The Formula To Break 100 Million Views On Shorts (ft/ Jenny Hoyos)

0:00All right, today we're going to get smarter about short form video. Short form video is something I am mega, mega long on. Why? Well, I don't know. Have you ever seen TikTok, Instagram Reels? Have you seen YouTube Shorts? These things are taking over the world. So today's guest is Jenny Hoyos. She is a short form video genius, to be honest. I mean, every single short she does gets like 10 million views, every single one. And it's not because she was famous before. It's not because she's doing crazy, crazy stuff. She has just figured out how to make viral short form videos. So I wanted to ask her every question I could.

0:32This is an episode of me learning from her, the tricks. So how does she come up with ideas? Like how do you figure out a good idea versus a bad idea? How does she structure the video? How does she script it? How does she film it? What are the elements and the hooks that make the video more viral versus medium viral versus low viral? Like what is that knob? So this interview is me talking to Jenny Hoyos, a 18-year-old short form genius who is going super viral. And she's going to teach us. So in the next hour, we're going to get really smart about short form. All right, let's do it.

1:12Let's jump in. What we're going to do is in the next, I don't know, 45 minutes, you are going to tell us the specifics, the tactical, the breakdown of how you've cracked the viral code. You know how to go viral, TikTok, YouTube. Yeah. But you are 18 years old. You live at home in your parents' house. it's only been two years since you started doing a lot of the content that you're doing. I went, scrolled all the way back and it started off not so great. But then now you're getting like 10 million views per video. You've had a hundred million view short. That's kind of incredible. Is that you? Is that what your life is like?

1:48Give people a sense of who are you? Yeah. I mean, you nailed it right in the head. Yeah. So I'm Jenny Hoyos. I'm a YouTuber who who makes videos around the life of a cheapskate, I guess you can say. I guess you can call me the anti-Mr. Beast. You know people call me Mr. Least. Yes, which is amazing branding. We've had Mr. Beast on here, and he's like, I spent$3 million per video. And I'm curious also, when you record, do you, like, we talk about Hollywood, if you ever see an actor in their van or their truck before they're going to go do a scene, they'll kind of get themselves into the character, they'll get themselves into the state of mind.

2:25Nobody can bother them. Nobody should go talk to them. They are getting in the zone. I'm curious, do you do anything to kind of get yourself into a certain state of mind? I remember there's a creator called Miss Excel that I love this story. I've pulled this many times. But she creates content of all things about Microsoft Excel, how to use it better. But she's super high energy. She's dancing and doing other stuff. It's like dancing plus Excel. It's a weird combo, but it works. And she said something like, before I go record, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say. I just get myself into a state where I feel magnetic.

2:58Like I just get my charisma, my energy up so high. And when I feel like I'm there, I run to my camera. I turn it on and I start recording because I believe, she said, I believe that all content is just energy transmission. It's me pushing my energy through the phone to you. The way I feel, I'm going to push it through and then you're going to feel that way too. I love the way she described that. That's very much how I do this podcast. I'm just curious. Not everybody does things that way. Is that similar to what you do? Or how do you approach kind of getting in the right state of mind before you create a piece of content?

3:28Oh my gosh. I love this question because I used to struggle with this so much as like, honestly, an introvert. Most people wouldn't like the CBS one, but like, yeah. The introvert with a billion views. Yeah. I don't know. I used to do what Miss Excel did. Basically what you said. I used to like try to bump up my energy so that when I film, I have like the highest energy. But now I try to have like consistently high energy throughout my day, every day. And I actually built that muscle by doing this thing for like a month. I would set up my camera for an hour and I would do a stand-up comedy show to myself.

4:04I'm like improvised or improvised. I've never like I've never done stand-up comedy. I don't know comedy. That's amazing. And I did that just to like learn to not be scared to like tell bad jokes and just like be myself and natural. Then after that, I would like record my entire day almost. And like, it wouldn't even go online. That is fascinating. You actually did that. You would, you would in the morning, you would turn on the camera and you would just do a standup routine just to get yourself to feel confident, to be okay in the awkwardness and to get your kind of like charisma reps. Is that what you were doing?

