Welcome to Dtcpod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first millions, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok and Igorganic Creative. Use the code Dtcpod ten for 10% off your next content purchase. As a D to C brand, you need real time financial visibility to save money and make better decisions. Waiting for books from slow and expensive bookkeepers that don't get ecommerce is slowing you down. Trusted by hundreds of brands, final Loop is a real time accounting service built by D to C founders. For D to C. Founders try final loop. Completely free, no credit card required. Just visit Finalloop.com D to CPOD and get 14 days free and a two month PNL within 24 hours with all the ecom data and breakdowns you need to crush it. What's up, DTC Pod? Today we've got Philip Rafini, who's the founder of Content assistant. So Philip, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background, and what you're up to at Content Assistant.

Yeah, so quick one liner is Content Assistant. Helps companies basically produce organic content. A little bit about myself. Went to school at University of Michigan, where I studied business computer science. I had my own ecommerce brand all throughout college selling office products. Did that to my senior year. Decided I wanted to do the big tech thing. So sold the business, paid off all my student loans, and went to go be a product manager at Microsoft, which is the worst thing I've ever done. It's extremely boring. People at these companies actually work less than 20 hours a week, and I spent most of the time walking around getting coffee with my friends. But I was like the first PM on an operating system and app store for automotive companies, which is like air quotes. Startup within Microsoft. Not the same as running a startup. You still get paid the same thing even if it lives or dies. So after that, went to go do a startup of my own. Didn't work out with my co founder. And then for the past two years, I've just been doing growth consulting for startups in crypto, fintech, bunch of different places. And then I also did my master's at Chianghua University in China through a program called the Shoresman Scholars, which was just a fun sidebar of making friends who weren't all just I want to start a tech company or e commerce company. And now I run content Assistant, which came from seeing problems that I constantly saw within the startups I was doing growth consulting for, which was everyone asking know, Philip, how'd you grow your TikTok? We want to create content, and we don't know how to start.

Well, that's awesome. I love that background. I love the context of having done a little bit of everything, not only in terms of where you worked, right. Like, having worked at the super corporate level, at the startup level, but also who you're working with, working around the world. I didn't know you were at Qinghua. I was back in China, like, ten years ago, back in the day, and like, BLCU, I worked there at Amazon, actually, for a while, so that's cool. What year were you out there?

When? Yeah. When? August 2021 to June 2022. So during COVID so I went through four weeks of quarantine. We got locked down on campus for two months. I've been to China twice. The first time, I went to ten different cities. The second time, while I was there, I only got to go to Beijing and Shanghai for a weekend once because of all the lockdowns, but it was one of the most interesting things I've ever done.

Wow. Yeah. And definitely want to get back into the content stuff and not distract too much. But what was the environment like when you were there? I think the reason I want to ask is just because from the time I was there in college, 2012, 2013, there's been a lot like, China and its position in the world has obviously changed a whole lot.

Right.

And when I was there, it was like a total free for all. Anyone could do anything right. What was kind of the like, on the piggyback of COVID and when you were there? I don't know. What was the feeling while you were out there?

Oh, I mean, you have to do exactly the Chinese government says, right? Like, you basically got cattle funneled from the plane to a hotel, stayed in the hotel for two weeks, then another hotel for a third week, then a third hotel for the fourth week. Then I was able to go on my university campus. Like, every place you went, you had a health code, it got scanned. The best way to exemplify it is a friend of mine took a taxi by a hotel that had a positive case, and the Chinese government saw that they called our university and was like, sir, it was like, this person needs to get a COVID test. Within 24 hours, he got the COVID test. It came back negative, and then the school was like, you need to quarantine your room for seven days anyway. Just is probably the best example of things I saw. I mean, I really like China. I think the way you have to go about it is thinking about the government and the country separately. Everyone in China, I really enjoy the people, but discussing about how the government operates and what they do and their place in the world, I think is two different kind of absolutely.

Absolutely. Okay, so now we're back from China, and you kind of start growth assistant. And one of the reasons that we're also really excited for the conversation is just kind of how you think about growth.

Right.

Like you said, you look at it through the lens of a PM. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what's the role of a product manager and how are you applying that kind of philosophy to content?

Yeah. So the role of the product manager, for those that don't know is essentially the productive manager defines what we are going to build. The engineering manager defines how we're going to build it, and then the software engineers actually build it. So the role of the product manager is to simply go to users of a software product or whatever it is, figure out what their problems are, and then develop features or a whole product to basically solve what those users problems are. So it's a lot of, like, talking to people, understanding what their problems are, and then empathizing with that. Right. So then in terms of content, it's the same exact thing. And that's where I think there's a huge missing link between the way most people think about it. Most people are like, oh, I just have to put out content. But the problem is they don't know because they haven't applied like a framework. And it is very simple and it's very obvious, but it's just one of those things that unless someone tells you, it's not very intuitive. So it's like with content, I do the same thing. It's like, all right, if I was going to create content for DTC Pod, it's like, all right. The people who listen to DTC Pod, the users are ecommerce founders. Their problems are that they want to grow their company. I'm sure that is the number one thing for an ecommerce founder. So you want to basically bring people onto the Pod and create content that just solves that specific problem. Right. So TikTok, Instagram, Twitter literally should just mostly be content about how would you help an e commerce company scale. And you can do that from different lenses and don't do the same thing every time and switch it up, but that is essentially how you can take the product management focus and apply it to content.

