Have you seen them? Well, I'm putting you on a day. I mean, these are just, you know, deep in the corner, in the trenches of IG. This is, yeah, this is that algo that hits you at like 1130. You're like, I need to wake up at seven. But I'm in a great algo right now. I don't want to find my way out. Yeah. You know, like, and when that happens, this is terrible. I'll scroll until I fall asleep. Like, until I fall asleep, like within my, yeah, holding my phone. I just realized you have a mustache. It's kind of at that stage where it's like, it's not immediately. This is crazy. This is breaking news. It's a, yeah. I'm never slowly with a mustache. It doesn't, it looks good. I'm, are you, how long are you in people? I don't know where things go. You know, there's a lot of twists and currents in life and, and my parents that might be coming soon. I bet you don't know. Oh my God. I got the nearest activations on, on Saturday night. I remember when you, um, this is actually probably a story. Go pop. When you just started nibble and like, things started working well. Oh, I hit that. T-flight it. Yeah. Yeah. And it was like, one of the first things you did, it was like, you, you went and got your teeth, like, and I did a professional thing and blow it. It was just signing for, you could probably go to where I'm up. So you could probably go into our app, the chip skype. You could probably go into our episode and like find, cause you were cheesing for like two episodes. I'm like, I was looking straight at it. Yeah. You were like, let me hit the intro Alex. So episode number 32. Uh, yeah. Uh, but check out softies burgers, stove burgers. You got to stop. I'm just trying to hit people with examples, bro, that are, uh, that are not just fashion. We tend to lean more towards fashion and muddry. So softies burgers, this burger joint that started as a, just as a fruit truckers, like a pop up. Look at their episodes that they do, the episodic show. Uh, it's like episode one, my new problems episode number two, um, growing pain. So number three, right. And so, but what they're doing is they're taking the lessons that they've been burning across building this company and launching a retail spot, which wasn't what they, you know, what they did in the past. And they're turning those lessons into the stories that they're telling the world. Right. And they're doing it a very, very, uh, honestly engaging way. Like if you look at their Oaks, like one of them for growing pains, they're both working, like working a kitchen and they look at the camera and they're like, really, you want to film a video right now? Like you see how busy we are. Dude, when did he get here? You think we have time to do a video right now? Yeah. Um, but it also brings to like the idea of growing pains, right? Like, yo, we're deep in the foundation later now. Yeah. We're, we're getting tested right now. We're deep in the company right now, trying to, trying to do our thing. Okay. The next one, your process. So Loewe does actually vary with Java ghost. They have like this glass blowing kind of, uh, piece or piece made from, from glass blowing that is like exceptional. And they have this carousel where they just show how it was, it was crafted from beginning to end dude. And it's like absolutely beautiful. They also have another carousel where they're actually one of the best at creating carousels where like they're walking around with a hand car, pushing all the materials to go get it developed. Right. Like your process is your store, which your product stored. And so therefore you have a robust process and it can even be like, you can look at Soppy's burgers. I know I'm talking about just clothing in that example. If you could look at Soppy's burger and go, okay. If you're, if you're getting meat from the best places. Yeah. I know I said, bro, like, it might, you know, sometimes you say this, that's it's in your head. Someone's got to make you define now, you know, like what, where is the best place to take me? Don't be right now. We're right. So if you're sourcing meat, I'm fine. If you're sourcing quality meat from different farms, it's organic, it's pesticides free, pesticides free, like that is a story in itself. Right. But that's your process. So the process of how I get my grades. So then your plate is multiple stories. Okay. You have the farmers, what the cows eat, what, what makes it organic, how it's pesticide free. Right. Like these are all stories that you'd be developing around the process to then be able to just, uh, showcase the poll. So the next one is reproduction. So I'm going to send you this video from the lady that has just 75,000 lights as 1.5 million views. It's an absolute banger video. I'm sorry. I said in two things, but look at the one and it's the story of this shirt that is made of orange is literally the hook of that. What if I told you this was made of orange, New Zealand, and the shirt's just like right on a hanging on a tree. There's an entire production process that has to, that they have to go into detail about, well, guess what the world produces this many oranges and those orange peels every year aren't used. And so X, Y, Z thing. And they go into like this ridiculous detail to show how they're making a shirt out of orange. Talk about luxury when you're, when you're making shirts out of oranges, but like showing that production process, let's say the shirts, $500. Like, I don't know if it's luxury without the story. It's not, it's kind of the takeaway. It's 100% the takeaway. And it's how the story is positioned here too. That is so key because you could either be like, you're making shirts out of oranges. You're broke. But then like the way that comes in is like, no, no, no, we're making shirts out of oranges. You're rich. Right. And like, there's such a positioning in play gear, showing the process and how many details and how many like things need to happen to be able to do that, that make it luxury. So your production process, there's a huge angle that you can take here. I know you're short on time. So I'm going to spin through the last, they're speaking in the last way. So now we go fiction. So one, you can create a series. You could create a fictional character that you build a, you know, a story around. We have one that's, that's coming out with a brand called crafted that's called waterside wisdom. And it's like this uncle, like rich uncle, young nephew there. The nephew always goes to hang out, hang out with the uncle. The uncle always gives him like life advice. And so they're playing like a game of chess while the uncle like gives advice, life advice, business advice, relationship advice to the nephew. Right. But it's like shot, true luxurious is shot in front of like Austin, like hails in the background, extremely beautiful. But we created this fictional