4:40Like people go to the gym, you were doing that? Actually. Okay. Here's what I would actually do. This actually sounds cringe because I've never said it before. there's this YouTube channel called charisma on command. So in the morning I'd watch that. Right. And then like throughout the day, like I would repeat like the, the things I learned in my head. And then at night I would do the standup comedy show, like throughout the day, I would try to record as well just to like get my reps in. But that's essentially what I did. I tried to like build up my charisma and personality just by like recording videos that no one's going to see.

5:08I don't think that's cringe at all. I think that makes total sense. Um, whenever I see somebody who's good at something. I don't assume they're just good at it. I assume they've worked at this. And when you see somebody who's good on camera or somebody who's got a personality that's really, you know, charismatic, I assume it's because they practice being charismatic. Maybe they did it informally, just in school all the time, cracking jokes at the lunch table and whatnot. And that's where they got their 10 ,000 reps. But if you don't have that, or you're starting as a, as an introvert or somebody who's bad at it, there is a deliberate way to get better.

5:40Just like any skill, just like building muscles, just like becoming good at, you know, tennis or whatever, whatever else it is. And I actually feel, I actually look for this. I look for things that are really valuable to have, but nobody wants to practice it. And even worse, um, people would find it cringe or lame. If you said I'm practicing this, cause I'm like, that's a goldmine. That is, we agreed it's valuable. Nobody really works on it. So I don't even have to work that hard to get great at it, to become better than most people at it because most people are not practicing. And even worse, even if people wanted to practice, they'd feel so lame or it's taboo or it sounds cringe or it sounds awkward to do it.

6:23That's a barrier to entry. Most people are not willing to do that. I hunt down those skills and I develop them. And it's really great to hear you at age 18 doing that same thing. That's really amazing. So you've said before, there's four criteria for an idea. Novelty, uncertainty, knowledge gaps, and complexity. Can you explain what this means? Knowledge gaps is basically telling the viewer, I know something that you don't, which is why you have to watch. Or similar to what we were talking about before, how it's like, I did X, so you don't have to. And then uncertainty is basically telling the viewer that you're doing something crazy that you don't know what the outcome could possibly be.

7:00Such as like, I recently made a video where I sold everything my family owns. There's so much uncertainty and how is her family going to react? We need to see their reaction to her selling everything. You know, I'm not a, I'm not so much of a TikToker or YouTuber just yet. We'll be soon. But when I write even a blog post or a Twitter thread or something like that, I will often put like the central curiosity gap, which is basically what, what is the person curious about that I can put up front where they're going to want to read to the end to see the payoff. Mr. Peace does this in his videos too, right?

7:33He did a video recently, which was like, I have people age one to a hundred trapped in these rooms and the last person out is going to win. And the curiosity is who's going to win? Is it going to be the old person? Is it going to be the young kid? That actually is something that comes down to the video idea itself. Because when I'm brainstorming an idea, we want the idea itself to have so many questions that need answered. Because at the end of the day, like content creation on YouTube, what piques people's curiosity is a problem that needs to be resolved at the end of the video or a question that's going to get answered at the end of the video.

8:07And that's what I try to do in all of my videos. So let's look at one of them. So 23 million views you have. What does$1 get you at Starbucks? Like literally the title is the question, the unresolved question. Yes. I don't know. What can you get? And I guess it's more like, what's the most you can get for the buck, right? How do you get the most bang for your buck? That's kind of brilliant. Okay. Who has the best dollar menu? 3.1 million views. Also unresolved. Which place is it going to be? And you can see literally the first frame is like you holding a dollar bill with Burger King behind you.

8:38And it's kind of like, you know, you can see what you're going to do. You're about to test visually. You can see you're going to test what can I buy with this dollar at this place. So the unresolved question is kind of interesting. The other thing I like that you do that I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but like, it seems like you weave in your personal life or your personal stories. So it's not just like, I'm going to do this crazy thing. It's like, it's my mom's birthday and I want to get her a gift. And then you do the crazy thing, but at least the video is more like, I don't know.

