I had heard stories of people making millions of dollars a year getting creators to create short form content on Tik Tok and Instagram, but I didn't know how they were doing it. I had Cody Schneider come and teach us how to actually make this happen. He shared all the tools you need to use, how to manage it, why creators with zero followers are better than creators with 100,000 followers. If you stick to the end of this episode, you will understand how to make the most of Tik Tok, Instagram reels, short form, everything in between. Specifically, valuable for people who want to build a mobile app, e-commerce, you name it. Enjoy the episode and like for the algorithm and comment for my soul. [Music] Cody, by the end of this episode, what are people going to take out of it? Totally. You're going to walk away from this understanding how for you page content has changed the relationships between brands and influencers or creators. what's the difference between an influencer and a creator and then how to basically execute on influencer or sorry on creator marketing uh and to actually like measure the ROI and like why it makes sense to do this in comparison to just going and doing like paid ads on a channel. So, and today we're going to talk about short form specifically, right? Because we've talked about long form on the pod together, but today we're going to talk about short form, right? Today we're going to talk about short form, how it fits into your marketing strategy and how this can be used for, you know, like the apps that you're building with that you're vibe coding, um, and what types of companies that this works well for, um, and what type of what types of companies this doesn't work well for. So, cool. Uh, let's get into it. I will say I am somewhat skeptical of short form versus long form. I'm just I mean, as you know, I love You're biased though, baby. You're biased. I know. So, I hope that by the end of this I'm going to be Mr. Short Form. So, let's see. I think it can work. Again, it there's certain types of companies that this is best for. Um, this is best for like social app or sorry, u like BTOC applications, right? So, like mobile apps. Um, this is best for um like products that have one killer feature that they're doing. Um, so think about like something like an incogn, right? where it's like data brokers are selling your emails, right? Like something like that. Um, this company like, you know, basically blocks the sale of your their data bro like that that type of thing where it's like simple. Um, it's it's it's way better. What this isn't good for is something where there's like a learning curve and that needs to have like more of a, you know, a long form u uh like kind of upskill on how to use the product if that makes sense. So yeah, but cool. To start, let's just talk about like creators versus influencer marketing. I talked to so many boomers and Gen X that are like followers, man. Like they don't have anything. Why are we working with them? And it kills me because that's not how the internet works anymore whatsoever. So social has evolved. Tik Tok changed everything. Um it basically took it from a who you follow and your social graph is how you get served content to what you're interested in. It's going to understand you better than yourself and it's basically just going to give you this like, you know, unlimited drip feed of brain rot that's going to keep you on platform as much as possible. So why do they do this? And that is the answer is because it keeps you on platform longer than when it's just social graph content. So people can say, "Yeah, I missed the old Instagram where it's like I just would see my friends post." News flash, they are there to make money. They need to make the only way they make money is by selling your attention. And to keep your attention the best right now is by basically showing you content from this for you page algorithm that is most likely uh to keep you present, most likely to keep you on on this. And all of them are doing this now, right? Like if you look at Twitter, if you look at Instagram reels, if you look um at LinkedIn, if you look at YouTube, um they're all for you page content where there's this discovery mechanism that's in it. So as a as a um as like a brand that's thinking about this as a marketing channel, you need to focus on really like the creators are the value that exists. like somebody that understands your niche and how to get like views and traction within the category that you're in is going is the most valuable part of this. I don't really care if an influencer like and and we can just break down the numbers, right, Greg? So like but say I go and like this influencer has uh we'll say a 100,000 followers, right? And here's this creator and I'm not even they don't even have they have zero followers when I start working with them, right? Um, but I'm going to break down like why this works. So, the influencer, say I go and I pay them, you know, they're they're going to charge me whatever. We'll say two grand for a post, right? Or something ridiculous. And the idea traditionally is that like, oh, I would be tapping into the trust of their audience. People like, and all of our data supports this, people do not make purchasing decisions largely off of like influencers. They make them off of creators that are consistently talking about these things. Influencers only work if you're at like a ma massive scale, like you're like a Kim Kardashian