Awesome. And then I think getting just distilling it down to what you said and identifying the problem and what problem are we going after? And solving it is a really important part of building good content and the foundation for good content. But I've noticed in the content that you've created, a lot of it's gone really successfully, gone viral. What are some of the frameworks beyond once you've laid the groundwork of this is what content should be like and this is the core of what we're going after, what are you thinking about as the next layer to productize in your content?

Yeah. All right, just to reiterate, first step is literally just define your content pillars, kind of. So I always use it, put it into two or three buckets like ecommerce founders or users. These are the three types of content we're going to create for them. Right? And then what I do is like a content strategy within that subject matter is I usually pick like there's value based and then kind of like awareness, virality content. So I think kind of what I do what's difficult is a lot of my customers just want views and followers. So I kind of optimize that and I just shoot for how do you get as many views as possible? So the way you do that is you just have to think about how all these algorithms work. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, they all use the same they send out your content to 100 people, then they send it to 1000, then 10,000, then 100,000. So ultimately you want to optimize that your content is the most applicable to as many people as possible at those runks. And the way you go about that is different than if you have zero followers, 1000 followers, 10,100 followers, because the platforms will learn better over time what type of people like your content. But if you're starting an account with 100 followers, you have to create content that has the highest probability possible of people liking it, right? So that becomes difficult and you have to really trug through if you are just starting. But so for me, when I start accounts, I just do highest possible, right? So for example, one of the customers I work with, we do content on books and we just tell stories from books, right? When we start those videos with things about Steve Jobs, Apple, David Goggins, people who are really well known, the probability that that first hundred people relate to it like Messi for example, every video about Messi goes viral because so many people in the world know who Messi is and they like him. Keanu Reeves. Same thing. I have a video, it's 3 million views across platforms about Keanu Reeves, because everybody loves Keanu Reeves. The probability that first hundred, then thousand, then 10,000 people like Keanu Reeves is very high. So it's like when you're just starting out, if you can make content that is both applicable to a lot of people but also incorporates those main core components you are shooting for, that is really strong. Like one of my customers, it's about self improvement content for men. So incorporate Keanu. Right. This is how Keanu lives a great life is ultimately kind of how you want to do it. Some industries are harder, right? Like e commerce, you just start off with stories with well known brands like Gym Shark Away, like, things like that awesome.

I think that's a really good framework, because, like you're saying, it can be daunting for a lot of people who are starting from zero or in the early stages or even a lot of the times we'll talk to a bunch of different founders who know it's really important, but then are just like, oh, my God, the ROI isn't like they're not seeing the ROI there. So then you'll just kind of step back. So what would you say for the vast majority of brands who have defined some sort of content strategy? They have elements of their brand in place. They're not seeing the growth that they might want to see. Do you have any recommendations for those people who I'd estimate fall in the vast majority of accounts?

Right.

The vast majority of accounts are brands that they're kind of posting just because they feel like they have to post. They're not seeing massive ROI from it, but they're like, we can't not post. So, yeah, I would love any thoughts you have about the vast majority of people in that long tail.

