Creatives Grab Coffee - Filming 365 videos in 2 Days | Creatives Grab Coffee 74

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

In this episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, we sit down with Jason Weitz from Left Mind Media, who dives into his journey from early film experiments to founding a company focused on social media video content. Jason shares how his passion for video evolved from high school projects to producing professional content that blends technical precision with creativity. He discusses the inception of Left Mind Media, a company that specializes in creating high-volume, batch content solutions for clients needing consistent social media presence.Chapters:00:00 - Introduction and Guest Introduction02:18 - Background and Founding of Left Mind Media03:07 - Early Career Journey and Inspiration from Film04:28 - Transition from Film School Aspirations to Video Production06:01 - First Freelance Projects and Building a Wedding Video Company09:29 - Learning Video Production through Challenges in Early Projects12:18 - Evolution of Editing Tools and Learning through Experience13:00 - Social Media Content Strategy and 365-Day Content Creation14:48 - Idea Generation and Challenges with Batch Content Creation17:39 - Overcoming Client Fatigue in Multi-Day Shoots20:16 - Shooting and Editing Process for Short-Form Content22:58 - Tailoring Content for Different Platforms and Audience Engagement25:37 - Importance of Client Fit and Ideal Business Profiles28:21 - Challenges of Organic Social Growth vs. Paid Reach32:05 - Expanding Service Offerings Beyond Social Content35:28 - Lessons from Testing Content Strategy on Personal Social Media38:40 - Practical Tools for Automated Posting and Scaling Content42:00 - Fine-Tuning Posting Schedules and Content Management46:03 - Navigating Facebook Ads and Platform Compliance Issues50:14 - Wrap-Up and Final ThoughtsSPONSORS:Canada Film Equipment: www.CanadaFilmEquipment.comAudio Process: www.Audioprocess.ca🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2vHd8BdbkMQITFZmDJ0bo9🍏 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/creatives-grab-coffee/id1530864140🎞️ Produced by LAPSE PRODUCTIONS – https://www.lapseproductions.comTo learn more about the show, visit: https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, the podcast on the business of video production. Creatives Grab Coffee is hosted by Dario Nuri and Kirill Lazerov from Labs Productions. Our goal is to share knowledge and experiences from video production professionals around the world. Whether you're a freelancer looking to start your own business or a seasoned business owner aiming to scale your company, this is the show for you. Join us as we develop a community of like-minded creatives looking to learn and help each other grow. Welcome to the business of video production.

Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Before we get started with the show, let's go over today's sponsors. Do you have a shoot in Toronto? Do you need crew or a strong production partner to help you with your project? Laps Productions is one of the top production companies in Toronto and your go-to video partner. With our strong creative skills and extensive network, we can help you achieve your goal. Laps Productions is able to offer you production services, white label services, or finder fees for project handoffs.

Reach out to us on our website at LAPSProductions.com to learn more. My name is Mehran, welcome to Canada Film Equipment. We are a boutique rental house based in Toronto. We are here to help you guys out with all production sizes. Feel free to contact us to get a quote if you are a production house and you're looking for lighting camera packages or lighting and group plan packages. You can see our contact information in the link below. We are more than happy to help you guys out.

Make sure you follow and subscribe to creativescraftcoffee.com. Thank you. Hey, what's up everybody? I'm Matt. Welcome to Audio Process. We are a boutique audio company doing location sound, sound design, post sound, ADR, Foley. We service equipment. We do all your audio needs here in Toronto. We got you covered.

Come on down. AudioProcess.ca. Don't forget to like, follow, subscribe, and all of the other internet things to creativesgrabcoffee.com. They'll be waiting for ya, I'll be waiting for ya, and we're all gonna have a real good time. And now, let's begin the show.

Alrighty, so on today's episode of Creatives Grab Coffee, we got Jason from Left Mind Media. Welcome, Jason. Thank you, thank you for having me so just before we kind of jump right into it tell us a little bit about yourself and the backstory behind LeftMind mmm the backstory is I mean I could give you guys my entire career if you want but just the good stuff just the good yeah. Okay, so my background personally, the good stuff is I have loved video from the beginning in back in high school, my buddies and I made a spoof of Gone In 60 Seconds. And I thought that was like the best thing ever.

And I did, you know, long, a while later just realized it was because that video really engages both parts of your brain right it engages the there's a lot of technical stuff you got to know but there's also a creative element to it and I really like that kind of balance of it and so somewhere along the way you know after we created that one of my buddies was like I'm gonna go to film school and I was like that's a thing that's a job you can have like, that's awesome. So that's what I wanted to do. So, so he he he went totally different route. He went off the Hollywood route.