or something like that, but there's a reason that they're going and making their own products to sell to their their audiences that they've cultivated because they know how valuable the audience is, right? Like for those brand deals. Um, so the breakdown here, say I paid them 2,000. In contrast, I'm and we'll say that the post that's for like one post and you know it's a it's a one out of 10 that a post has some virality, right? Like we we know you play this game like with YouTube like or and all the other content that you do out of all you know out of all the content that I publish, one of them will will outperform. It'll be the outlier to the rest of them. And so if I'm only getting one at bat and I know that it's one out of 10, right? there's only a 10% chance that that thing actually like is an outlier from a content standpoint. And so maybe this thing gets, you know, and this is not like unrealistic, only 30,000 views, right? In contrast, if I go work with a creator and the payment for that creator, right? So we're going to just like break this down. So the followers uh is 10,000, cost is 2,000, and post views uh is 30,000. In contrast, if I work with a creator and I pay them $900 a month to do a post per day, Sam Alman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so, too. Now, I think that you can look at trends uh to basically figure out uh what are the startup ideas you should be building. So, that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by highquality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building and then we hand it on a you know silver platter for you to go check out. Um, we do have a few paid plans that, you know, take it to the next level. Uh, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it. But you can start for free ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it on Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube shorts. So across all the channels and I know that 10% of those 30 posts, right? So 30 times 0.1 is are going to just outperform the rest of them. It's a greater likelihood that I get a better return on that $900 than I get on this 2,000. And the only reason that this works is because it's for you page content, right? It's because the algorithm is just going to show content that's most likely to keep the person on the platform. They don't care where it's coming from. That's how a creator with zero followers, right, can actually like do this. And as a brand, this is like what people do. This is what you should be doing is you go find creators within your niche that are already posting content in your category. You reach out to them and you're like, "Hey, I'll pay you 900 a month to post a video per day across all the channels. They're going to create a brand new account, right? So imagine it's like example company uh like Alley, right? and like whoever the creator's like name is and they're what you're going to see is they're going to figure out a format that outperforms the rest and then they double down on that format over and over and over again basically remixing it and from this what ends up happening is I'll go like one of these videos will pop and say one of those videos goes and it gets me a 100,000 views right so when we break down the CPM which is the cost per thousand views. This is this old march marketing metric, right? Um the cost per thousand views ends up being way cheaper for the creator marketing than it does for the influencerled marketing even though the influencer has more followers. And so this is the arbitrage that exists between creators and the influencers. The other thing we have to think about here though is if I just took that same money, that $900 and I took that to Facebook and I paid that $900, right? The average CPM on Facebook is about $6 depending on which like category you're in. So of that 900, right, I would only get 150,000 impressions. Okay? So, as long as the creator has a couple of these that hit, and we'll say maybe in aggregate they do 500,000 impressions, right? So, I'm paying $900 for 500,000 impressions. So, the cost per,000 impressions is going to be uh a $180. So, we'll say $2, right? So, I'm getting a CPM by working with these creators. I'm getting a CPM that's cheaper than what I could pay on Facebook. And this is the real like arbitrage that's here. This is why people are are like obsessed over this, are doing this, etc. Like, you know, you go down the list. And the the the other piece of this is you don't work with just one creator. You work with like five to 10 of them. And there's this compound learning effect that happens. So, if I have a video going a video a day going out from five, you know, 10 different creators, that means that I have uh 10 different videos that are dropping. And of those 10 videos, one is going to hit, one is going to be an outlier. Like, it's like just, you know, based on the math. I take that learning and I share that with all my other creators. And then it creates this growth flywheel where there's like more surface area for learning on the like of of of um like what content types are most likely going to create uh uh basically reach for the for the product. And so that's kind of the like theory behind it. Now we'll get into the actual like pro like application. But before we do that questions I can try to answer. I mean I would love to see some examples of like have you seen this work? Yes. Like is it just theory or or does it does it work? 100% it