So this is the new insight I developed in the past few weeks, which is that I believe that it is required to produce content on the Internet. If you are a brand, creating content is kind of a nice to have, but it signals that you are able to do it first. That content has to be good. You can't post anything. It has to be some degree, make sense and be good. The stuff people posted in 2016 on Facebook is not the stuff you can get away with now. You have to actually take the effort. I looked at one company's, Instagram, today, and their posts are so bad, and it's like, all right, this doesn't count. So the first step is you are required to make at least some good content on more than one platform, because I think it is just the credibility piece. Two, what we have found from testing is that if you have content and you have followers on your account and you do not, your CAC is lower on ad spend with having content. So you will save money from a very monetizable standpoint. What we did was we took two Instagram accounts, one with followers and content, one without ran ads, and the other CAC was significantly lower. So it does work. But what I've found is, as a company, you just need to make the decision. Do you want to go all in on content if you don't? Because what I realize is it's that lukewarm place where you just waste money. Content ROI is extremely intangible. I mean, for example, I got hit up by two influencers today who I follow and whose content I liked from a customer's account that did not realize it was me that now want to work with me. And I'm like, this is awesome, but you can't really quantify those things as a company and it's really hard to convince your CEO that it's actually worthwhile. What I have found, though, is the company in the space with the best content is going to win, kind of period, just because everybody's going to know, like and trust them and you have to be in the 0.1%. So, like, two case studies I want to give, and these are the two companies that I think are startups that are doing it the best. Most people on this podcast have probably seen, like, the Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker. It's a meme, right? It just tweets. For those that don't know, it's a Twitter and Instagram TikTok account that shares Nancy Pelosi's stock trades in real time because she's net worth, I think, is over $150,000,000 as a politician. So something's going on there. And essentially the person behind that is a close friend of mine and he runs the Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker account. He runs the Warren Buffett Channel on TikTok. So it's just clips of Warren Buffett talking about investing. He runs the Warren Buffett Stock Tracker account on Twitter and he also does the same for Michael Blurry Bury, who made a ton of money during the 208 crisis and is pretty famous. Across all of those accounts, he has netted about 500,000 plus followers. That app and company that he runs is an app where you connect your Robin Hood account and it copy trades, famous politicians and people, right? So when they built the app and launched it, all of their users were people who had the problem of we want to make high market returns, we want to copy other people who do it, and that type of content with the product just home run. And they hit number one in the App Store in one day. And that was the only thing they did. And it cost them less than $10,000 to do all of that because Chris was a founder of the company. The other case study I really like is a company called Rupa Health, which is run by a close friend of mine named Tara Viswanathan and her head of growth, Kobe Conrad. They're brilliant. Kobe runs ads on his Instagram posts before he posts them, so he knows if people like them or not. That is just a next level way to test content before he posts. So everything on their Instagram account is amazing. They've launched Live, so also I missed this, but for context, rupa Health is a functional medicine platform for holistic and functional medicine doctors. They aggregate lab testing and they now have free courses. They have live courses. They have a podcast sponsored by Athletic Greens that is so popular and it is the number one in their category. Instead of having a blog, they have a magazine, because people would rather be focused on a magazine than a blog. And when I asked him about it. He's like, yeah, you need to expect no ROI for two years, but then they're going to be the absolute leader in their category, and they get to control the entire narrative for an industry. So I really think it's like, all right, are we going to do the bare minimum to lower CAC and just look credible, or are we going to try and absolutely monetize all of the media within the category? And I don't think you can be inventory.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting in terms of how you can almost align product with content strategy. And for the right content strategies, when you have a product on the back end that fits into it, it's like you're saying it's just, like, perfect, right? You have the audience, the intents there. They've proven that intent through their content, and then you're able to productize that on the back end. So I'm wondering for people who because a lot of times it works the other way, a lot of times people aren't thinking content first. They're thinking brand first, product first, maybe problem first as well. And then they're like, okay, now how do we come up with content to match this? So assuming that those are the vast majority of people who've already set up their brand and now they're thinking through it, how do you help those people build a content strategy, right? Especially in kind of what we talked about, the way that the landscape is evolving so quickly, the way that maybe you're not able to quantify ROI on it immediately. And sure, if you're great and you're smart and you can trust your gut and you can come up with a good idea and be like, two years ahead of the curve, that's going to be awesome. But for the long tail of people who maybe have the brand, do you have any advice for them about how to start thinking about developing better content strategies to suit their brand and be authentic to their brand?

The first step, and I guess this is going to be harder for brands, the first step is you just copy. Right? Every single person who is good at content, all of them started by copying someone else. I think even Mr. Beast did this, where counting to 100,000 on YouTube wasn't like a unique idea. Someone did it. He just did it with a different flavor of the same thing. Right? I started on content in 2019 when I grew my LinkedIn to, like, 19,000 people, and I just started by copying the exact structure of somebody who was at, like 100,000 followers, right? And everybody does that. And then over time, you start to not like copying, and you start to find your own flavor. And when you start, you're so small that one nobody's going to call you out to everybody does it. So it's not a big deal. Even the giant people on Twitter, like, Saw Hillbloom literally are just repurposed when he started. I guarantee he just repurposed stories from someone else. I think it's like Trong Fang on Twitter also is really big. He literally just takes YouTube videos that are popular and then turns them into Twitter threads. That's it. And you can match that very easily. Nobody notices, nobody cares. It's just everyone's telling the same stories anyway. So I think just starting and then hyper testing as quickly as possible. So, for example, when I was learning how to do animated videos on TikTok with a very unique storytelling strategy, I created two TikTok accounts and two Instagram, two YouTubes, and I made two versions of every single video I made. And the only difference was the first three second hook. And the reason I did that was so I could hyper test the hooks. Because now I am learning from two videos a day instead of one. So same thing, right? If you want to get started on TikTok, and that's more of a learning curve, write a script, post it on Twitter, and then see which ones are doing better on Twitter, and then just repurpose those for TikTok or whatever.