So he's he's down in California now. But I kind of wanted to that that path took too long for me. So I wanted to create my own stuff kind of faster than that. So I went the video route and you know it's not quite as as glamorous as you will as maybe that you know Hollywood director lifestyle or whatever but you do get to kind of create your own stuff and you get into it a lot faster so I really enjoyed that. So I worked at a place called called a Funnel Blocks for a while, I did some freelancing for a while, started a wedding video company and eventually started Leftwine Media, which is designed to be the business aspect or the

business branch of my company. And the idea behind the name is that the, you know, left side of the brain, supposedly anyway, is more kind of logical and analytical and the right side of the brain is the anyway, is more kind of logical and analytical, and the right side of the brain is the creative side. And so I'm here saying that I'm here to solve business problems first and stroke my creative ego last, because that's what I wanted this business to be,

was about solving business problems for businesses and not being all about, I make the prettiest videos or anything like that. I wanna make videos to actually solve problems for folks. Where can we see the gone in 60 seconds spoof? I think it's on YouTube somewhere actually. It's called not here anymore in about a minute. Okay. That's terrible.

It's awful. We gotta it. We got it. We got to overlay it on top. It's like a meet the Spartans type type spoof name. You know. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it was terrible but you know it was a lot of fun. As long as you had fun. Yeah. That's the most important part. We did, we did two short films ourselves and they are so bad. They're not 48 hours. They were 48 hour films. We're not putting them on YouTube ever. Cause we got like such weird things that we had to include in the, in the short films to the point where it was just like, there's no way we're going to make this work. And then the second one was like this weird comedy spoof of a zombie apocalypse in the short films to the point where it's just like there's no way we're gonna make this work and then

The second one was like this weird comedy spoof of a zombie apocalypse that we were trying to kind of do but it It didn't work It's man pulling that 48 hours that's really hard that's a it's an insane challenge Trying to come up with that story was wild But there were some people that submitted theirs that we were watching on the whatever the last day or whatnot. And some people went all

out and it looked awesome. Like we were looking at each other like, damn, we just got schooled. I got it. How did these guys come up with that? Well, I mean, some of those teams been doing it for a while, right? So they've got stuff kind of canned

and ready to go. And then there's like what elements we have to add into this, then they just add them in and, and, you know, put out something great. Back then, back then, we had just started, we had just started back then. So we were kind of like, still learning the industry, learning the ropes. And we found I found that a lot of like, really good 48 hour short films, a lot of the time

people had kind of like a few different caveat ideas and locations and stuff all prepped up for, and then they would just wait to see what kind of elements they needed to include. And then they would just kind of adjust their stories and their filming based on that. Whereas, I don't know, we just had a condo apartment. That's all we had prepped. Couple of gear, like a little bit of gear.

And then it was like we What was it remember? It was like a story about trying to it was like a zombie apocalypse, but like everyone would be very happy I don't remember that. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Oh my god Yeah, you know you mentioned zombie apocalypse and I was like when did we shoot a zombie short from but you're right It was called like happy something it was a plague where everyone would be very happy very happy reality people were supposed to be bitter like the last bitter person in the world that was left we did another one where our protagonist like has to steal something do you remember we did it at Maudo's

jewelry store yeah yeah it was anyways. It's the garbage. The only thing I remember from those two shorts was how tired I was. Oh, yeah Like I was exhausted. I don't know about you Carol. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you were asleep while I was editing them So I was really exhausted Yes, but they were also long days Yeah, I like the concept though. The concept of that zombie one sounds good. See, the concept sounded better than the execution at the time.

I feel like if we had that concept now with our current capabilities of execution, it probably would be a lot better than what it was back then. Do you wanna redo it, Kirill? Maybe, maybe, why not? To do like a before and after. Before, way before. So how long you've been working

Well, I have been making and selling videos for since about 2001 so oh a while and I can say that legitimately because Back, you know when I was first getting interested my And I can say that legitimately because back when I was first getting interested, my church would put on kids musicals and my high school put on, or sorry, my elementary school, my ex elementary school put on talent shows and I would film them and sell copies to the parents. So I was only making like 200 bucks a shot between me and my buddy who I mentioned. But I thought I was pretty hot shit because you know, making that kind of money and I was doing what I love doing. So that was back in the day when, so my particularly my church putting on the kids musicals, I had seen

some of the videos that they had paid Videographers to do and it was just kind of like a guy in the back, you know with his you know camera He would zoom in zoom out and I was like now we're gonna do this multicam And so I I borrowed people's cameras and got them together And we shot the thing and I remember one year in particular I had four cameras and I only had iMovie to edit on. And this was back when it was, you know, like a linear platform. You only had one camera on the timeline. I remember having to go through and manually, like with math, I had to say like how many frames was this, you know, shot?