9:07I kind of connect with you more. I see your mom. I like that you're buying your mom a gift. You're kind of earnest about it. Is that a tactic that you think about, you know, kind of a personal story versus just a generic stunt? Totally. I think that's what makes the videos. Like quite frankly, there's so many people who can do the same idea and it just doesn't go as viral because they're not telling a story. And that's why I try to weave in like my personal life because it's more relatable, more people comments about it. That's how we get that returning viewership. So what's an example of a video you did with a story that you could have done without?

9:39Okay, the best example I have was I have a video where I made a garden on a budget. And if you search up other people's videos making a garden, they were averaging like 20 ,000 views. People who make gardening videos don't average high views. So what was the difference? How did you get, if a normal garden video, 20 ,000 views, your garden video, 20 million views, what did you do to juice that video up? I told the story of how ratatouille is my favorite food, but it's so expensive to buy it. But technically speaking, I could just make a garden to have infinite ratatouille for life. and it's my favorite food.

10:17So it just works out. And then also my mom and my grandma were helping me for a portion of the garden. It just interweaves so many things that the people can insert themselves into. Right. So you took a normal thing with medium to low stakes. You added your why, why I care about this. And the why doesn't have to be life or death. I think that's kind of important. I think a lot of the YouTubers did it as life or death. This is the craziest stunt you've ever seen. And I think Ryan Trahan and you, I think you guys are very, very likable because it's almost like low stakes stakes. Oh, a thousand percent.

10:51Especially like now on YouTube, people are so used to like these high stakes, like seeing $10 ,000 in a title anymore. People don't even know what that even means because they're seeing people like Mr. Beast spend a million dollars. So it's like, you know, people are just so numb to these numbers or these stakes where almost these low stakes are high stakes. Right. Okay. So let's take it. Let's do an example. Here's an idea. And let's try to make it better using some of the techniques. We'll just riff on this and see where it goes. Live improv here. Okay, so let's say I want to make a video about me making dinner.

11:25So I'm cooking dinner. One out of 10 video concept. It's not going to be the most exciting. Let's use, show me how you would make it better. So let's use either novelty, complexity, knowledge gaps, or uncertainty. How would you kind of make that idea more interesting? I love this. So for me, if I was to make that idea, making dinner, right? Intrinsically not intriguing at all. But what's relevant to me is how much of a struggle it is as someone who has like a health condition, right? So like that's one angle, right? Then there's also the angle of like you're doing it on a budget, which is what I usually do.

12:00So now that's even more of an intriguing angle, like trying to make a healthy meal on a budget because healthy is supposed to be expensive. Right. Or it could be, I'm trying to make a fancy dinner, but I don't know how to cook. That too. Or I'm a total beginner, but I'm going for gourmet. Yes, exactly. And then there's so many different layers. And I also love to do juxtaposition where it's like, okay, I want to make a gourmet dinner with leftovers from last night. Or like a Lunchable or something like that, right? Yes, exactly. Turning the Lunchable into gourmet. Then all of these are great ideas.

12:38And then at the end of the day, it's like, which one makes you most excited? Gotcha. Okay, cool. And then the personal story part would be, why am I making the dinner in the first place? Why does this matter to me? What are the stakes? So we made the idea more interesting by adding the contrast, the juxtaposition, the complexity, the novelty. But then the personal story might be, I invited my mom over for dinner. She's cooked for me my whole life. I told her I was going to cook her an amazing meal. Only problem is I've never, you know, I'm an adult now. I moved out of the house, but I've never cooked dinner for anybody.

13:08I've never hosted guests. I got to do it. The story is even better now because there's even an angle where what if the video is something along the lines of like, you're going to turn a Lunchables into a Dinnerables because Lunchables, they don't have a dinner option. It's just Lunchables, right? And then what's even better is your mom would never cook for you, but she would always give you Lunchables for lunch. So now for dinner, you're going to give her Lunchables. I mean, it sounds a bit complex, but as you script it, you don't remember like with complexity, the goal is to like add layers to give people more reasons to watch, but you don't want to actually confuse the viewer.