So it's all about just testing as quickly as is. What have you seen work for? Whether it's brands or people that you work with, clearly they bring you in because there's opportunity for us to capture. You guys are really good at it, right? But for the people who don't have that, how do you recommend? What's the best way to do it? Is it to bring in a contractor? I know people, there's tons of people who are like, hey, we'll help you clip content and create content. Or is this something that needs to be run in house by the social media marketing manager? Again, you're a PM, you've run this. You know how to figure this out. But for the vast majority of people who's in charge of that and who should be running that strategy?

Yeah, so it's really interesting because the way I was looking for customers recently is I just go and look at people who are hiring for social media managers on LinkedIn. But one thing that's super interesting is all those job posts are still written like they were targeting someone in 2016. I don't think people realize that I'm really good at 62nd videos. I can't give you any advice on Twitter. I can give you general advice, but I've never grown a large Twitter, right? And my friends who are good at Twitter have not grown TikTok. So I literally have a partner, like a friend. He's really good at Twitter. I'm good at short form. We literally just talk once a week now and give each other feedback. And I think what most companies don't realize is that you kind of have to hire one person for each channel. You can kind of get away with someone. For Twitter and LinkedIn, short form is the same across four different platforms, but you kind of need to build like a team. So what I suggest is basically finding the channel where most of your audience is be that Twitter, short form, whatever, it's very different. And then ultimately it falls within the marketing team. So one of the companies that I think does this really well is Alchemy. They're a Web three infrastructure company. There is a guy named Vito. Vito grew his Twitter personal Twitter account to $120,000. Alchemy convinced him to move from Italy to San Francisco, basically to run their Twitter. Right. I don't think companies realize how valuable these people are. Where I have now tiered it into three boats, the 0.1% of content creators are not going to work for a company. They are too good and they are going to go into business for themselves. That is like the Mr. Beast. The sawhill blooms. They're not going to go produce content for anyone else. Then I think there is another tier of people. I personally don't think I am in the zero 1% because I think based on the way I look and the way I sound, I'm just like not there. I have two friends that both run YouTube shorts accounts. They make the same exact content. The one is three times larger than the other one. And it just shows. It's like people just like how he looks in his voice better even. They do the same exact thing. So some people are just like naturally gifted for these different platforms. I have dyslexia. I'm not going to be giant on Twitter, but anyway, so I put myself in the rung below. That where I know what I'm doing. I'm not going to blow up my own personal brand, but I'm going to help multiple people. The thing is, I know that I'm good enough, that working with one company is not a good idea for me because it is not a full time job necessarily to run a TikTok or Twitter for one company. All these people I know who are good at these platforms, they'll typically work with anywhere from two to five different companies at a time. And that's what they should do. That's definitely manageable. And then there's a third rung of people that just kind of like work for a company. And I'm not going to delineate those two groups a lot. I think there is a very big advantage to just working for a company instead of an agency. You get community stability. It's way less pressure. But those people necessarily aren't able to handle multiple companies at one time. So it's like analyzing that stack of types of people and then trying to find one that fits within your marketing team to actually own that.

No, absolutely. And I think that the one thing that you mentioned there that I kind of want to get into is also the pace at which content and social media kind of evolves. It always kind of blows my mind. Right? It's like the thing that was working a month ago or two months ago is if you're using strategy from last year, you're like, behind the ball. And then the consumer's attention is already beyond that. They've seen it a million times. A bunch of people have popped up and start creating clips all in the same way, and that ship has sailed.

Right.

So how do you think about staying ahead of the curve? Is it a question of just being really tuned into the trends? What's going on, and being able to move ahead of everyone else? Or how do you see today's, I guess, the speed at which content strategy evolves in today's landscape?