When do I want this to cut? And that's when I had to cut into the many frames was this, you know shot when I wanted this to cut and that's when I had To cut into the next, you know shot and it was just like a real headache But why did you have to use maths for it? Like were they all different frame rates or I? I don't know. There was something about I just remember doing that but there was something about the Cameras that weren't lining up because you I couldn't Stack them on top of each other. I only had one timeline to work with, so I could only have one camera on the timeline at a time. So I had no way of syncing them. So I just had to figure out like, now I'm here in the end of the clip, so where am I in this clip? So then go to that, that timeline and then cut in,

cut into that. So that was, it was, it was a true nightmare. I was doing it on my, like on my dad's computer at his, you know, print shop that he owned and, uh, leading to the, you know, leading to the night to try and get this thing done. But, um, yeah, it was crazy. I know how like final cut and premiere pro can be very difficult softwares even like from when we started, but just hearing this, I'm like, oh my God, back then that must have been like, that must have been like 10 years advanced. What software was that that you were using? It was just iMovie. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Just old school. I very basically like in what very old school. I Probably 2005 or earlier. So yes, it was it was a nightmare

But uh, you know, I made it work Hey, you learned with the hardest way. Honestly, it's it's interesting to hear how some people learn Different ways of like how to edit certain things I mean like I got my first roots of learning how to edit certain things. I mean, like I got my first roots of learning how to edit things from music editing back in like 2005 and 2006 from like an old software called Techno EJ. And that gave me the foundation to understand how timelines worked. And I never knew that I would actually need it

later in life. And I'm like, oh. What were you editing? The Rude Sandstorm? The Rude, yeah, old school techno The Root Sandstorm. It's probably somewhere in old files. I don't even know if it even exists anymore. But it had a very similar timeline setup so that when I actually got on Premiere, I was like, oh, this is almost the exact same thing just with a video element added in.

And so yeah, the roots for how to learn editing is always interesting to hear. It's like, how did you kind of start Frankensteining your first few videos together? Yeah, for me, that was the original iMovie. That's how I started. That's wild. Nowadays, we noticed that we saw that these days you're

kind of like focused on a lot of social, um, batch content making, which always kind of intrigues Dario and I because it's, we know how it is to kind of like jump into a video shoot for like a single day and like creating one video. Like that's very specific and targeted. Whereas we're seeing a somewhat of a not maybe maybe not a trend, but certain companies coming in with like creating huge batches of content. And your specifically was interesting because you said 365 days worth of video content and what four days like give us a little bit of a backstory on how you kind of came up with that and how that's working out. So I there there's a few elements that mash together to create this.

And it was just kind of the perfect time to create it. So I had tried creating some of my own content and doing it in batches. And I made about, I don't know, like 40 videos-h for myself and then like I posted like three of them You know, so that was that was headache. Number one was first of all when you create this content Then what do you do with it? Right? It's got to be edited. It's got to be posted you know, you have to Follow up with it do all this stuff

So I first that was kind of the first problem that I wanted to solve. The second problem that I wanted to solve, this came out of a book by, I think was by Phil Yoon, who talked about how he, you know, spent the first, like three days to four days of the year doing his content, and he would do all of his content for the year in that first, you know, three to four days. And that was, that was wild to me, but he had ways of, um, manipulating footage on the back end so that he would create long form content, short form content, uh, like podcast content, um, content, blog content, all this stuff from his original content by multiplying it and using it in different ways, right? He would do things like use the transcripts to create his blog content. And so we had that. And then there was the platform repurpose.io,

which can read your content, at least your short form video content on one platform, and then send it out everywhere. And they try to kind of genericize the platform, but I saw it working in a very specific way. So what I did was I came up with a, oh, and then the other thing was a buddy of mine on a Facebook group had created this kind of ideation method which allowed people to come up with about like,

you could do like 30 days of content in two hours. But, you know, I looked at that again and said, come up with about like you do like 30 days of content in two hours but you know I looked at that again and said all right if you're doing 30 days of content two hours that's still two hours every single month that you have to dedicate to your content so I wanted to come up with a way for people to create like a massive amount of content in a really short amount of time. And another, another factor in this is there that YouTube shorts limit your content to be one minute long, or it's, it's not considered a short. And so the short, this kind of wave hit of you've got all these

platforms coming out. You have this short form content that's limited to one minute. If you want it to be the same across all platforms. And you've got also the influx of AI makes it a lot easier to come up with the ideas for the content because that's the first challenge. And then, you know, filming it is is cake at that point, because you're doing these sub one minute talking, basically talking head

videos. So with that, I've been able to do it successfully with I think like six or seven clients so far have done it. One gentleman I'm going to going to fly down to San Francisco later in September to film his second six months. Because one thing I discovered the hard way is that people really only have a tolerance for about two days of this. After that, they're kind of done. Even if they have all their content planned out, they're just kind of burned out of doing this stuff all day for two days.

