hiiii friend,
eeeeeek i’m so excited to be starting this newsletter with you. this is something i’ve been pondering for a while and i feel so lucky to have you here for the very first one!!
as you know by now, this is where i’m going to be sharing everything i’m trialling on my channels every single week. if you’ve stumbled upon my content recently, you might have noticed i’ve been playing around with a series called ‘25 things i’ve had to unlearn at 25’. so let’s talk about why i started this series, what i’ve been testing, and what i’ve learnt so far…..
a bit of background:
i’ve been making content for six years, and for a lot of that time, most of it has revolved around alistair and i. that has been great, but we definitely fell into the humour and entertainment niche. honestly, it’s something we could have doubled down on and i’m sure that would have been amazing.
but over the last few months, i realised that it wasn’t really the niche that was going to help me build the community that i wanted to build long-term. i love being funny, but i wanted to find a way to make people feel like they’re part of my life, not just watching it like you watch a show like Friends - you’re entertained, you have a laugh, and move on.
i’m on this road to a million followers on instagram, and i realised that by the time i get there, i wanted people to know me for something. something that would position me to do more speaking gigs, talk to business owners, or grow this newsletter you’re reading right now. i enjoy that world and want to move in that direction, which led me to lifestyle content, because you can educate and entertain people at the same time, and to me it feels like the most natural place to take my content next.
what i wanted to find out:
….all that to say, i decided to start creating serialised content ((((content that is clearly a series)))) as a way to flex something different and try moving in the direction of the lifestyle niche. i think we all kind of understand by now that serialised content is a really great way to capture a new audience quite quickly. people know it’s a series and so they’re like oh if i like this series, i have to follow to get the next part. as long as there’s value in the one video where you catch them, you don’t even have to entice them to follow. they just will.
i started looking at who’s done this really well recently, and the one creator that i saw had a lot of success was chloe shih’s ‘30 lessons by 30’. i wanted to know if i could look at what she did, figure out why it worked so well, and replicate her results.
all that got me to this hypothesis:
a serialised lifestyle series will get me to 1 million
followers on instagram
i was honestly a bit scared to change the style of content i was posting after so many years of skits, but i knew it was time to try. so once i had this hypothesis in my mind, it was time to start trialling it out.
getting ready to test out my theory:
here’s how my planning process went:
i started by looking at exactly what chloe did. i got my ai to break down the full structure she used in her videos - what did she do? how did they work?
my ai also took the data of each of her videos and compared the worst performing ones to the best performing ones
then my ai and i started making hypotheses on why the better performing videos were better performing (((obviously i didn’t have the data on her retention rates or how many followers she got from each video, so that part we had to guess)))
i took a video chloe made about how she grew to a million followers and got my ai to pick it apart
i probably spent a couple of hours each day over a span of 3-4 days just researching, analysing, and chatting with claude.
in that process, i also realised that when you actually rewatch those lessons now that it’s been a year or so, you can tell that the internet has caught up. she is really lucky because she made those scripts before everyone else was doing AI scripts, but now everyone can produce the same level of storytelling. so i knew i couldn’t just use her structure because it just sounded like every other person who decided to copy her.
a big part of this process was figuring out then, ok, what’s my tone of voice? because that would have to be my edge on everyone else who is doing this style of series. i kept going around and around and around trying to get the first script and then i finally had to just go screw this. i just need to get testing at this point…
(((btw, your tone of voice is the only thing that can’t be copied - remember that!!)))
want the full breakdown?
ok, now you've got the hypothesis i tested this week. here's where you find out exactly what i tried, how it went & what i'm doing next (the stuff I don't share anywhere else)
upgrade now