scene world and character to tell the story associated with crafted about values, about time, about, about being timeless about laundry, right? Low house does this as well with their glasses where they like this wise old guys, their main character and they transport all the stories through him by transporting all the wisdom through him. Right. That's a, that's a great example. Uh, with tier, we created that scientist. So we created this fictional character where the fictional character was dropped off into the desert and he wasn't able to return home until he developed the right shoe. So he was in the lab and they, they had test subjects, right? We created this fictional character to the point where we could have created a completely dedicated account to that fictional character. So when we talk about stories, it's like you can create this fictional character and then tell the stories through that individual late checkout. There's the same thing. Every character is this fictional character. Late checkouts, the brain where the entire world of the brass video, literally. Yeah. Where the entire world of the brand takes place within the hotel. So all the characters are based off. Yes. That stay at the hotel. So they're the painter. They have the bell boy, right? These are all characters. They build campaigns around, but they all embody what the brand stands for from like this creative style that like really portrays a specific lifestyle. Um, there's a brand that I think is going to absolutely pop off with one of the coolest websites I've actually ever seen, but they created a series called the rotors man. Is that how you pronounce that? Their whole angle is for those who become more hashtag engineer for success. Rotorist world, rotary world. I'll do two things. Number one being they created this series called the rotors male. The rotors man is an individual that embodies the type of people that are going to shop at this brand to watch. They just have a lot of sense art guy. Uh, I think so. Yes. And so all these fictional characters are created to illustrate the values of, of the brand. So if you look at the episodes, right, let me pull it back up again. If you look at the episodes and you read the captions for each one of these videos, is this a launch brand? Yeah. So rotors man confident within while helping others when that's episode two, episode one was rotors man loyal to one kind to everyone. This is a series that takes place inside of an elevator and there's multiple people within that elevator and the rotors man, you know, does something to illustrate or to bring to life the idea of loyal to one kind to everyone. Second part hit their website and tell me this is from out. Yeah. Rotors world. Is this not like, it's not a functional website from the POV of like, would I want to navigate this site every single time? No. But when you actually talk about it being sick, it is hands down one of the coolest websites. And we'll talk about world building. There's a lot of AI too. Yeah. But they're doing it in a way where it's like the us cruise. You know what I mean? Like it's actually really, really cool. Um, so again, if you have these specific values as a brand, you can help illustrate those, those, uh, values through a fictional character that you identify as example, the rotors man. Last one that I have is this brand oldest road. Um, we created a series with them called campfire stories where we brought in like this fictional storyteller and that individual is telling either stories of, well, what are their customer segments is like luxury travelers or not like luxury travels, but like people that travel to take timeless pieces with them. Right. And so in that, we created campfire stories where it's like these same people telling some of the crazy stories that everybody has crazy travel stories. Right. And some of them have like the wildest travel stories. And so we're, we're taking all, all of them in from, from different customers. And then we're going and going to a range. You're creating like this campfire and literally creating like this storytelling setting. And he's a storyteller for all of these. And so we can create this fictional, uh, storyteller, to be able to tell these stories. And so this gives you the ability to be very, very creative. Like when I look at the nonfiction side, this is very much like zero to one, zero to five territory. And once you start really building brand equity with people, it doesn't mean you can't do those things. If you do them, you just have to do them at a very, very high level where you're, you're building a fiction world that you can add those layers in there. Right. Like as much as I love canned goods clothing, they're never going to be seen in the same light as Jacquemus or even as an L wood in this case, because of the, the luxury of the content, the production value of the content, but where they're at right now, it's exactly what they should be doing. But in two years, let's say if they're as big as L wood is now, they can definitely go still tell the same stories, but through a much higher production lens. When you get into the fictional side, that is when you can do a lot more world building. You could introduce these characters. You could introduce these settings. You can, you can introduce fake characters. You could introduce real characters. You could build world and sets around real characters, et cetera. You can still do these things on a budget. There's a brand called currently running who does this on a budget. Like he's a single, single guy, like building this brand. But at the same time, he is a cinematographer. He's a photographer, right? And so he has this upper hand on everybody else that he's competing against that. He can take like the most beautiful visuals. He can tell stories because he can do it himself. He doesn't need three people. He doesn't need five people. Right. And so all of that to say, like, when somebody does tell you storytelling is the best marketing, listen to this episode and do everything that this episode says, because you execute against the ideas here and how to position a story. And then the actual examples of like, you could just take your reasoning for doing something and turn that into the story. You can take your transformation or somebody on your team's POB and transform that into the story. You have endless stories that you can build around. If you have these very, very in the more stories that you tell next year, just the higher probability of you winning and you out competing the person who's leveraging AI, who's you just doing UGC, et cetera, and not telling these amazing stories associated to a player. Yeah, that's all I got. I know that was a lot. So I appreciate you bearing with me. No, that's a good one to bookmark and review for people. All right, y'all.