For a whole week, basically. Yeah. If it was four days. Wow. But I found that it really only takes about six hours, including a lunch break, to get the 90 days worth of content that you need each day. So because they're sub one minute clips, people can just kind of just get through them really quickly after you kind of get them started and get the momentum going for the day So it's it's actually not too hard to pull off and then I just got editors just editing them like crazy

Going about I'm getting right now. I'm getting about two to a day out of my editors Out of one editor so I can shooting so I'm getting that means I'm getting 40 a month. So I'm about 10 days ahead of posting. And then I'm, yeah, just posting them using a scheduler and repurpose.io. And that, you know, that's, that's it. That's all I'm doing. So you're probably you're posting it for them or you're just delivering the assets? Yeah. So, so we're, we're posting it for them. Because're just delivering the assets? Yeah, so we're posting it for them because I think that's another challenge that people have, right? The idea is that I'm solving the headache of content creation because number one, it

takes so much of their time. Number two, they don't have time to post it or the staff to post it for them. There's all this stuff that goes into content creation that if I can take it all off their plate for them, it solves a massive problem that they're going to have. In terms of planning that many videos at once, because I looked at some of them and when I usually hear that much content is being produced in a single day, I think of something super basic in terms of what is being created. But from what I saw, it's like some of them are a little bit more in depth, like not so much in the editing aspect, but more so in the specific content that they're talking about.

It's like, it doesn't sound like it's just different variations of the same content that you're doing. Like, is it like all different, like different kind of scripting or are you also including, for example, like a 16 by 9 or a 9 by 16? Like how do you typically break it down with someone? So all of it is purpose created for social media. So it's all shot 9 by 16. And the idea behind the content creation is I have multiple methods, which I share with them, with the client on how to come up with the ideas for the content. So there's things like, you know,

search, you know, find questions that people are asking on various websites, you know, related to your niche, you know, like, just basic brainstorming, you know, how do you come up with the stuff on your on your own? And then we put it through AI and I have about a paragraph long prompt followed by like 500 different kind of posting headline formats. And we ask it to create around 50 to 100 at a time. So what you wind up with is about these blocks of like 50 of the, they're all basically the same idea

or around the same, you know, kind of set of ideas. And then we take those, you know, once you have that list we put it in a spreadsheet and then randomize it. So they're right next to each other. They don't seem to be about the same thing. But you have the same ideas mixed in there. And that's because it's short form content, right? Not everyone is tuned into the same piece of short form

content all the time. So it's perfectly OK to reuse ideas. In fact, you can reuse the exact same video sometimes I've seen short form content where someone posts it they get a million views and then they just repost it later and get another million views you know off the exact same content so there's there's really no point in you know if you are if your platform has a point there's no point in, you know, if your platform has a point, there's no point in just saying it once. You should say it multiple times. So that's kind of my idea. You just don't want this stuff right next to each other to be exactly the same. So that's why we do

the randomized mixing. And as long as you're doing that, you're going to be fine. So you said you come up with, sorry, I'm just curious about something. So you tell your client, like, these are some of the ways to generate the initial concepts for it. Do you do that work for them? Or do you just tell them, like, this is how you should do it, and then wait for them to send you the basic info?

My clients are always going to be the subject matter experts in their field. So I don't I don't come up with the ideas for them. I tell them how to come up with the ideas because and a lot of the times when my clients do is they they start with this plan and then they say, oh wait, I've written a book about this. I can pull content ideas from that or I've written all these blogs about that. I can pull content ideas from that. It's written all these blogs about that I can pull content ideas from that. It's really just a way to get them started honestly. Half the time they're not using my methods at all and I don't really care you know as long as the ideas are coming from somewhere.

So it just depends really on the client and what they've done previously how much of kind of my advice they're relying on but my advice like I, it mostly just kind of gets the ball rolling and gets them doing something that they weren't doing before, which is to lay out what all this content is going to be. Because that's the like all of this all through the editing even relies on a spreadsheet being organized. And you know, we know what each video is about, because we're just going down the list and checking them off. And we can tell that you know, we I can tell that to my editor, I can say like, if we put notes in the spreadsheet or something like that on the day of the shoot, because you know how shoots go, they get kind of crazy and messy. So we can take notes, I can put that in the

spreadsheet, and then my editor, you then my editor knows whatever is there. So it's all about organization and preparation and the pre-production becomes the most important part, but it's really not that difficult to do at the end of the day. Well, you also answered one of the questions that I had, which was how do you convince someone to go into doing that much content at once? Because I know how it is sometimes even doing like one interview for a couple of clients and it can be very exhausting after a little while. And then you basically answered that where instead of doing four days, you push them for two days. Like, do you find

that even that two days, they're still feeling a little bit burnt out, maybe keeping it back to doing only 90 day chunks or how are you finding it now? I've considered doing 90 day chunks. I feel like the problem with 90 day chunks is, again, it's 90 days is not dissimilar enough from 30 days that they're going to feel the difference. Like having six months of your stuff done, that's saying something. But if you have only 90 days done, then I'm going to be calling you in 30 days to set up the shoot for the next 30 days. One thing we do is we edit 30 days of content before we start posting, so that in case there's anything

that goes wrong, their stuff is still coming out every day, because that's important to us. So with that 30 day kind of advanced window, that really only gives you 60 days to do the other shoot. So at that point, it's like you've barely seen any content come out by the time I'm saying, hey, you want to do the next shoot? Like, like, let's schedule this. They can't see the results yet.

