Masterclass: The YouTube Playbook in 37 Minutes

0:00The Colin and Samir Show is supported by Microsoft Copilot. This is something I thought I would never say, but can I share with you my favorite prompt? I mean, like when you say something like that, I have to say yes. Were you going to say no? No, but okay. Just let me hear it. So when I'm researching for a guest or I need to know a lot about a subject matter, I say, make me a podcast about. And when you do that, you're going to get a short blurb about that subject. And then in like two minutes, you're going to get a podcast. So check this out. Welcome to Co-Pilot Podcasts. Picture this, a guy working the front desk at a hotel, making lacrosse videos in his spare time, completely unaware that he's about to become one of the most influential voices in the creator economy.

0:38Today, we're diving into the remarkable story of Colin Rosenblum. Wow. Did you pay it to say that? That's crazy. That's very kind. It's crazy, but it's my favorite way to learn about a subject matter. I'm learning about so much more now that I can turn this research into like a seven minute podcast that I can listen to just when I'm walking. Did you tell it that I worked at the front desk of a hotel? Dude, the prompt is just, make me a podcast about Colin from Colin and Samir. That's it. I may be biased, but I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm hooked. So if you guys haven't checked out Copilot, check it out.

1:10Try it for your research. Try it for getting variations of your titles, your ideas. It's one of my favorite tools on the internet right now for our creativity. And now back to the show. In the next minute alone, there's going to be over 2 ,500 videos uploaded to YouTube. That's over 2 million videos a day. So if you're someone who wants to start or grow a YouTube channel, how do you stand out? We've asked that question to hundreds of professional YouTubers over the past 10 years, and we pulled out 38 minutes of the best advice from the Colin and Samir show. YouTube is not a video platform. It's a click and watch platform.

1:47It's a platform that people have to decide what to view. Even when you compare it to other video platforms like TikTok feeds you content based on your algorithm, based on your watch history, and they're really good at it. But YouTube long form, at least, is still a decision platform. So to me, the first step is always just really nailing down what ideas we're going to make for a channel. So when I think about these smaller channels that are growing really quickly, it's usually that they have actually invested more time into ideation. I recently had a channel in our accelerator program, Ian Lore Astro.

2:19He's an astrophotography channel. And there was nothing terribly wrong with how he was making the videos. Like the videos are pretty good, but they were doing two or 3000 views of video. And I'd love to take a lot of credit for it. But the reality of it is, is we were just like, Hey, like spend more time on ideation, study what's working in other niches, try to build a video that we define as having a CCN fit. It hits the core audience, it's the casual audience and it hits the new audience all at the same time, which sounds easy, but it's actually quite hard because sometimes what's really interesting to a new audience alienates a core audience.

2:50And sometimes what's really interesting to a core audience is just narrowing the total potential market the video can hit. He changed it from maybe being a situation where he was spending 5 % of time on idea title thumbnail to maybe spending 30 % of time on idea title thumbnail. And he made a video that got a million views and did, I think, 270 times his average viewership. just a video just with astrophotography at different time levels. And it was built on a format that had worked for other people. Like, it was really interesting to see just how big of a multiplier YouTube can be. Can you break down why that title thumbnail works as opposed to like, I photographed the Milky Way?

3:31I think because immediately that poses like an interesting question of like, what do the different levels of time investment look like for this thing? There's also like a clear comparison, whether it be a body transformation, whether it be like a$1 jet versus like$100 billion jet or whatever. I think viewers are just fascinated by comparisons and seeing how different things take different amounts of time or investment. And also that format makes for a really interesting thumbnail because you can show the different levels of effort and how that photo ends up coming out. But those little differences can just have such outsized returns, which it breaks my brain sometimes.

4:07We worked with this creator, his name was Tim Gabe, and he had a video which was six UI hacks. And someone on my team helped advise him on just like a tiny thumbnail change. And the difference between the thumbnail he had before and the thumbnail he had afterwards was, I would say maybe it was like 30, 40 % better, the one afterwards. Like it wasn't a huge difference. But the video ended up getting 40 times more views per day. And that's what breaks my brain. And I think what a lot of creators like fail to realize is how much of a difference those small details can make. Sometimes it is about just like realizing where you need to invest more time and focus and just improving those little details.

