Stop studying the biggest accounts in your niche

Doors to Short Form Launch close Sunday night (5 days left).

The idea research process (mentioned below) is the first thing I teach you inside the program, so you never have to start a video from a blank page.

Join us here if you want to run it with me.

Most people think all of their videos need to come from completely original ideas.

The truth is, you don't need to approach content in this way.

What you need is to find what's already working in your niche, break it into the six core components, and remix with your own perspective.

You still want to infuse your own creativity in the remixing process, but it doesn’t take as much outside-the-box thinking as people typically assume.

If you talk to any content strategist or operator of a large personal brand, it’s unanimous that researching the top accounts in your niche is a winning strategy.

However…the big mistake people make is that they study the wrong accounts.

Most people start by looking at the biggest accounts in their space.

They watch someone with 3 million followers, remake their best video, get a fraction of the views, and decide it only worked because of who posted it.

They're half right.

Mega channels get most of their performance from name and face recognition.

So their best video tells you a lot about their existing personal brand value...and very little about the idea itself.

The videos worth remaking come from accounts between 10,000 and 250,000 followers (especially those at the lower end), where the idea has to carry the video.

And inside those accounts, you're looking for what I call an outlier...any video that performed 5x+ better than the average for that channel.

For example, a 30,000 view video on an account that usually gets 5,000 views tells you more than a million view video on an account that always gets a million.

Here's how to find relevant outliers quickly:

1. Find one account between 10,000 and 250,000 followers that serves the same audience you do

2. Scroll their recent videos and note the usual view count

3. Find the video that did 5x+ that

4. Write down one thing you'd add that they didn't mention

(You don't need to have posted anything to do this exercise)

This process works effectively across every niche.

Here are four people from my program that did this well in four very different spaces...

• Chris designs luxury gyms. He went from 18,749 followers and a plateau in June to 24,900 now, with a video past 390,000 views on TikTok (Alex Hormozi follows him).

• Joanie cooks for people managing blood sugar and joined in June to cross 10,000 on Instagram. She's at 23,900 there now, with three videos past a million views.

• Logan is an artist. He's at 97,000 followers with a video past 3 million views.

• Nick sells digital products. His account usually did a few thousand views per video...then one did 146,000. That's an outlier, and if you served his audience, that's the video you'd study.

If you research the wrong accounts, you'll copy videos that worked because of the creator's fame...and every video you build on them inherits a moderately good idea.

Moderately good ideas + small unproven account = losing video

In Short Form Launch, I take you through my entire ideation process to build a watchlist of 20 relevant channels in your niche, run the research through Claude and Sandcastles, and you leave with your validated topic shortlist of winning ideas.

If you want to learn how to run this idea research process with me, join us here.

PS - Doors close Sunday 10/25. Only 5 days left to enroll and I will never run this program again at this price.

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