Yeah. So I feel like two days is a good amount of time. I feel like no one's really burned out on that until like the maybe like last hour or so and then they're they're just willing to like push through it, you know, because they're like, I'm almost done. The end is in sight at this point. So I feel like that's been a good amount of time and then that gives us loads of footage and we can edit that for six months or even more possibly ahead of time.

And again, like they're only six hour days. So they're not like super long days. It's not like on a film set where you're like pushing 10, 12 hour days. It's six hours with a lunch break. So it's really not super harsh to put a client through that. Is it just you who's shooting it or do you like, like in terms of like how does the production typically go? Yeah, so that's a good question. It is, I shoot the ones that are local and I'll shoot them if my client wants me to come out there

but because the the organization piece is so Important and the editing piece is so important when you look at the actual production It's kind of the least important part So so if a client doesn't't wanna pay to fly me out to where they are or to fly to me, then I'll just hire someone local. And as long as I can interview them and they're good and they have enough batteries

to film for six hours straight, then really anybody can do it. Like anybody who can check off that they're doing it, they can all do it. And that's kind of like the whole thing behind my company is I don't want to be one of those videographers who gets hired to do something like this, right? I want to be someone who's doing the hiring for a job like this. Just producing it. Yeah, producer and really who's, you know, because I'm solving business problems, like

that's where my value lies as a business owner. I can tell you there was one client who they were actually, there's partners and they're in separate cities. I don't know how they run their, I guess they just run their business online, but they're partners in separate cities and they're meeting in Salt Lake City, I think to do the shoot and the day before The videographer who I had hired lets me know he can't do it Sound like that's super cool but I was able to just go back through the

Facebook, you know But I was able to just go back through the Facebook ad that I put out and all the responses I got. Because you put out an ad like that in any city and you're going to get 100 responses. And I was able to find someone who was able to do it the next day and they loved him. So it was totally, totally fine. I saved the day and worked out great. I have a question on the amount of deliverables. So you do it in four days and that gives them enough content for you. Said, is there how many days was it? 90, 90 days. Well, two days is 180 days worth of content he mentioned.

And then he gets editors to produce two videos a day. That's, that was the next thing I was also going to ask about is like how is that thing going? So hold on the question I have those how many how many videos then are you technically filming in the six hours? We're shooting about 90 videos. So we aim to get we aim to get about 184 videos done in two days So roughly, you know, that takes about 90 videos a day 92 if you want to be specific Okay

That's a lot. Okay, that's Just like hang around for like six hours and see how you do it. It's like five minutes of video Basically five minutes of video. Yeah literally of video, basically. Five minutes of video, literally. But yeah, but I mean, again, like you, you're only filming these are, these are one minute videos or even less than one minute in some cases. So because you're limited to the one minute, you know, uh, and the way I, I watch for that is just by watching the, um, the clock run on the camera and you know, I like all right ready to go and they're like ready go and they do their thing and I'm watching the time and kind of you know I have kind of my

editor sense because sometimes they stop and have to start over or you know whatever it is but I can be like yes this this is this will be a minute or occasionally though you know it'll run for um like three minutes, four minutes. I'm like, all right, this is part now and this is part one, part two, I'm just going to make that note and we're going to split it into part one, part two. So we do do things like that often. The I had one gentleman who he could barely do 30 seconds at a time. So which is which is fine, you know, but we won't you do you do want to algorithmically aim for let like 34 second mark, because the watch time is the most important thing. And if it's if they don't if they don't hit that about 34

seconds, then they have to get 100% watch time or it's not gonna like log anything good in the algorithm for you. So you you do want to Kind of push them for a little bit more if they're kind of you know, if they're short oh, so if if they're if So you might have some videos where they're not even a minute long. They might be half that. Yeah Okay. Yeah, it just it totally depends on the it totally depends on the person um, but the the short ones if they're really short You got to be like, all right

Can you give me a little bit more because I need like I need more than this like 20 seconds You gave me like give me give me more But some people just kind of you know, for lack of a better way of saying it they won't shut up They just roll roll through it. But it's actually easier to break that up than to extend something that is too short. So I kind of prefer those people. Yeah, because the longer content is easier to just kind of split up in half

whereas like the shorter content, you're getting them to elaborate. And sometimes that elaboration is very vague or not really tying in the content super well. I'm wondering though also like it because it's become like a system I'm assuming that it's kind of like a package that you're providing all these potential leads and depending on also like how you charge for it is it something you work with mostly small businesses or is there have you found like a little bit of a range?

