What is a StoryBrand? Plus Automations, Shortcuts & Project Juggling

Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of the Creator Toolbox. This is the show all about the nuts and bolts behind your creator business. How you can create a business around your creation. I'm Colin Garay from thepodcasthost.com, joined by Jacob, as always. How you getting on, Jacob? Hello. Good. Good to be back. Good, good. What's going on this week? You having a busy one? Yeah, yeah. It's felt pretty nonstop, actually. The whole the past two months or cycle has felt

pretty nonstop, but in a really good way. A lot done. So. Yeah, getting towards the end now and it's like crunch time. Gotta make sure we take everything off. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think it matters how you plan things out. It always feels like, and we plan in two month cycles, it always feels like you do twice as much in the last two weeks as you have in any previous two weeks. Yeah. And it probably. I wonder

if it's just around focus. It's just around. I actually wrote these things down that I need to do and therefore I need to actually concentrate and get them done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe we should plan in like two weeks cycles instead and then. Yeah. God, that'd be stressful. Yeah. All right. We've got a few things we want to cover today, don't we?

We've got a whole idea around. Do you want to talk about the story brand idea, Donald Miller's book, and a few things we've been working on there. So how to build a story brand that can really draw your listeners in. I've got a great creator of the week, actually. I want to talk through somebody I came across recently. Well, actually, no, I've known her for a while and I just want to talk about a bit of her work, which should be cool. I've got techie thing as well.

We'll go into straight away around lighting and automation and things. Just someone I've been playing with and a few other ideas too. So should we just jump into it? Yeah, let's do it. Good stuff. Before we jump in, I'll do a quick

little support slot. As you might know, we run a podcast app called Alitoo. If you want to support the free content we put out, we'd love it if you go and check it out. Alitoo is a podcast maker app, like I said, designed to make podcasting as easy as humanly possible. It has call recording, it has audio editing, audio cleanup, publishing, all built in. Really, the core thing behind it is automating as much as we can and helping with the rest with particularly our editing, which is all around

making it so. So it's podcast specific. So you're not using editing tools that are built for audio producers. We've got tools that are built in really just for podcasters only. What you need and tools, little devices, little aspects that are really just helping podcasters, particularly like our speedup. So you can edit at one and a half times, which is something that always surprised me. It never existed in all our tools. Jacob. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people

love. So yeah, go over and check out Alatu, alitoo.com. that's alitu.com. and it really helps support the content, content we put out. All right, can I jump into a quick one first? Jacob, a tool of the week, please, go ahead. Right. So something I bought a while ago, and I wasn't sure if it was worth it at the time, but I've kind of brought it in for different things over time. Was a stream deck. You ever come across the wee stream decks? No. Is it

the sort of pad with the buttons what do things when you press them in a stream? Yeah, buttons. What do things exactly. The elgato stream deck is the one I got in particular, but there's a few others around. And in fact, one cool thing is the rodecaster, which a lot of podcasters have these days. You can actually change the little sound pads on the side of it to act almost like a stream deck. So you've got, you know the rodecaster, Jacob, with eight, eight sound pads on the side.

Yeah. Normally you would put sound effects on them and you can play sound effects, but you can actually, there's little mods and I think it's maybe even built into the Rodecaster software these days. But there's definitely those kind of hacky mods you could use in the past to turn them into stream deck type buttons, do other things, like open windows or whatever. Is a broadcaster that's on your desk right in front of you just now? No, I have it over on our recording desk over to my left here.

Cause the last time I was in your office, I spotted something which made me absurdly happy about your setup, which is built into your stream deck. I think it might be. If it's not, the rodecaster is a button which is a timer for your coffee. And I just thought that right there. That's genius. Such a good use of technology. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We'll see that. So that was one of the first buttons I created. As soon as I got the stream deck,

I looked into what you could do with it. And one of the things was a timer. And I was like, oh, excellent. I always like set a, I'd like mess around with Siri, try to set a four minute timer for my coffee or whatever, like for it. When it's steeping, it's like I can just have a wee button and it just does it. And it was really cool. The difference with stream deck, compared to a lot of other ones, is how the buttons are little screens. And so the buttons

can show animations. So when I press my coffee one, my coffee one has a little timer on it, and it has a little timer icon on it, and it has the word coffee. I press it and suddenly it turns into an actual interactive timer. Like it counts down. You can see it counting down on the button. So it's really gimmicky. You can do it in so many other ways. It's really not worth 100 something quid. For stream, for coffee, but for streaming. Yeah, as a little add on, it's really cool.

I mean, theoretically the stream deck was designed for, like you said, their stream streamers. So in your stream, like we're recording in streamyard just now, you can flip between different layouts, you can flip between different, you can optimize all sorts of different functions, make it really simple to actually manage a live stream. But equally you can do that with a non live recording as well. Like, so to be able to, I mean, we don't stream this live, but you can

do some live production really simply in it as well. And I do have some of those setup, but I never found that the most useful thing. I found it actually just over time. I'm just automating more and more random little things, which individually, like the coffee thing, individually, they're not worth the 100 odd quid it is for the stream deck. But altogether they're kind of just optimizing my work enough that suddenly it does become almost worth it.