4:47If you want to be a successful creator, you have to embrace the fact that your audience is not only the final audience, but they're also your focus group. Traditional media, you've got the focus group and then you've got the intended audience. That distinction goes away. Your fans are your focus group. And if you don't listen to them, you're not going to be a successful creator long term. There's two aspects to your content. There's the product and there's the performance. And a lot of really creatively purist people can never accept that the performance of the content, and so therefore the marketing, the title, and the thumbnail are important and potentially just as important or more important than the content itself.

5:32Now, we've always said the content is king and we want to have a great product and we're never going to let that suffer. but getting people to watch that is such an important part of it. You don't brace the quality of the product and then the performance itself of that product. It just can't happen. It's going to lose too much steam. We have like, this episode is brought to you by LifeLock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info. And if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft.

6:07LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Or your money back. Save up to 40 % your first year at lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. The most uptight process for launching a new YouTube channel that I've ever heard of. And we had basically, for lack of a better term, like an actual playbook. And it comes from just an overweening amount of preparation ahead of time. We research every vertical that we go into. We watch everything in that vertical. We understand how the hosts talk to the audiences. We understand the colors they use, how long the episodes are, how often they post, what their opening lines are, whether they have a theme song or not, what their titles include.

6:53Do their titles include punctuation? Do their thumbnails involve a white stroke on the outside of everyone's head? Whatever it is, we know everything about the vertical before we even decide to go into it. And then from there, we decide, okay, can we play in this space? Where aren't people saying the things that we would like to say? Are there enough collaborators in this space that we think we could be part of a community in this ecosystem? And then from there, it's like, okay, what would we actually say? And we come up with literally a year's worth of content titles and log lines. if you don't have, if you don't have, and I mean, maybe more than that.

7:29It was like a hundred. It's about a hundred. A hundred titles and log lines. Yeah. And then from there, you know, going back to the playbook idea, it's once we've kind of developed all this list, once we've done all this research and once we're kind of got the go ahead, it's we have to launch with five videos, like day one, five videos. It's not launch on an empty channel. It's not here's the only one. It's five videos that within those five videos give you the thesis of the channel. Here are the range of things we're going to talk about. Here's how they're going to look. Here's how they're going to sound.

7:58Here's an episode about hygiene. Here's an episode about clothing and personal style. Here's an episode about, you know, a real life experiment where we do something wacky like try to kill you with a high heel, you know, and here's something. The video did really well. It did. Great thumbnail. People were really excited to kill things with high heels. Yeah. And when we're going in for an actual channel launch, we also focus all of the attention on it, right? Style theory is a great example. We got to a million subscribers in 62 hours, right? Whoa. Yeah. Because we intentionally sent people to a channel with everything we had from every other channel.

8:35We pointed straight at it and said, go watch this right now. And when they landed there, they landed on five 20-minute episodes. If you make it through all those episodes, it's 100 minutes of watch time on a brand new channel. We actually got flagged or something. YouTube thought we were like spamming. Yeah, because of— They tried to demonetize the channel. There were problems early on because YouTube's internal systems couldn't handle all of the watch minutes that were suddenly flooding to this new channel. That's super interesting, I think. We have some principles of a good YouTube intro from what we've seen.

9:09Upon click, the first seven seconds of a video is about confirming the click. It's just like, is this matching my expectations? Or is it clickbait, you mean? Yeah. So basically, our first rule is like— Or even is it just slightly off? Got it. right? Like, did they stretch just even a little bit further than what I was expecting? Cool. Or is Mark Rober not there? Yeah, yeah. That'd be a good example. Exactly. Or is Mark Rober on Zoom, right? Where it's like, oh, I'm going to send him a recipe and see if it... Immediately, that's a different expectation. So when I see you, Mark, and like a crazy pizza that's exploding like a volcano in the thumbnail, right?

9:41Yeah, yeah. And so then in the first seven seconds, basically I see, okay, Mark's actually there with you. That's super important. The next like 10 seconds, we talk about making it personal. It's like, why are you the one to make him a master chef? So you're about to take him to an intensive culinary bootcamp. You're in the chef's coat. If I don't know who you are, I immediately assume, all right, this guy's a legit chef. And then basically by, you know, we typically say by 30 seconds, but you do this at 15 seconds, you have to introduce a new hook. Yep. And so what you do here is you say, and we're going to take him through three tests that he has to pass.