Is it something you work with mostly small businesses, or have you found a little bit of a range? So what I've found lately, or I guess what I've discovered is, if the business is too small, number one, they can't really afford this. And I mean, it is, we are like doing all of their, effectively we're doing all of their social media stuff like because video is such a powerful platform we're doing social media on because right

now some short form content is kind of dominating it you don't technically need anything else you don't have to have like Instagram you know photo posts or anything like that like it's not necessary so there's. So there's that to consider. So we are providing kind of a full social media management. We're doing the descriptions and the tags and all that stuff. So we're providing a kind of a premium service there. It's not so expensive though that, know I would say a what I consider medium not like not the SBA considers a medium-sized business have like 200 to 500 employees or

something crazy like that but what I would consider a medium business from my perspective they they can afford it but I think that I I really feel like it's got to be the right But I think that I really feel like it's got to be the right fit for the company because they have to. They can't use this as a direct. So let me backtrack a bit. So one thing that I've I've been pushing for this is again, because coming back to my company, you know, wanting to solve business problems. The other thing we're solving is that we are you're not just if you're doing this right anyway, you're not just creating content for content sake, but you're creating this as a lead magnet.

So you're you're trying to drive people to a website or to take some kind of action to click a link in your bio to you know, to do whatever you want them to do to do something at the end of the video. So I have a whole system and flow where I show people, you know, exactly how this works, but they can basically put a call to action that's going to drive customers eventually down the line. So with that said though, this cannot be your only lead generation source and be reliable because it's because again, this is organic social media we're talking about. So first of all, if you're like a local company, it's not going to work for you at all because you might get a million views, but if your business is here in Portland and those million views are in New York, none of them are going to lead to any kind of business. So your company has to fit a certain profile that you have at some kind of national offering. And then secondly, it's kind of a big, slow moving ship

because you're growing a social media account, which takes, you know, upwards of, of a year, you know, on average, if you're doing everything right. And then also, if you need to make changes, we can make changes, but we're already edited 30 days in advance. So we've already got 30 days of stuff, you know, going out by the time you make a change. So it's going to take a month or two for any changes to implement and to actually be seen. So it is a big, slow moving ship, which is kind of one of the weaknesses of it. And again, like your company has to be ready

and willing to invest in a social media campaign, which like honestly, I don't recommend for every single company. You know, like I said, like local companies, smaller companies, like there are better places for you to spend your money honestly, which you know, I can also help you with, but that like, this is not the, you know, it's a, it's a really sexy offer. And that's

why I offer it, but it's not always the best thing for every single company, which is why I love to talk to companies to find out if they're going to be an actual good fit for this or if there's something else I can offer them or if I can refer to someone or, you know, that's cause that's what I love doing at the end of the day is helping companies grow. It's not even the small one. Sometimes it's even the large size corporations where, you know, we've chatted with them and then they don't want to focus on social media at all.

It just doesn't drive their business forward. So it's, it's great that, it's great that you've come up with a very specific profile, customer profile for this. Cause that's sometimes that's one of the biggest challenges for people in our industry is coming up with the exact target market of who they're trying to kind of sell for, like, or the niche basically.

So you've kind of niched out something for the specific product, rather than more so like a niche that your company in general focuses. It's like these types of videos are only for these types of clients and those are the ones I'm going to target. I also noticed that you have some content similar to that that you did on your own social media and Instagram. Like how have you found your own product working for you over the over the last little while? If I'm perfectly honest, it hasn't worked very well for me. I haven't seen much response from my own content

and I you know haven't haven't had the time, you know as a I mean technically I'm not a solopreneur, but it feels like I am a lot of the time because I'm running this run the whole show and I haven't had the time to really Analyze that closely and see why it's it's not working. But I feel like one of the elements that I've been missing of late, which I'm going to be incorporating into this in the future is the

basically, the account growth, So getting more eyeballs on it faster than kind of the organic process. And that's kind of, you know, in an unfortunate place we find ourselves in on the social media front is like, you got to pay someone to get eyeballs on your content or they're not you know or get very lucky it seems like. Have you like I noticed your TikToks off offline on on the website have you used other social platforms aside from like maybe Instagram to try to push it? Yeah well I'm sorry go ahead.

No go ahead. I was gonna say I noticed when we were posting our Creators Grabbed Coffee reels, on Instagram, like the views were random. Some would do really well, some would do okay. But then we noticed that on TikTok, it was doing pretty well and then the views were consistent. Like we could see like a pattern.

And then we noticed on YouTube Shorts, it was totally random. Some of them would get two views. Some of them would get 1,000. I had no idea how YouTube runs their algorithm. So I wonder if you're running into the same thing with your Instagram, because I was looking at your Instagram page over there, and they're pretty low. Maybe if you tested it out on TikTok, they might be higher. So I'm running the ones that I was running, we're going to everywhere.