13:43And that kind of comes back in with the way you copyright it because you want to say it in a way that's easy to digest and drip feed that context. Right. Yeah. When we were hanging out with Mr. Beast and he was telling us about some of his video ideas, what I realized was I was like, man, The reason his videos can get 100 million, 200 million views is because it's a concept so simple. You could literally just draw it with a stick figure drawing and people would get it. Two people who don't know each other trapped in a room for 100 days. If they make it the whole way, they get a million dollars, right?

14:18These are like simple, universal, easy to understand ideas. what you just did with the Lunchables, Dinnerables thing is both the kind of like that amusement. Like I'm doing this just for my own amusement. I'm not doing this to impress you. I'm doing this to scratch my own itch. Can I do this? And like, I think that's very likable and also very simple to understand. Yeah. I turned Lunchables into Dinnerables. Visually, you can imagine that. Yeah. Okay. That's great. All right. I'm excited for you to go make that video someday. All right. So we got ideas and how to basically brainstorm to turn any kind of mundane idea into a better idea using those techniques.

14:54Now, actually pulling it off. So delivering on it. So what is the most important part? What's the first thing you do when you have the idea? Now, first thing you got to get right in order for a video to pop off. The hook. And the hook is so important that sometimes I figure out the most viral hook isn't the most viral idea. So then I have to come back to the idea and change the idea based on the hook. When you think about hooks, I guess, what is the big picture advice when it comes to hooks? And then what is the tactical process you take? Power words should be the first thing that starts the video.

15:30What's a power word? What do you mean? Power words are things that will instantly hook people that are very strong words, such as free, zero dollars, stole, or any crazy word. And the reason I say that is because I see a lot of people, like way too many people start their videos with, this is, I'm out. This is, is not telling me anything about the video. Like I actually scroll because it's like, it's bad. As opposed to if someone says free chicken sandwiches all weekend, I'm in. Where are these free chicken sandwiches? I was in the moment you said free. So that's the number one thing. You want your hooks to start with power words.

16:08The second thing is you want it to be progressing the video. The reason why this is also bad is because it is just saying a statement. It is not doing anything. This is blank. Doesn't tell me what you're going to do. It's just telling me a statement as opposed to preaching sandwiches this weekend. You're already telling me the whole story or I'm building a secret room. You're already telling me the action. Even though the power words aren't until three words in secret, it still works because it's starting with the action. I'm doing blank. I'm going to do blank. The story is progressing as opposed to a statement being stale.

16:43That's the second thing. And another thing that's very crucial for hooks or in your general introduction of your video is to foreshadow the end. Your hook has to be so clear what the video is going to be about. You're not only setting up the video, but you're also saying what the conflict is and what's going to be at the end of the video all in one sentence, which is very hard, but that's what a really good hook has. So I have an example here of one of yours. You have one that says, movie theaters are overpriced. And you said, that's the hook. And then the foreshadow is, so I'm going to make a movie theater at home on a budget of only$5.

17:21Exactly. Yep, exactly. You nailed it. You want your hooks to have the setup conflict and what the resolution is going to be all in one. What metrics in a video map to that? So like, for example, on YouTube, but in a normal YouTube video, the thumbnail and the title matter. And you know that because you can see the click-through rate, how many people actually choose to try to watch your video. When it comes to short form video, what metrics are the top two that are related to idea and hook? Yeah, so the idea slash hook metric would be the view versus swipe away percentage. View versus swipe away.

17:56And what is good and then what's amazing for that percentage, that number? Yeah, so I've heard the average is 70, where pretty good for me is 80 % plus. And excellent would be 85 % plus. But for my channel, we average around 80-85%, which is very uncommon. I think Beasts is at 75%, so I've heard. And then the second one is the view versus swipe away. And then what's the next most important metric? Retention? Retention overall. Yes, retention, I'd say. It just shows how much the viewer enjoyed the video. What do you shoot for with retention? It depends on the video length, but generally you want to be at at least 90%.

18:39My team, we usually go for 95 plus. Wow. And again, I think for most people, it's like 15 % or something crazy. Oh, no. Okay, so the hook and the first frame. What about the visual? What works in the actual visual? Because with short form, there's no thumbnail. And people aren't really reading the title, I don't think. So what's your philosophy on what to put on screen? What that first frame should look like? Yeah, I try to keep it as simple as possible. It's very similar philosophy to like a title and thumbnail, same psychology in a way, where I try to keep it like little to no focus points, high brightness, high saturation.