10:18I think important too that the audience now knows what they're waiting for. Yeah, we were just in New York and we were talking to Max Joseph. He was talking about how every great story needs an A to Z. So the audience needs to be informed. What is A and what is Z? Yeah. And Z meaning like, when is the video over? And so you introduce these three challenges and you go, once he does these three that's when the video is over if he hasn't done the three the video is not over yep and we're seeing this a lot like rober does it uh jimmy does this a lot in his videos where we call it like the video game map yeah where they kind of zoom out and they're like but that's one of six challenges that we're doing this video right yeah and they zoom out and you're oh cool i want to get there yeah the a to z map those graphics like people are using those kind of flashy, intense.

11:06I don't take it quite that far where I'm doing the really crazy VFX and that kind of thing. But I mean, I think it's really cool. Everything is a list. This is some like, you know, in, I think this is advice from like nonfiction writing. Fundamentally, every nonfiction book is a listicle. It's just like sometimes packaged up in a non-listically kind of way. Atomic Habits is a listicle. The Four Habits of Behavior Change. The Four Our Workweek is a listicle. Everything is a listicle at the end of the day. And so this is something that we, say to our students in the YouTuber Academy, when in doubt, just think about a list.

11:38If you were talking to yourself from two years ago, what is three or five or seven, we like odd numbers, three or five or seven things you would have wanted to know, and then just talk about those things. And that's it. Everything is a list of code at the end of the day. It helps you organize your thoughts as a storyteller. And then for the audience, you have to get to the end. You know, one of the philosophies that we teach on our YouTuber Academy, which is like my whole philosophy of YouTube, is find a way to systemize it as much as possible. It's completely unsustainable if you're having to reinvent the wheel every single time.

12:04Yeah. Which is why I don't envy entertainment YouTubers because they are having to reinvent the wheel every single time. Yeah. But as an educational YouTuber, all you need is a title, a thumbnail, and a list. And title, thumbnail, list, would like a reasonable hook or promise. I don't even like the word hook because it sounds too like - Yeah, yeah, yeah, promise. Yeah, exactly. It's like a promise. What is the video actually about? You know, the title is 17 Purchases That Saved Me Time. In this video, we're going to talk about 17 Purchases That Saved Me Time. Number one is a paddle-off. But I like that framework of like, Like, you know, all you need is an idea, thumbnail, or did you say title, thumbnail, and a list?

12:37Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. I like that a lot. That's so good. I think number one on the laws of writing good videos, Doc. Ooh, I would love to hear the laws of writing good videos. Law number one, control the scope. Make sure the point isn't too broad. Keep it narrow. Keep it focused. Love that. Number two, don't waste the viewer's time. It's almost the same one again. What is the point? Make your point as concisely as possible. number three load up the learning outcomes and this one's really important to me because I feel like our role is to make you feel at the end like you got more than just you know like marshmallows and and cheese whiz you know like you got something of substance after you consume our content plan for flow some ideas will have a natural order you know it could be physical outside to inside.

13:28It could be temporal, beginning to end. It could be conceptual. Start with the background info, current events, future speculation, you know. But make sure that you have a clear idea. Five, make it personal. Provide context. It's not always obvious how good a screen is, how impressive someone's subscriber count is. Right. Remember who you're talking to. You know, not every video is for everyone. So you guys are going to see this a lot, right? Sometimes you guys are going to do a video that's really targeting brand new creators who've never done anything. And sometimes you guys are going deep into the weeds for people who, if they don't have like a million subscribers, it's probably not applicable.

14:08Don't worry about it. Yeah. Right? Plan for the payoff. Really important to me. Tell and show us how to feel. Man. And this is part of the context one too. Provide context. When you're presenting to the camera, it captures a fraction of your energy. It captures a fraction of your emotion. So you have to overdo it. If you don't overdo it, you end up just flat and boring. Number 10, have fun. The audience's bullshit detector is like finely tuned. Finely tuned. If they can tell that you don't give a shit, why should they give a shit? What process or structure would you recommend for someone who maybe has never even written scripts before?