Yeah, I mean, it's disgusting, right? Because once one thing starts working, everyone copies. And you can see this with Twitter threads. A handful of people figured out Twitter threads were the way to blow up. They blew up, and then everybody did Twitter threads, and then it became a meme. Right? And they still kind of work, but just not as well, because the cost to copy is super low, especially on Twitter, because it's all just written. Right. TikTok is a bit harder. The approach I take with TikTok is we just put so much money into the production quality that I can count on one hand the amount of people that have the production quality that we produce just because people aren't willing to spend the money on replicating that. And also finding, like, the editors are really hard. And I train all of my editors for a month in house before we hire them. So to directly answer your question, though, which is just like, how do you stay ahead? Is it's really hard? And I think you just have to keep testing. Right? And then you just have to keep watching what other people are doing. And yeah, testing and watching what other people doing. Because I know a year from now, what I'm doing is probably not going to work. And the question that I have been thinking very deeply about a lot lately is with generative AI, the cost to create content twelve or 24 months from now is going to be zero. Which means when you are in a world where content costs zero to create, how do you differentiate yourself? How do you compete? Because even people like Mr. Beast, he's going to take all that time, all that energy, to put it into content, and it's just going to get copied right away. And the other thing that I think is super, super important to understand about content is like a Power Law, where 1% of content is getting 99% of views. All my short form videos either get less than 10,000 or 100,000. Very rarely do they fall in that in between. So it's trying to optimize for, like that's. Why, again, do you want to do the bare minimum where you're going to be below that power law, the. Whole time you just accept that or do you want to be in the 0.1% and you want to be on the top of that power law? Trying to be in the middle is just a waste of money and resources. And I think companies just need to make a decision where they want to be and then that ultimately dictates staying in head. Because if you're putting all those resources in, you will just to come back to this really quick. Like Alchemy, who I mentioned earlier is doing really well. They launched an entire free open course curriculum to learn Web Three development, right, like no other company did, that they are in the 0.1% and that's the game they're going to keep playing and that's going to keep working. And then because the team is dedicated full time, they'll figure something else out. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think it's so important and whether you're an e commerce operator, a SaaS operator, content creator, et cetera, it's like you benefit by moving first and timing matters. And it almost feels like timing now, especially with the stuff going on in AI, the access to information, the fact that everyone's on Twitter and all these other platforms. So like you were saying, the speed to be able to copy something is so fast that you really have to do something innovative and you have to move fast and at the right time to take it to market, whatever your business is. So if you're building a D to C brand and you're in the apparel space and you want to do something that's new, you got to do something that's new and fresh because people are going to knock it off. If you're building a supplement, do something that's new and that hasn't been done because then if you do something well, it's going to be copied. And the cost to set up a shopify store, the cost to create the content around, it's all coming down. The next question that I have in regards to what you were saying about content generative AI, where all this goes is you mentioned that for you guys, you invest a lot in your content production and your creation.

Right.

It seems like very recently the whole trend on TikTok was like you want to be as low production as possible, be authentic, talk to the camera and you'll pop off and go viral. Do you see things almost swinging in a different way where people are looking for other things? How do you see that kind of evolving?

So the content strategy I do for my customers is very specific where we target people with intangible products, so like software and we do completely educational, storytelling based videos. And my whole pitch to them is like if you get an actor or you have someone in your video, they can never stop. Once they stop, no one's going to recognize your videos anymore because it's a different person and you're going to lose all that brand awareness. So what we do is there's nobody in it. We just do voiceovers. That's why it's like we can craft a brand identity around that, use specific brand colors, and then you always own it. I don't think that necessarily performs as well as having a person in it, but you don't have to worry about putting someone in it. Revisions are way faster because you're just editing a voiceover in clips. It's just different strategy relative to what everyone else is doing. But I think to answer the question, the way you really delineate on content is like, what you talk about, who you are and how you talk about it, those are the three things, right? And the way you outperform everyone in content is you are the only person that does those things. Mr. Beast is the only one on TikTok handing out cell phones for Halloween, right? That is why that video is getting 80 million views. Most people, when they produce content, are just doing whatever else they're doing. Production quality is one way that you can delineate yourself, right? Like, if everybody is doing film with your phone, very organic, very plain, simple. Everyone starts to blend in, right? So you need to differentiate yourself based on age, ethnicity, how you talk, what you wear, all those things vary. Production quality is just one way. And I think as more companies start producing content, the production quality is only going to go up as companies realize that you literally can get more views by putting the same amount of money into your TikTok as you can running a Super Bowl ad, if not more.

Yeah, and that's kind of where I see this all going. I think we've seen the last couple of years where you've seen successful brands who are built on the back of content strategies. You've seen individual creators who have built brands because they've built up such an audience and a following that they've been in a position to launch brands. And what I'm sort of seeing, even like the fact that we, for example, have this podcast, right? We were doing it, we started, we were in the B two B space, and now I see every B two B company having a podcast, being a creator, and they're kind of like learning. So I just find it really interesting to where this is all headed. And I think brands are becoming content creators, whether it's direct to consumer brands, SaaS brands, all the way up. Because, like, what you're saying, if you can get the ROI on creating content versus what you're getting by running a Super Bowl ad, why not play the content game? So I just think it's really easy. It's really interesting to see where content is going and how important it is for brand operators of all kinds.

Yeah, I think you have to do paid end organic, though, is what I've realized, because none of these platforms are incentivized to allow you to succeed based on just organic content.

So that leads me into my next thing. Let's talk about the mix between Paid and organic. You gave us the example of creators who are actually starting with Paid to test their organic before launching organic. But why don't you just tell me about brand strategy, how you can create assets and deploy them on social organically, turn them into Paid, and yeah, just how some of the people you're working with are using your assets to drive more conversions for whatever they're offering.