So they were going to TikTok, they're going to Instagram, they started on Facebook, they went on my LinkedIn. And I think that's it. I don't think I was doing Twitter or anything like that. I was going to say just before you continue, it might be the solution. Do you think that Leftmind might not fit your own target market criteria? Do you think that could be potentially it? I always try to drink my own Kool-Aid. So with that, I was like, I've got to at least do this for myself, try it out for myself, test it on myself, do all that stuff. So I got the system working for me.

And it worked. I put out a whole ton of content. People were commenting on it. But again, there were mostly people who I already knew through local networking or something. They're like, I'm seeing your stuff everywhere. I'm like, that's great. You're not, who's supposed to be seeing it? Again, there are mostly people who I already knew through, you know, local networking or something. Like I'm seeing your stuff everywhere. I'm like, that's great. You're not who's supposed to be seeing it, but you know, it's cool that you're seeing

it. Yeah, I've had, I've had that too with like people within my network where they've seen like our videos and then like I'm seeing it's like, great. You're not really going to be a client of mine though. So it's like, great. The worst is when you pay for ads and they say that and you're like you're not trying paying for that view I paid for that view. Don't click that's three bucks. But you know we've gotten work out of people seeing us do the podcast

because then they know we do podcasts right so then, Hey, we were thinking of doing it. I was gonna ask you something. Oh, with regards to how you're posting your stuff, do you post or even for your clients? Do you do everything manually? Or do you have like some type of service you use? Yeah, so I mentioned before repurpose.io which which sees any Content and automatically post it to other places. It even takes care of the kind of irritant of like watermarks like you used to post on tik-tok and they have it has a watermark of you if you save it else elsewhere So this doesn't have that. So it's a really nice service because also a kind of side benefit is when my clients, if they want to make their own short form contents, that's totally fine. They just need to post it to their Facebook and it will automatically post all over

their network in about two hours. So that's been really nice having that system. So I you know, I'm using these tools in a very specific way to set that up. And I you know I'm using these tools in a very specific way to set that up and you know for then for posting we you know you can use technically the um because we're using Facebook as our base so you can use the Facebook scheduler but that only allows you to post out 10 days. So I wanted to be able to post out further than that. So we're using postly.ai. And like, is there any risk of maybe like these social media platforms seeing

like the repurposed.ai website and then maybe like blacklisting your account or like blocking? Cause I remember in the past, like that used to be an issue with some schedulers. Like some people might ran, like might trigger something on on their end and then your account might get blocked. I don't think there's any risk of the account being blocked, but there's some debate still on the internet about whether or not the algorithm prefers it, you know.

So if you post something like directly and natively on TikTok, for example, it's supposed to do better. If you post it natively on Instagram, it's supposed to do better. There's counter arguments for all of it, you know? There's arguments and counter arguments for everything. So that's the way we've been doing it for now.

We haven't tested, we haven't had enough clients really yet to test if it makes a difference, if we post it individually everywhere. But the problem with posting it individually everywhere, especially these days is the two factor authentication. And so you'd have to like every single day, you know, you'd be messaging your client saying like, Hey, can I get into your account? It's like, No, I don't, I don't want to do that. I it's annoying enough when you know, you'd be messaging your clients saying like hey, can I get into your account? It's like no, I don't I don't want to do that. I I it's annoying enough when you know Something goes offline, you know in repurpose or something to have to message them and do that

So I don't want to do that. So that's why I'm sticking with repurpose for now How long have you now been doing the system or kind of like been trying to start X here? Have you been executing it so far? About a year, I think, probably. So fairly new still. It's not, you're still kind of like trying to figure out the ins and outs of it as you go, right? Yeah, a little bit.

I mean, we brought on a client recently and we got it all up and running pretty smoothly. So I don't think there's any major hangouts, but I haven't really had the chance to scale it or anything like that. Or like I said, like do any major testing with it. It's been a fairly slow rollout over the year. Yeah, it like as you mentioned, it's a it's a slow burn where like even making adjustments on the go for the client, it takes at least 30 days

to even see the changes being posted, which also for the algorithm takes another probably at 30 to 60 to 90 to 120 days for it to actually make an impact on the algorithm. So yeah, when it comes to trying to do anything organic, it's gonna take a while. So you'll probably get a better sense of how effective it can be within like another year or two, at least from at least like with some of the earlier clients, right? Yeah. Yeah, I believe so.

Do you still do other types of video content as well? Or do you mostly focus on this now? Like what's the kind of balance that you're trying to kind of figure out here? or do you mostly focus on this now? Like what's the kind of balance that you're trying to kind of figure out here? Yeah, so I do, I mean, I do a lot of other stuff. So I, you know, just, I honestly like these last few months, I've been doing a lot of shoots for restaurants.