works. And it's just like the again like we we've talked about this in other videos like you're looking for marketing arbitrage. Like if I can pay say again like we'll do Tik Tok, right? Like if the Tik Tok CPM is $8 to get in front of people, but I can get in front of them for $2, right, by doing creator marketing. Like that's a better allocation of the budget, the limited resources that I have, right? That's the whole game that we're playing here. Um, now the the challenge is finding the creators that are like most likely to do this, but or sorry, most likely to actually create people to go and sign up for the product, but the we can like show an example of like one. Um, so my friend runs this company. It's called like Focus Tree, and this is like literally their exact strategy is they find these creators and that are in like uh I don't know what you would call it like self uh like they basically use this. It's like an app where it's like you turn it on when you're studying and it like it's like a it's like a don't use your phone type of app, right? Like a like a productivity app. Um, so this is their exact strategy. I know Lauren has like scaled from like zero to it's like two million users or something like that now. I I I don't know since the last time I talked to him like where where it's at, but this is how this can be used. And again, it's all you're looking for is these outlier videos and then sharing that with your entire team, right? So this is just one of the like thousands of Tik Tok or sorry the hundred of hundreds of Tik Tok uh usernames that are basically uh in this creator like you know ecosystem that he's using. So why does this work? The product is included within the content. You're getting it at a cheaper cost than if you were paying uh Tik Tok directly for those ads. And then uh you also have this learning mechanism where it's basically these creators are using the uh the learnings from everybody else to go and create more content. The best performers, you take those, you turn those into paid ads as well. It basically turns into like a UGC content form for your company. Um so you find the winners, pull those out, put ad spend behind them. They're going to if they work organically, they're also going to work uh in a paid setting. So also organic always works better than paid. Just like think about it, right? You know, people don't love to buy things from a paid ad. They'd much prefer to buy it from, you know, content that feels organic. And that's what this feels like. I think like an old analogy to this strategy is like uh you know buying meta ads is almost like you're buying a billboard in a busy town square and you're hoping that people are going to look up at the billboard and then they're going to convert versus what this is is like you're almost giving out flyers, value ad flyers around here's like the 10, you know, the 10 the the 10 highest rated restaurants in this area and like one of them is your restaurant and it's like, "Oh, thanks for this like value ad information, friend." Totally. Totally. And this is actually the best performing ads, right? Is when it feels like it's native content on the platform. And so like we more and more like I'm trying to make the ads look like they they were edited on an iPhone, right? They were like recorded on an iPhone, dropped into Cap Cut, and then like edited in Cap Cut on an iPhone or edited literally in the Instagram app on the iPhone. Right. So, recorded on an iPhone 5S. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that that's like uncomfortable to a lot of brands, right, to use media like that because they're like, "Oh, we want to do this like super sexy like, you know, be like shooting it with like a red camera." And it's like, "We don't need to do that, right? Like literally, we can hire some like 20-year-old creator that's just trying to like pay for school. And this is how these creators function, right? It's like they'll have brand deals with multiple companies. So, say they're working with five different companies. They're making five grand a month while they're going to college. They have to post five videos a day. That's nothing for them. That's the whole angle here. This is like why they do this. So, so how do we Okay, I'm I first of all, I've never thought of thought of this sort of delineation between creators and influencers. I haven't really thought much about the strategy. I'm bought in. I want to do it. How do I do it? Yeah, totally. So, the process here is find first off, you need to find people that are talking about the content that your category is in. So, say you're trying to like sell something to people that are like vibe coding or like we'll do like lovable as an example. Um, so like here's a great example of lovable doing a strategy like this, right? Wow. Like coding_dev.app like they're 100% they at least tested this. Um, and so uh but this this is probably a different strategy where it's like an in-house team is doing this or they're like paying a clipper or whatever, right? We can get into the Clipper verse creator thing. I don't think Clippers is real. I think all the data is absolutely [ __ ] fake, but we'll uh we can go down that rabbit hole if you want. Um the uh so the angle here though is basically you're trying to find people that are talking about this like your category. And the only way to do this really effectively is just like going to Tik Tok and like scrolling and watching videos that are in like