I am not an expert in Paid in any shape or form, nor will pretend to be. So I don't want to talk about this too much, but I'm like talking about I don't run the paid for my customers, but I know what they do, which is one thing is what a lot of people do is if you want to grow your account right, you post 30 videos, one's going to get more followers than all the other ones. Put ad spend behind that to keep pushing it out to grow your account. That's one way. Same with conversion, right? Like, I think organic is good where you can make a bunch of posts, see what converts or not. These platforms aren't going to push your video up perpetually forever. So it's like if that video converts well, either on followers or actual purchases, put ad spend behind it so the platform keeps pushing it out. That's like a very viable, proven strategy that a lot of people do. The other thing is if you tell stories about your customers, right? So one of the companies I work with, all the videos we produce for them is just case studies on how they help their customers. They took the videos we make for them, put them in their Cold outreach emails, and it increased their conversion rates, right? So it's like if I'm a company on my social page, just take your case studies and turn them into stories. Right? So it's like I'm trying to think of an example like Alchemy, the Web Three infrastructure company, just coming back to this example for them, all their social media content should just like they target Web Three projects that are trying to grow because they provide infrastructure. All of their social media content should literally just be like how their customers like OpenSea went from zero to X amount of revenue per year, right? And then if you pin those to the top of your social media and then you drive ads and people just find those things, that is going to work better. Just logically, that is a better way to do it.

No, absolutely. The next question I add is just in terms of consistency, right? So I want to talk about consistency and I want to talk about the different platforms. Like you were saying before you got to get it right, you got to know what type of content you're building. So you have to have the right content strategy. But at the end of the day, you also need to get your reps out. You need to have volume and you need to have consistency and you need to be posting to all the different platforms. So could you just characterize a little bit about what good cadence looks like as it pertains to content creation and what platforms that you guys really think about when it comes to short form video?

Yeah, so too for a short form video, I think it just depends who you talk to. Some people are like you need to post three to five times a day. I think when you start an account, if you post three to five times a day, that is helpful. You learn faster, your videos get pushed out, it's going to grow faster. Right? I try to post once a day. I'm pretty confident that the platforms platforms will reward you for consistency. So if you post once a day, your posts are more likely to get pushed out than someone who posts once a month. Good content does well, kind of like regardless though, I think the best advice is just like whatever you can do, manageably, right? So for example, right now at my customers we do 160 2nd animated video per day. That is so hard and it is absolutely exhausting where I'm kind of like playing with the model right now and probably we're only going to do like three months of that and then switch to lower. But when you produce a lot in the beginning, you learn faster, you grow faster and then you can dial it back, I think. But ultimately I'm more bearish, I think on creator and individual brands than most people simply because once you get on the content creation hamster wheel you can't really get off. If you stop producing content for three months, everything you did, your old stuff will not get pushed out anymore. So it's basically like it's not a loss cause, but you have to continuously do it forever, right? So I think it's building systems that actually allow you to do that sustainably, right? Either starting a podcast that you thoroughly enjoy and then repurposing ideas from that to something else or just finding something that works for you. Like Morning Brew is really easy every day they just use the news, right? You don't have to think of anything new. Creating content around the news is obviously the easiest thing because there's always something new. But if you're just telling stories from your industry, you're eventually going to run out of stories. So I think it is both thinking about the cadence in which you do it and the type of content you do to be sustainable and then the cheat code is is just incorporating news so you always have at least something.

So you always have something to talk about. But I do want to follow up on that. Like, what you said is creating anyone creating any sort of 62nd video every single day? It's a lot of content, but you guys are doing it. And animating it would love to understand how you think about the creative briefs of being able to be able to pump out that much content. And how are you thinking about you onboard a brand and how are you guys creating that much content? Because like you said, if you're doing a 62nd video every single day, each one's slightly different. Do they all revolve around the same different concept pillars? Do you have a structure that you put in place to build it?

What does that process look like? The first month I look at with every new customer is somewhat, to a degree, a wash, because I just try a ton of different things and just make the breadth of the type of content we make really, really wide. And then if you do 30 videos that are all somewhat different and in different veins, like, let's say, for example, I have a crypto customer, and I met with them today about the content strategy. So we made videos about crypto news. We made videos about explaining crypto concepts. We made videos about crypto founders. We made videos about finance founders, right? We did it to all these different things. And then at the end of the month, we looked like, all right, the videos about the founders that weren't necessarily crypto videos, but like, the first 50 seconds of the video was just like the founder's life. And it was like, for example, a video that did really well was how a 16 year old hacked the FBI and his hacker group rivaled Anonymous. Then he got put under house arrest for two years. Now he runs a billion dollar crypto protocol. That video did 100,000 views. It's on brand. It attracts the type of audience that we are looking for. But crypto content is really hard to do well. So that's like a good vector to go off of. All of our videos that were like, lowe's implements. NFTs did terrible. So I always start really wide and then narrow down. And then they told me one video did really well, and they're like, Philip, we hated this. This wasn't on brand. I was like, all right, we won't do any more of like, people's memories are really short. And I think the number one problem I saw is, like, I was working with a company and we hired an agency to do our Twitter, and it took two months to write this Twitter thread. And it was because the feedback and iterations and revisions were four weeks. And you know what? That Twitter thread performed the exact same had we just posted it versus after four revisions. Like, yes, revisions are helpful, but there is a very limiting return when you create content. It's a volume and quality game where you try to get out as much as possible, then you learn, right? So, for example, now we know the Founder Stories works with this crypto company, then the way I think about creating content is just idea rough, draft script, edited script, and then producing it. So I think it's easier to chunk. So I'll sit down, like today I wrote down 30 ideas for them and I sent them the ideas. Then I'll draft seven scripts and then revisit them in 24 hours and be like, all right, reread them and be like, all right, this isn't as good, and then tweak it. But that's it. You're only ever like tweaking, not rewriting. And I think what people also get wrong is different parts of the content matter more than others. The first three sentences are so, so important. Spend 50% of your time on literally the first line of a tweet or the first line of a TikTok script, because that's the most important. The back 50%, if someone's gotten halfway through, they're probably going to finish. So it doesn't matter nearly as much is essentially how I approach it. But yeah, once you find what works, you just continuously do that. And then you start to find ways to come up with content. You look what other people are doing in other industries. You just look at other platforms. Chat GPT is super helpful. So, like, for my customer with books, we tell stories from books. Chat GPT cannot give me a script. But if I go to Chat GPT and I say, give me the most interesting story about Phil Knight from Shoe Dog, it's going to give me a really good story that I can then translate into a script I use for TikTok.