19:22And we'll go through so many lengths and measures and After Effects and VFX just to make it like pop out just that much more. Such as like, sometimes we'll add artificial fire just to make it look crazier. Like in one of our shorts, I went to Hell's Kitchen, but you don't really get that message across unless you actually add the restaurant on fire, you know? And it's like something as literal as that. You're pointing up at the logo of the restaurant. It looks like there's a fire. Is that not real? That's not real. That's not real. People think it's real. Yeah, so we try to make like things really stand out.

19:55Even with the secret room, when I first hit the wall, I just dented the wall. I didn't even break a hole. And we actually had to make a VFX where it would look like I made this giant hole. Like I broke a giant hole. When in reality, it wasn't a giant hole that broke. It was like a little teeny tiny hole because I had like a little small hammer. So it's like little stuff like that. We try to enhance things to look even crazier in post. Interesting. And so what was the first thing you said? No little to no focus points? What does that mean? So what I mean by that is we don't want any busyness to go on.

20:26I think, you know, it's a really good example. If you can show who has the best dollar menu, like in the first frame, just pause it and notice that that is not a real environment. Like we actually took myself, we rotoscoped myself, and then we found a image of McDonald's on Google that was so much cleaner, that had no cars. The logo was clean. There was no trees just so it could be perfectly like just look perfect for the viewer, if that makes sense. That's what we try to do. We want the environment to look as clean as possible. So there's no busy points. So, all right. So great. So we've done idea, how to go from meh to good to great.

21:02We've done the hook, how to grab them by the throat, get that 80 plus percent view rate. Now you said foreshadowing is the next part. What is foreshadowing and how do you do it? Because this is one that I've heard. Obviously, I've thought about the ideas. I've thought about hooks. This is not something I do in my process. What is foreshadowing? Foreshadowing is when you give a viewer the expectation of the end of the video. and the way I've coined it is you basically want to tell the viewer that there's an Amazon gift card at the end of the video, essentially. They need to watch till the end. Sometimes you'll have to explicitly tell the viewer, oh, you'll get blank at the end of the video.

21:38Usually, a lot of my foreshadowing is implied. So who has the best dollar menu? It's very implied that by the end of the video, I'm going to tell you who has the best dollar menu, essentially. And that's usually the best foreshadowing, one that's so obvious because it's within the hook and it's implied. But when even better, even stronger foreshadow and hook is when you have a mechanism. So an example of that is what does$10 get you in Miami? Now, not only do you know by the end of the video, what$10 gets you in Miami, but you also know how I spent the$10. Now the mechanism is actually seeing the money being spent because in the first second you see, oh, she spent$2, we're at an$8 budget.

22:17And then a couple of seconds later, oh, now she's at five. And we have a sense of progression of where the video is going. Because otherwise, if the viewer does not feel like the video is constantly progressing, then they're going to leave because they don't feel like even though you said that there's something at the end, they don't know where the end is. So it's also very important to make it clear. Let's talk about storytelling. You have a great quote. You said, what is storytelling? Storytelling in one word is change. Yes. Unpack that. What does that mean? I think the biggest thing is progression.

22:49I guess when I say change, I mean progression. So similar to what I was just saying, the viewer wants to feel like they're constantly either learning or laughing even more or they are building towards something. They don't want to feel like they're watching something stagnant, like they're just watching paint dry. The best storytelling is when there's character development change in the actual character, where at the beginning of the video, the character started at one point and is now at a new point at the end. So I subtly did that in my short that hit 100 million views. so basically I built a secret room with zero dollars and my goal was to have a secret spot to watch YouTube and in the beginning of the video my mom was yelling at me for destroying the house and how there's nothing under there like I'm crazy what am I doing and then at the end of the video she ended up having the secret room and pretending like it was hers now it was very subtle but like change like that is what actually made the viewers not only watch till the end to see how that gets resolved, but also rewatch the video again, knowing that.