How to Make Brand Building Creative Content In House

We built Chubbies from zero to a 9-figure exit and part of a 10-figure IPO. If there's one thing you can do to increase the new customer revenue you're getting through owned and organic channels (the most profitable kind of new customer revenue), create exceptional video content in-house. Here are the 4 keys that worked for us:

1. Find the right people.

- These people are fundamentally funny, magnetic, creative, and scrappy. There's no way around this.
- Often times they won't have any formal training in this arena.
- Often times they will already be in your friend group.
- These people are a joy to be around.
- They love to make people laugh.
- They are already doing it in some form. They might be moonlighting as a standup comic. They might be the person posting the funniest memes/content on your friend group text thread. They've had some of their own tweets go viral. There's a nugget of existing passion and results.

2. Find people who can do it all.

They can go end-to-end
- generate the concept
- Storyboard
- write
- film
- act
- edit
- package
- distribute
- analyze performance
- incorporate learnings
- repeat
- No need to over-specialize. Sure, you can find separate people for all of these things, but that's the opposite of scrappy.

3. Go fast. Learn fast.

- High volume + measurable objective definition of success = a process for maximizing the probability of finding winners
- What do you have to embrace in order to do that? low production value. this will NOT look like a Nike or Apple ad. That's the point.
- Success is NOT having your content look like a feature film. Success is moving the metrics you're trying to move as much as possible with as little investment (time, people, money) as possible.
- you can't get this tight + fast feedback using external resources, nor can you get the compounding learning that becomes essential to continue to progress

4. Uncomfortable constraints + high standards

- You can reshoot 1000000 times and then edit for 10000 hours.
- or, you can require your team to get 2 shots on goal out into the world 2x per week.
- creative endeavors without uncomfortable constraints are doomed.
- Not advocating getting content out for the sake of getting it out.
- When you have people in-house putting out content consistently, their personal reputation gets attached to that content, which is a great filter + incentive structure to ensure high content quality
- the high standards DO NOT mean high production value.
- the high standards DO mean a great piece of content people love + want to share, which is a combination of exceptional concept, execution and packaging
- southpark's "6 Days to Air" is a wonderful example of how this plays out.

...

THIS IS NOT EASY.
Actually, it is very hard.
Exhausting.
Humbling.
Exhilarating.
The most rewarding thing you can do if you love making content people love.

Great things are not easy.

P.S.

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