Like in my, when I have extra time, I just have shot it for an agency So I've been doing that I still do a lot of video business cards Which have been which were kind of thing I got started on you know so it's their brand videos Whatever you want to call them. It's every business videographers kind of bread and butter is those kind of videos and I've made a few Ads I'm starting to run Facebook ads and do full funnel offers now So yeah, I'm doing a bunch of other things

Are you having success with the the ads? So my I have had I've had I've had a rocky relationship with Facebook ads in the past, and to the point where they blacklisted my account. Would you do a yellow dot or something? So the funny thing about that is at the time I was in a like a training program. I was going through and I was putting out this ad that was recommended and it was like the exact same ad that you know me and the six other people in this group were putting out all at the same time. Oh, that's what it was. So video ad. Yeah, video ad. And for some reason, they chose me to block my account. And, you know,

all those other ones were running just fine, but mine got lucky. You were the sixth one. Yeah, I guess so. So I, and the worst thing about it, the worst thing about it is they will not tell you why they just say you violated violated our terms of service and you say what, which terms of service and they're like, we're not telling you. You know what? I get it. I get it. It's the same with Google. Google has this weird thing, especially when you're trying to verify your business sometimes. That is something Dario and I are having like a problem right now. We can't figure out a way to verify our new address.

They're basically telling us, they're telling us we have to film the whole video from start to end, no cutting, it has to be on their platform. We did it several times and it said video couldn't upload. It's like... You're like, okay. It doesn't tell you why. How am I supposed to verify this thing then? Like what happened before...

Yeah, I heard about that. Like it's, it's now a thing. Cause like before we had the issue of basically where they would send a code to your, in a letter to you. Yeah, that's how I did it. Yeah. That's how everyone did it like a few years ago. And then for some reason we did, when we finally changed our address, I think like two years ago, they sent us, they said they sent the code. We never got it. Turns out what happened is that it went to a wrong address, but we didn't find out till later, but it was like a West versus East kind of thing.

But when we were trying to get in touch with them, we basically were starting to tell, we told them we didn't get the code and then they started telling us uh okay let's do a live call and then you need to show us this this and this and so I would do the live call with them once and then show them like three of the things that they were asking for and then they would say oh but do you also have this? It's like what are you talking about? You didn't say I needed this for the call. It's like well you need to do it. So I schedule another one.

I get that one. I show them the new stuff and the old stuff. And then they're like, oh, what about this? It's like, can you just tell me all the parameters that you need included? I got three calls. I had the third call. It still didn't work. And I like during that call, I said, so you guys also send these codes, right?

They're like, yes. It's like, so if I sent this code to a random address and in that address, I just, even if I'm not actually there, I just grabbed the code and then I input it home, it's gonna work. And then the guy's like, yeah, it'll work. I'm like, you do realize how dumb this whole thing is where you're making me jump through hoops over video call

when I could just get the code. And then like a week later, we got the new code finally and I just did it through that. Thank god. Like I went back to the address I'm like something's missing here like what are we doing wrong and yeah that's when I noticed I'm like oh there's the same address on the east side or on the west side we're on the east side so whatever Eglinton Avenue east that's ours but it was going to the west then. Oh jeez. Yeah. So dumb. So dumb. So we finally got it. We had the address for two years but we wanted to change our address to somewhere downtown like a get like a remote working

space downtown that we can work out of and now they changed the system where they don't send out those codes anymore and and I don't know I don't- And I don't know if it's not uploading it because when I was trying to figure out a way to do it, I was trying to see if there was another method. So I went through the menu system, which was a fucking disaster. Like, goddamn, like Google, I don't know who they hired to design their system

because I was trying to figure out an alternative way to do it. So I don't know if that now triggered something in their system where we have to do the live call. Like, what the hell? But it's not even a live call that they're making us do. They're making us record it through their system. So-

No, you have to, it's buried. It's buried. You can figure out the way to do a live call, but it's like within the settings, like it's a nightmare. Yeah. They've made it next to impossible for small businesses to have a Google address. It's terrible. Okay. I think we're nearing like the one hour mark already with the episode. How did you come up? Well, I guess you already mentioned how you came up with Left Mind. Yeah. He's left-minded. That's how he came up with it.

But yeah, Jason, thank you so much for joining us in the episode. Did you have any, before we go, did you have any questions for us or anything like that? Or would you want to start a new episode? I was going to say, now is not the time. We could talk about a post show if you want. But thanks for having me on guys. This is a lot of fun. Yeah, let me just do a shout out for you, your URL and whatnot. So guys, if you want to find Jason, go to leftmindmedia.com and your socials are the same, I'm going to guess.

Let me see, at Leftmind Media. Yeah. Yeah. On Instagram. Are you LeftMind Media, yeah. Yeah. On Instagram, are you on TikTok still or? Mm-hmm, yeah. Okay, perfect. Yeah, go get him a follow and he's based out of Portland. So we'll end the episode there. Thanks for listening to this episode

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