One example, the one that kind of brought it to mind here, was my lights. So if you're watching the video feed here, you can see all the lights behind me. So I have colored lights, I have hue lights, I have normal, just plug in lights as well. And I have them linked up to a button on the stream deck so that I have different color layouts for different types of videos. I can press a button that makes it purple. I can press a button that makes it white.

In fact, I wonder, can do that demo that in the background. There we go. I've turned it all off. So there, there's all the lights off if you can see it, and there's all the lights on. That's just pressing a button on my stream deck. And I can change colors with it as well. And again, it's just a bit gimmicky. You can get a ten pound remote control that does this as well. But it's the kind of extra control and the fact it's all in one place and it just, I don't know, it just

makes my life a bit easier. What are the non gimmicky things

that you're getting real serious use out of? I mean some stuff like just being able to open certain applications and do application shortcuts. So things like in premiere you can set up a screen on the stream deck. So you can have, you can have different screens, as in I can have a little scroll in the bottom. I can turn some of the buttons at the bottom into scroll, which means go left and right. And then if I press right it goes to a premier setup.

And then that means I can do like hotkeys, I can do macros, so I can set up sequences. So if I'm doing a few different things, like cut this, convert it to that, trim it here, and then do this, and I can have one button that does all of that kind of stuff. So the stuff like that, which are genuine workflow hacks and they work in particular applications, I think the funny thing is, with it, it does take a bit of work to set up and it takes a bit of research to figure out what

it does. And there's tons of articles out there like how to use your stream deck, and a lot of them are just the gimmicky things. But if you become a bit of a power user around the shortcuts and all that kind of stuff, it does start to save you genuine time. So I'm still certainly not using it as a power user. I could do a lot more with it, I think, but I thought it was worth bringing up, and I will.

In fact, I'm looking at it just now. Do you know what, there was a, there was a task I was doing recently which gives a wee demo of this. So I was copying and pasting. Jacob, do you remember when we were transferring our courses from which time? Well, I don't know from exactly which time, from somewhere to somewhere from I think most recently was teachable to circle. And I had like 100 and something videos to transfer courses

and videos. And I figured out I was doing the exact same sequence of things, doing ten of them, and I set up a little macro for that. And I made it so that I had to, oh, I should, I'll put it in the show notes. I can't remember the name of it, but there was a little tool which let you set up like browser recording. So have you come across tools like that before? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, yeah, yeah. So you can set up it to, as a plugin for your browser again, stick it in the show notes.

But there are tools out there which you press record and it basically records your clicks and your scrolls. So you can automate a task in a browser and you can flick between tabs. So I had two tabs in a browser, one with teachable, one with circle. And I was like, right, copy this field, flick to the other tab, tape, paste into this field, flick back to the other tab, copy this whole text blocks, flick back to the other tab, paste it in there,

flick back again, and then it was like two or three of them. Take a video from Vimeo, put it into the new one too, and it was exactly the same every time. And so this browser recorder I clicked on and recorded and then it just ran it, the whole thing automatically. That's really cool. Yeah. So I still had this little pain point where I had to actually like open the browser thing, click play on it and start it up. But suddenly I realized I could put that into my stream

deck. So right now in my stream deck I have two buttons. One is vid paste and one is copy URL. And that was related to that task because it meant that I could just, I could manually do one of the bets that was causing a bit of a pain point with this recording and I would just press the button. It would do three things. I would flick to another tab, press the button, and it would do

the other three things and it would just totally automate the whole thing. That is so not what I thought you were talking about when you said it recorded your browser. I thought you were going to say like loom or teller or that kind of thing. Come across something like that. And that sounds awesome. I've used it remains like scraping tools, same kind of workflow, right, where you need to scrape something from the Internet and you need to say, this is where you need to go, this is the element

you're looking for, blah, blah, blah. This is all these steps of how to browse the Internet. But that is really, really cool. So the manual part that you're talking about in that is, was it able to work its way down a list of videos or did you have to press play for each video and then kind of do the process for each video. That was the manual part was I couldn't figure out how to make it browse from one video to the next or one lesson to the next because that is a

subjective almost thing. Like it wasn't just doing the exact same thing on the screen every single time. Yeah, but if a video, if a lesson was open, so if I had the lesson open in one and a lesson teachable, and then I had the lesson open in circle, that was exactly the same every time. Because the layout of the screens was exactly the same every time. One thing was I couldn't advance to the next lesson automatically. What was this called? So I can't remember,

but I'll put it in the show notes. It was just. It was a price that there's loads of them out there, but I can put it in the show notes, the one that I was using. Wonder if I still. No, I don't have it still installed. I took it off again. I tend to keep my browser extensions pretty trim. So I uninstalled it again, but I can definitely go and find it. So yeah, if you're interested in this, go and have a look in the show notes and you'll see which one.