No, absolutely. And I think that one thing you mentioned in terms of how important it is to focus in the right places. Like, one, in terms of efficiency, you got to get your content out. Because if you're going back and forth over one tweet thread and you're spending a month on that and you're ending up getting the same things, it's like the content cycle moves really quickly. And the other thing that you mentioned is just the importance of the first, whether it's the hook or the first couple seconds, it's like, that's what's important. And even if you analyze any piece of content, you could see it. You could post a video on Twitter and you'll see the drop off. It doesn't even matter how good your content is. Even for the most viral content, right, you get views, you get a pop off and then it's like a funnel. It just drops off over time. So you want to make sure if you have something important that you're trying to get across, and especially when you're creating that content, that you're able to get that out of there and you're thinking about shipping your content in the right way. The next thing I want to talk about is I know you guys are primarily focused on B to B, right?

Yeah. Well, that's at least just what I prefer.

Yeah, what you prefer. So why don't you tell us a little bit? I think you've alluded to it and you've hinted at it, but what's different about creating content for services that don't quite have a tangible product? And then how would you think about it if you were creating content for maybe more physical products as well?

Yeah, I think it's just kind of difficulty. Right. I can tell you for a fact. Let's use Triple Whale as an example that I think most people do. Is anyone really going to want to watch TikTok Me screen sharing my Twitter Whale dashboard? Like, no, right? You use Triple Whale to solve your problems. So it's like, all right, just create content around those problems. That's where I think the main difference is physical D to C brands are just so much easier. I think the educational because the two types of content you can make right are entertainment and educational. Entertainment is way easier to go viral than education. Just period. Because when we talk about the relatability aspect, more people come to these platforms to be entertained than they do to learn. Right. I personally just like educational. That's just me. So I line myself with people that want to do that. I don't think that's for everyone. But with the physical products, I'm trying to think of one. I think it's called Lunchbox is like a backpack brand for festivals. I can't remember the guy's name off top of my head, but I really like him. I met him at dinner once. Anyway, they should just do videos of festivals, right? Because the people that buy their lunchbox backpacks for festivals, that's what they like. So just make content around that. I saw one TikTok that absolutely crushed it. They sold like, creative peanut butter brands, and it was just peanut butter with either pretzels in it or like M M's or just what educational content do you create around that product? Like, I couldn't tell you, but I know for a fact people would love just watching you spread that peanut butter on different pieces of bread. Right. So I think it's just you have to go back to the problem. Some products aren't necessarily solving a problem. They're just like kind of enjoyable things like peanut butter. I don't know if that necessarily solves a problem outside, like hunger. Because some videos work better. I would always probably default to entertainment content. I just think doing entertainment content has a way lower market size in B to B than educational content. Because people who are interested in Triple Whales content probably want to learn to grow their business. They don't really want to be entertained. That's just like my two cent. I know the guy who runs the triple content on Twitter does a lot of memes and stuff. So I think it's like a balance of doing both for different companies and it's like figuring out what your balance is as a brand where some people are way more serious than others.

Yeah, I wanted to touch on that for 1 second. So what do you mean by entertainment for brands? Do you think this is something that brands should be doing in the B to B space or that I know you're saying it's easier to do and get right because that's what consumers or people who are on the platforms are there for. But do you think it's just harder to execute on or it's just like a weird thing? Why is this B, two B company trying to entertain me and it falls flat? How do you think about that?