the brain raw videos that are in your category. If you watch enough of them, you're going to get siloed into this like space and then you're going to start seeing these recurring faces, these recurring creators on the platform. You go and reach out to them via DM or sometimes they have like emails in their bios and ask them, you know, hey, I want to work with you. Uh, you know, 30 videos per I want to basically hire you on a cost per video basis. Uh, you know, video per day for 900. And then that's that's the reach out process. Same same play here is like I'm basically like going to work with a bunch of them. I'm going to find the best performers and then those best performers I keep them on a retainer. I get rid of the worst and then I restart my cycle, right? And so I'm just trying to add like add up as many of these creators as I can um to find the the the the best people. Um and there's only so many per category. So like you it really depends on like how sophisticated the space is. Like again, if you're talking about like some type of vibe coding app or like say you build an application that's for like um people that do real estate investing. So you like there's going to be like probably way more people talking about real estate that you can use um than you know these smaller categories. It just depends. But that's the whole strategy here is like you're trying to find the best people that are already making content in this place. Then they go and they make an an entirely new account. So a fresh account and then they're starting from zero. They're starting from zero followers. But they can go and because it's again this for you page content they can get this reach like they never could previously. Um, and when this is like executed well, right, you again like get this at a cheaper cost than what you're seeing in these other places. So, that's how you find the creators. You reach out to them. Um, it's a super manual process. We talked about this on another episode. There's this application called Stormy AI which helps with that actual like uh identification of these people. So, Stormy works is you can basically like go and search for creators for by each uh each category. Um, so like Tik Tok or Instagram or like YouTube, right? Um, and put in the uh the category that you're in. Uh, it's going to find those people and then you can DM uh directly through this. Why Stormmy is really great is it handles the the whole reachout process as well and negotiation on the pricing, which is amazing because it's like that's the massive time suck. Um, but that's kind of the the strategy here. Um, is basically to like go and find the the these people, these individuals. Um, with all this said, like here's the negatives of this, right? The management of the creators is a pain. So that's like one piece. So how people typically combat that is they go and they hire like whoever their best performer is, they make them a manager of all the other creators. So they're still having to do their videos per day, but they they pay them more basically to manage the entire team. And they're making sure the entire team is actually delivering on what they're saying. And then the other piece is when they see a winner, an outlier from the entire team, they share that with the rest of the team. So how do you actually like track that? What are the tools to do this? Stormy is for the reach out to actually track the success of this campaign. You can use something like shortize which is basically your creators submit their videos and then it tracks the amount of views, engagements, etc. from what you're doing. You can also use viral app. It's basic it's shortmize and viral app are similar in kind of what they're what they how they function but it's basically tracking the success of your your campaigns that you're running right um and then the other uh tools that are uh really valuable for this is is basically like we're trying to find outliers right we're trying to find the um the videos that are performing better in a category than like other ones and to do that uh there's tools out there that you can basically use to go and find these like outlier winners. One of them is called uh uh Virulo. I don't know how to pronounce it, but it basically aggregates it scrapes and aggregates all of these um uh Tik Toks uh and uh and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and it makes them searchable so you can find outliers within the category that you're in. And then you're like, "Oh, this worked previously. Let's hand this off to my creator team and let them remix that for our brand." And then another one that does this as well is called Sand Castles AI. Um, and it also uh is basically like this research tool that helps you find those types of viral shorts. So that's kind of the stack that you're using is like manual reachout um or some type of like AI agent like Stormy. Uh you get them into like it's literally just like in a Discord server is how a lot of people or like a WhatsApp group is how a lot of people manage these. Um and then you're doing the tracking with some with a tool uh again like viral app or viral.app or shorttomize. Um and then uh helping them find those uh those like viral uh outliers by using one of these like discovery tools. That's the whole playbook here. Um it's really simple. It's just like the one of these things that gets like hard to execute logistically. And that's like why a lot of people stay away from this and