14:49You're basically just thinking about how do I re-hook them every time we move from one segment to the next? How do I make it completely clear at all times what this particular segment is going to be about? So is essentially, you know, the transition between each segment, is that essentially introducing a new problem? So like a rhythm of problem and solution? Yes. Yeah, exactly. That's a really good way of thinking about it. So if we take it another way and think of an entertainment thing, someone like Max Fosch is trying to break into an aquarium or something. and we will have it set up that the first segment is, but first I needed to get myself a giant fish costume or something.

15:25And so we know, right, okay, the first problem he's encountering is he needs to buy this giant costume. And then say over the course of the segment, he buys the costume, he makes his way to the aquarium, and then he discovers something like, but then I realized the costume was too big for me to fit in the door. And then you realize, okay, so the next problem we're dealing with is how does he actually gain access to the building? And so I think the way you put it, Colin, is perfect. It's like you're just continuously raising a problem, solving it, and then immediately raising another problem and solving it.

15:53Really, the most key thing when we're talking about this problem-solution way of approaching it is that you can't leave the audience in between setting up the next solution for too long. So you resolve a problem. You resolve that segment. The audience needs to know what's coming next. They can't be left in that kind of middle ground limbo where they don't know what the next segment is going to be about because the brain will start to wander. That homepage is just one click away. they need to be kept focused on, okay, they've resolved one problem and now they've set up the next one. What's coming next?

16:21I think what comes to mind for me is that it's not necessarily about like pace of editing. It's pace of new problems. Like I think people can often confuse pace of editing with pace of new problem that like, it doesn't actually matter if you're moving quickly, but if you don't have a new problem, then you'll lose people. So that was actually George Blackman, who's a professional YouTube script writer. And that conversation was from our course called the YouTube Growth Playbook. The YouTube Growth Playbook is a step-by-step system for growing a YouTube channel. It's based off of our 15 years of experience on the platform, as well as our hundreds of interviews with professional creators.

16:58It's all centered around the three rules of YouTube. Now to help you take what you're learning in this video and put it into practice, we put together a free worksheet that you can download just by clicking the link in our description and putting in your email. All right, now we're going to talk about packaging and thumbnails with Cleo Abram. I noticed in watching your videos over the last year and a half that your thumbnails have changed a lot. And I feel like they've improved a lot, like in the quality of the graphic design, in the composition, in the clickability of just like telling a story between the title and the thumbnail.

17:30What was that process like for you? What did you learn about YouTube titles and thumbnails that has taken you to where you are today? I sort of feel like a machine learning algorithm in this way where I'm just like pattern matching and it's hard to describe exactly what the steps were. Um, but maybe it was you guys, maybe it was someone else, the three step, the three things rule that you want to have three things. That's been really helpful. Thinking about the thumbnail as part of the story, like noticing what I like, I have a big deck. Um, it was a lot of titles and thumbnails that I admire.

18:05And then I just looked through and I tried to articulate why I admired them so much. And a lot of it had to do with like, um, Tom Scott's relationship between his titles and his thumbnails and the way that he's like in action in many of them. And there's an arrow that's pointing to something specific. And I love that. Sometimes it's tricky because I'm trying to maybe include my own face probably because it's sort of a signal that this is a show that people have, uh, clicked on before. Um, but also include something that is not necessarily like me in action in the field. Sometimes I'm in the field, but sometimes I'm not.

18:36And then also I think there's a certain amount of creative confidence that it takes to make something, I mean, first something on YouTube in general, but also to put out a title and a thumbnail that doesn't try to be everything and sort of assumes that you're going to create that curiosity gap and then people will click it and that it will work. I think very early on I was trying to like put the whole video in the title and thumbnail and now I'm a little bit more relaxed about it and that's actually helped. And so it's an exercise in choosing those three things and like making that actually work.

19:07Something really interesting about your thumbnails, and we were speaking with you yesterday about this, is that realism is really important to you. Yeah. And that is not necessarily the YouTube meta. Like that's not really what's fully happening across YouTube. Right. Realism. How much do you think about that, care about that, where the brand of being a creator goes? Yeah, that's I think it's super important. I think for a while, it's something that I thought was just like assigned to me, like the idea of, oh, I'm if I want to be creator, I have to be like Mr. Beast and ZHC. Like I have to have a logo as my channel name and my channel like profile picture.

