Here's how to get people addicted to your content

There are 6 levels of dopamine that get released when someone watches a video.

I call this, The Dopamine Ladder.

The higher you’re able to ascend someone up this ladder in a video, the more hooked they become.

Get them to the top, and you’ve built a cult-like fan who will watch literally everything you make without even knowing what the video is about.

This is the ultimate psychological storytelling framework. Please, only use it for good.

Level 01: Stimulation

The lowest rung on the ladder.

To get someone to release level one dopamine, all you have to do is create a visual stun gun in the first 2 seconds with some colors, motion, brightness, or any visual that stops their scroll immediately.

This is table stakes, but important to capture their focus and have a chance at ascending them higher.

Nick DiGiovanni consistently crushes with this in his videos…there’s always something visual happening in the first 2 seconds of his videos. 

Level 02: Captivation

In addition to the visual stun gun, you also need to create a curiosity loop that captivates the viewer’s attention.

To do this, you need to say/show something that opens a question in their head and makes them desperate to keep watching.

Beast is the gold standard at doing this and he engineers his intros to always have some crazy challenge at the beginning that you feel compelled to keep watching watching.

Level 03: Anticipation

To get continue ascending to this level, not only do you have to ask an interesting question, but you also have to get the viewer to anticipate what the answer might be. The more invested they become in figuring out the answer, the longer they'll watch.

If you’re a music nerd, Charlie Puth’s breakdowns are a great example of this. He goes “7 levels of why” deep on questions like why people say “Gosh, I feel like I’ve heard this song before” and the anticipation of where he’s headed keeps you watching.

Level 04: Validation

This is where you finally provide an answer to their question and close the loop. But in order for this to be effective and the dopamine to be released, the answer needs to be non-obvious. If they could have guessed what the answer was themselves, then the dopamine will never release. 

Hormozi’s coaching videos are great at this. People ask him a question, you think he’ll tell them to do one thing, but a lot of the time he tells them the exact opposite of what “conventional wisdom” says they should do. 

This guy asks how to make $100M and Hormozi tells him to kill one of his businesses to get there. Counterintuitive, and therefore the dopamine releases.

Level 05: Affection

This is when the viewer stops just liking the video and starts liking you, the messenger, over the message. This is the transition from audience to fanbase.

Robert Irwin has over 9.5M followers and gets 3.5M views on a video about a boa constrictor stuck in a carport. I guarantee you 3.5M people didn’t care that much about the snake and it’s injured tail…but they do have an affection for Robert. So when they saw his face, they didn’t scroll away.

He has ascended beyond the message.

Level 06: Revelation

This is rarified air and where superfandom is born.

This happens when a viewer is such a fan that just seeing your name or face makes them want to watch, without knowing anything about what the video is going to be about. At this level, you are the hook.

This is why Kylie Jenner can post a “make coffee with me” video with almost 40M views…

Climbing to this part of the ladder consistently is super rare and you don’t need to be here to have huge success with content.

Bottom line: The dopamine ladder is the psychological framework that explains how so many top creators build cult-like personal brands. 

Building a cult-like personal brand doesn’t even require levels 5 and 6 for 99% of the population. It’s stacking levels 1 through 4 consistently, video after video, and then maybe some day levels 5 and 6 kick in on their own.

If you want more examples on how to apply the Dopamine Ladders framework in your content, I made a deep dive on YouTube breaking in down with great visuals. You can watch that here.

Keep going 🫡

PS – I manually curated 105 Collections of top short-form video examples across the best 22 formats types, 47 visual hooks types, 30 editing styles, and 6 signature series categories. Each Collection has several videos that you can use as examples when making content. All users can access them on the Collections tab in Sandcastles here