How we solved social media for a health food chef

10 weeks ago, I started working with Joanie in my Short Form Academy program.

She is a health food chef and blogger that makes videos about healthy recipes.

Her goal was to use short-form video (on IG and Tiktok) to build an authority-driven personal brand in the “sugar-friendly” recipe space, with the goal of monetizing through blog traffic and eventually, other paid offers.

When she started the program, she was at ~5K followers on IG and averaging about 2K views/video.

10 weeks later, she has:

• 20K+ followers on IG

• 5 different videos above 400,000+ views

• Averaging 102,000 views per video while being in the program (non-outlier average is up 5x from prejoining)

When she got her first breakout outlier she said, “I had to check my blog revenue analytics to make sure something wasn’t broken because there was so much traffic”

She is crushing and it started working fast!

There were several key unlocks that helped Joanie get this level of explosive growth in such a short period of time.

The transformation came from a combination of my short form system curriculum and our live weekly SFA group calls.

In just a few weeks of learning my approach to content, Joanie was able to start incorporating many of the core principles on her own.

But the real secret sauce was combining these new fundamentals with our 1:1 video reviews in the live group calls.

As I reviewed Joanie’s first couple videos, I immediately noticed patterns in the local winners that I thought we could easily amplify with a few improvements.

As soon as she built-in these recommendations, the views skyrocketed.

Without giving away all of her best stuff, each of these were things we identified on the SFA live calls and worked almost immediately once she implemented a fix to them.

1. Ideas - typically videos fail because the topics are too narrow, too conventional, or not curiosity inducing enough. We started mashing together opposites (e.g., conventionally sugary foods that had low sugar, expensive foods made cheaply) and it worked super well in her niche

2. Hooks - this was the biggest improvement opportunity for Joanie. We noticed her hooks were too slow, too unclear, and not attention grabbing enough. We optimized for all of this and she now has a hook formula that works consistently 

3. Scriptwriting - Joanie’s videos are super natural and come off extremely authentic. Most of them are scripted, but it doesn’t feel robotic or forced (and it was important we didn’t lose this). All we did was tighten up some of the speed to value and build in additional contrast loops and they instantly elevated

4. Editing - Joanie has a cool editing style where she switches between camera angles all within her kitchen while she makes the recipes. She usually voices over the videos separate from the filming which creates a clean workflow and easy process for replication. We focused more effort on making sure the hook clips follow our formula and it crushes

Now the video recipe for each business owner is going to be completely different from niche to niche.

But the easiest way to find these optimizations is by working with someone that is able to analyze the nonobvious patterns to help direct more targeted experimentation.

Whether that person is me, some other coach, or the Sandcastles MCP in Claude, this is a critical step most business owners need to take if they are stuck with low-performing content.

Btw, I have no doubt Joanie will be at 50K+ followers by the end of the year if she stays consistent and on this track.