19:45And I actually did that. I like changed my profile picture to like an eyeball. What does that even mean? What is what does an eyeball have to do with me? And I did it because I was like I was thinking is one of those correlation is not causation type of situations where I was like looking at the top and and seeing what they do not realizing that I'm just a human being. I'm like not planning to build an empire. I don't want to build an empire or anything. I just want to connect with people and make videos I love. And so it is important to be intentional. Like I think about even how fonts communicate to people.

20:15Like I changed my font from being somewhat more corporate to something that's like so normal. That's just on everyone's computer. And it just feels more like me. And I think that like if creators can find those little things, like what song just feels like me, what font feels like me, What video feels like me? And it comes down to realism too, like with the thumbnails. And I found that realistic thumbnails just feel like me. It feels like, yeah, if my face is not like, I feel more connected to the thumbnail. If I'm just making a very subtle face that's like, because it's realistic and I'm like, oh, that's legit.

20:49Also, the concepts that you do are rooted in realism. Like they don't feel sensational. The titles might be somewhat sensational. I spent 24 hours in the world's quietest room or loudest room. There's a superlative there that fits into what performs on YouTube. Then when you watch it, a lot of it is rooted in the relationship you have with the guy who runs the room. Like the people you meet. You've done such a good job of creating characters out of those people. One of my absolute favorites is the Underwater Hotel. Yes, it's so fun. The guy you meet. Yeah, what's his name? Daniel. Sweet Daniel.

21:25Yeah, sweet Daniel. Hello. Hello. No way. Now, another thing is in your sensory deprivation video, you also showed this moment of really vulnerable, raw emotion. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the decision of keeping that in or not keeping that in? Yeah, that was wild. So I got in the sensory deprivation tank and like at first it was lights and floating and sound. And then hour two, I turned off the light. So it was just floating and sound. Hour three, I actually put earplugs in. So it was just floating. Like those earplugs were crazy. Those are some nice earplugs. And I had a moment in there where I actually felt like I had these like recessed memories about my grandmother.

22:09And just like the last time I felt super, super still. And it was just taking a nap with her one summer when in like 2008, when I was just super young. And it was wild because I literally started crying. I guess they're bawling. And it's so funny because Zach helps to edit the videos. And normally I'll like help talk. I'll like kind of talk to him through the video. I'm like, dude, that was funny. Like, that was cool. We should definitely like put down the video. And with that, I felt so uncomfortable because I knew Zach was going to watch it. And I was like, I just didn't say anything for like five minutes.

22:40I was like, anyways. And so we actually talked about it afterwards. And he was like, dude, we should put this in the video. Those are the moments we crave, even like off camera. In a human level, we crave those like real emotions, real conversations. And so that was a huge like turning point to me to realize like, I'm a human being. Like, I have a YouTube channel, but those are the moments that matter. And so many great comments came from that just like empathizing with me and people sharing their experiences the last time they felt still or like how their grandparents impacted their lives. So cool twist.

23:12When it comes to retention, obviously, there's things you can do in the first 30 seconds, the first minute. are there checklist items you have to get people to 10 minutes to 15 to 20 yeah i mean it's very hard with a single storyline if you're doing like a double digit minute video to just have that one thing grip their entire attention throughout the whole video and pay off at the end um so typically if you're doing a longer video you should introduce like a side story and like re you should have some plan halfway through like to re-engage them so they don't just get bored you know i mean like if i just said like if i hand you a camera out of camera it's like okay if he tags me he gets a hundred grand and then I just run and that's it it's just me running through the woods and him just running through the woods after me you can't make a 15 minute video out of it you know what I mean but if I do that and then like three minutes in I pull a lever and a bear comes out and starts chasing him and he has to get away from the bear I don't know obviously we wouldn't do this but kill the bear and then he starts chasing me and then six minutes in I jump across the lake and as he goes to jump through I press a button that shoots him to the moon whatever you know what I mean like now all of a sudden it's interesting and you're watching right and that's it right one is just a single story and it's boring.