I don't know what entertainment content we would create for my crypto customer that's just like, look, what are we supposed to do that someone because this is what I think is really bad. I saw a company that is a billion dollar company. They have 230,000 followers on TikTok and one of their videos has 2.3 million views. And it is a clip from Zoolander. And it's like our social media team coming up with ideas. And I'm like, what's this doing for you? Nothing. The only thing this is doing is that the social media manager, that account gets to go into their meeting and say, we got 3 million views. This well, we got 2.5 million views this month and 2.3 were from something that have absolutely no idea. And anyone that follows you based on that is not following you because you are making content for who you should post to be making. So, like, with my crypto customer, I just don't know what entertainment content we would make. I think entertainment content is actually way harder to do. But I think if you, like, great example. Duolingo is a really good company. I think people should look into as, like, their mascot is that green bird. They just make ridiculous videos with that bird. Right. But they do a combination of that and language learning. Right? So that is the perfect mix where they're drilling their brand and their mascot into everyone's head. It's for some reason less ridiculous because it is a mascot, not a person. Like, if it's a person probably would have been way more cringey than if it's like the bird mascot. Everyone's like, I love this. But part of the reason that works is because it is unique, right? Nobody else has a giant green bird mascot on TikTok. So it is less cringey because it is unique. It's when brands copy what individuals are doing that, it's like, all right, you're just trying too hard in a way that is not effective. It's like you actually have to put thought into, how can I be n of one on this platform? For me, it's high production animated videos that I know no one else can pump out at that our volume for Duolingo, it is their green bird. So it's like figuring out, thinking, how can I be n of one for the content I make?

Yeah, and I think that part is really important. Like you're saying people resonate with content that is authentic. So if you're like in your green bird example, that's authentic to Duolingo. Whereas if you're just creating content to piggyback on something else that's going off, it becomes really cringe. And everyone who's watching it's like, okay.

Well, what is that?

And then even if you go viral, it's probably not even the people or the targets that you're looking for in the first place. But anyway, Philip, this has been super informative in terms of frameworks for building content, how to think about it, et cetera. For people who are tuning in and listening. Where can we connect with you? Where can we find you? Where are you? On Twitter? LinkedIn. Where can we find out more about you? And Growth assistant.

Yeah. So I am at Philip content assistant. Just to clarify, content Assistant. I am at Philip Rafini with one L on Instagram and then Philip underscore Raffini on Twitter. And the last thing I'll plug, which is right now I'm trying to figure out social media SEO. So how can you just rank on Instagram and TikTok for SEO versus just like, variety? So if anybody wants to test social media SEO, that is correct.

Let's talk about I know I almost just closed this convo out, but I do think SEO is an amazing medium. And I know that TikTok becomes a search platform effectively. How do you think about social as an SEO play?

Okay, so this is really interesting. This is what I've spent the past seven days on, which is 40% of gen C starts their search on TikTok. And according to Cloudflare, TikTok has a higher search volume than Google. And as a personal preference, if I was to search great date spots in New York City, I would rather use TikTok than Google. It's just better, right? On Google it's now all blogs that have been SEO optimized to game the system and they're not actually good information. TikTok is just people sharing information on things they like. So it is a better search engine. One little interesting case study is like, for example, this crypto company I work with, we created a video called what is Web Three? Right? The video got like 300 views. It's currently sitting at 6000 and it's not getting pushed out at all. And if you search what is Web Three on TikTok, the second highest ranked video is that video, right? Which means we've gotten about 6000 impressions for what is Web Three on just that one video, right? Nobody is doing this. Nobody is thinking about this. Everyone's just trying to go viral on the for you page. But my two senses is that as the cost of content becomes zero to make a company is not going to be able to compete with the Mr. Beast of the world for organic content distribution on TikTok. So they should be playing the SEO game of how can you best optimize for high volume searches. So that is the way I would start thinking about it. And I think there is probably like no companies doing this right now at all, but I think TikTok launched sponsored search ads last month. Instagram and TikTok need to grow their revenue and they are almost at max and they need to grow their revenue and their user growth is stagnant. So what are they going to do? They're going to try to steal market share and search from Google because that is basically one of the only last product ideas they can do.

Yeah, I think that one's actually really interesting because like you're saying SEO, you target the keyword, you start building the content piece around it. But if you're thinking about that in the lens of social content and video content, I think it gets really interesting, especially because these are types of content that really pay you out over time in the sense that it's not all the search volume coming in one day. If you're able to land one of those key positions for a keyword every day, you're going to be bringing in more and more traffic so that value begins to compound. So I think as far as a strategy, super interesting. Maybe as you guys explore it further and get more success, we'll have you back on the pod and we can kind of unpack everything about SEO as it pertains to social.

Yeah, I have to go figure that out because I've only seen two people on TikTok and one person on Twitter talk about this and it's definitely not like a guaranteed thing, but I think there is something interesting that will happen there. Cool.

Well, thanks so much, Philip. We look forward to having you back and best of luck this year. Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoyed this episode of Dtcpod. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love your support. A rating and review would go a long way as we continue to host the best builders in DTC and beyond. Follow and subscribe to the show and make sure to check out our show notes where you can find our socials and weekly newsletter, visit us on Dtcpod.com to.