why like a lot of brands have trouble doing this because hiring somebody that understands what I just described is like impossible. Like it's like they're also like probably a 22-year-old that's just coming out of school that's hella flaky and like you know just they're they're going to be rogue. Like they're going to be kind of difficult to work with. And so it's it's figuring out like like how do I I work with that person and make this make sense. So yeah, questions I can try to answer about that. There's going to be some pain. There's going to be some pain managing some of these creators. But if you can suffer through the pain, there will be some gain likely. Uh if you could find the right creators, find the right formats, manage them appropriately, don't lose them, uh track, you know, track all this stuff and then also keep up to date with like what new formats are coming out. Um I think that you mentioned in the beginning which is this is particularly valuable for people in like consumer mobile mobile apps. I mean the example you used was a mobile I think a mobile app. Um this whole generation of like Calai the Twitter app you know the whole like app mafia gang. Um you know these people making kids you know young people making millions of dollars a year through mobile apps. I think a big reason why is they understand this strategy and they understand how to manage these people. Totally. So I'd be curious your thoughts on that specifically. I think the thing that I, you know, I think about with this is like it has to be an impulse purchase decision that can happen on a mobile device, right? So like this works for as well for like e-commerce products where it's like at a price point that's like say $29 or something like that, right? I mean that same strategy can be used for Tik Tok shop. You go find Tik Tok shop creators, you pay them on a per video basis and then also give them an affiliate commission of everything that they drive. But the reason this works is like if I can on my phone go and search this thing and start using it like that that and there's no like transition to like a web application or anything like that, right? Um, and there's no learning curve. Like it drops me into it and I'm like instantly I I I understand like the value of this like that there's that killer feature instantly on my phone which again could be a physical product that's being sent. Um, that is where this like fits into the marketing stack. So that's one piece. The other side though is that like if say you are a web application or like you're an API provider which is like a friend's company that's doing this that's like this is working for which is hilarious. It builds top offunnel branded search which creates this like discovery flywheel and also like you you're basically just creating more surface area. I talk about like digital gravity, right? Which is like this like how do I create as much surface area for my brand within my category and like layer on all of these strategies. This is a thing that can be layered on for like a traditional like even like B2B or B to SMB type company because if you think about Tik Tok or like Instagram like they're touching so many people like their their daily activives in the US is insane, right? There's 100% chance they're probably touching a certain percentage of your target customers. So if you can create content that's going to be like naturally displayed in front of those people from across these count these accounts like you're going to own more and more mental real estate within that category right which is naturally going to increase branded search and we see this right a video goes viral on Tik Tok or something like that and branded search volume sees a spike like and how we're tracking that branded search volume is in Google search console you can say hey can the query contains whatever my brand name is right so when you run these campaigns what you'll see is that you will see like an increase in branded search. They see this in particular in ecom. It's actually wild. They like they go you do this you go viral on Tik Tok, right? And then the branded search on Amazon increases like absolutely wild, right? Like there's like a lift in the in in basically the branded search that's like directly like on a platform that's not even related. And so that that is like this other piece of this. It's it's hard to quantify like the value and the ROI there. But if you're just like, yo, I'm just trying to have an entire industry know that I exist. This is how this marketing strategy can be layered with something else. Um, like again, I'm talking about like you have to learn how to use the web application to actually like have it be valuable. This is like uh uh something uh that can be layered along with say like the YouTube creator strategy that we talked about previously that you're getting like that very top of funnel like kind of like brand awareness and then you have the very bottom funnel like oh I'm going to get these people to like convert and I would layer I would like I would think about layering these things and starting okay I start with the YouTube strategy and then I'd like layer on the creator strategy on top of that. So I love it Cody thanks for once again spilling the sauce. you are a G. I appreciate you. I'll include where to find Cody and his company Graph in the show notes for people to go and follow. Thanks again, Cody. And uh I'll see you next time. Happy to do it, G. Ramen.