But yeah, there's a few around there. Pretty standard. Yeah, I'm guilty sometimes when I'll say, like if you're a creator out there, you'll have to do these kind of repetitive tasks so often, or certainly I've found we've had to not just copy and courses, but all sorts of things like that. And I am guilty sometimes of spending longer trying to automate something than it would take to just go ahead and just bloody do it manually.

Yeah. It's a hard thing to balance though, because like it's about, you never quite know how long it's going to take you to automate it and if you can do it quick enough, it will save you time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. And more often than not, you end up doing these things again sometime in the future, even if you don't think you necessarily have to now. So. And even the learning, like the learning of that can apply to something else. It'll speed that up in the future.

And I just find it more fun trying to figure out a problem like that than just doing some rote work, essentially. So sometimes it's actually worth 2 hours making something automated than 1 hour doing it manually simply because it's a more fun task. And I learned something along the way. Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that a lot. That's a nice way to look at it. It does matter. Yeah. Not by ruining the rest of your day, by being super bored for an hour.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah. Cool. So there's a few tasks, a few tools in there. You've got the stream deck, you've got hue. Lighting actually is really cool with the color changing all that stuff. It's expensive, but I have found it really worthwhile and easy over the years. And then yeah, browser recording too. I need to go into,

in a future episode. I want to go into all of the automation things that I've implemented over the last few years actually because I like even just keyboard shortcuts and auto hotkey for like text expansion and stuff like that. Stuff like that just makes your life so much easier and simpler. It just shocks me how many people type their full email address into a form every single time they're filling out a form. Yeah, yeah. Just setting up that presume you don't

do that, Jacob. Oh no. I have safari lastpass and one password vying for dominance on every form that I click on. So it takes me about two minutes rather than just typing it in. It would actually be quicker just to type it in. Instead of trying to like I need to just slightly get my mouse underneath the safari pop up, try to give me the password so I can get to the one password one. Yeah, yeah. Such a good, such a good timing. I use a text expander for that. So I just type in a we shortcut,

like three characters. My email address just expands into it and so it works for all the like address as well. Like, you know when you're filling out your address on a, I know one, one pass and stuff can do that. I actually prefer that. Yeah, that's cool. How do you do that? Yeah. Autohotkey. Yeah, but there's a few around as well. But auto hotkey is great for that. Yeah. Like I have so many things in there.

Yeah. Like email. Email particularly. So I have like three or four shortcuts for how I sign off emails. So I just type in three characters and it expands into cheers, exclamation Mark Colin. So I never type that in or for welcomes. It's like so more general. Welcome. Thank introductions to an email. Like hello, thanks for getting in touch. Really appreciate your interest because I like to, I'm a bit of an over writer. Over, what would you call it?

Like all of the platitudes. Well, that's a bad word for it, but you know what I mean, all of that like, I like the niceties. I do appreciate that in other people and I think it's worth it in text because you lose the personality. So I always, I always write stuff like that. I write, yeah. Thanks for getting in touch. Really appreciate you doing that. But I have shortcuts for those things and I have four or five different variations and I just type in three characters and expands

that. I mean, it's just 20 seconds each. Time, but yeah, yeah, I mean, like, I've got. I think everyone actually, to some degree has that on mobile. Right. So there's some that are just built into iOS. Like, omw. On my way, I've set up a few of them for different things and. Yeah, that makes sense. I never actually considered doing that on desktop, but, yeah. Nice. Yeah, I've got loads. Even bio. You know, you get asked for your biography all the time when you're going on

podcasts and things and somebody asks me for that. Now I just type in bio and it expands out into my full biography and an email. That's cool. Yeah. Does it ever get in the way? Like, does it ever. It does. Occasionally I'll create a new one and then like 10 hours, like a day later, I'll suddenly appear because I'll write that acronym by accident and I'll realize and I'll change it. And I often put little codes in, so often, like, dot something is usually my. My way of avoiding that.

So, yeah, bio, what else do I use? Yeah, that's the main one. To be honest, if I put a dot in, it's very, very rarely in real life. You'll type full stop without a space and then an acronym. Yeah, yeah. So it barely ever happens. Yeah. Um, aye. Yeah. So that works nicely. Cool. All right. I come back to some of them in future, though, I've got a bunch more of those that I've used over the years. Yeah, I like these little hearts because, I mean, these are, uh.

I like to think that I have made quite a lot of my little bits involved, but it's always interesting to hear other people. Yeah. And what they've done. I've never, never heard it. Yeah. Oh, hot teams from coolers. So what is a story brand? Tell me about story. Start with that. Like, what is a story brand? Initially, like, just define that term. What does that mean?

Story brand is the whole idea of the book. So it's a book. That's how I got introduced to it. I'm not sure if it started as a book or not, but it's written by Don Miller. And the whole idea is that you create a hero's journey, basically for your customer and your product. The reason that I got onto this was because over the years, we just did that. We had slot for allity at the start there. But actually, the reason I started

looking into this was for allity. Over the years, the way that our competitors position themselves has changed. And I wanted to shift our positioning to a slightly different place because traditionally, when we started out, and it'll be the same for a lot of creators in different niches, there wasn't a lot of competition, and we were just the easiest way to make podcasts. Now there's all these other companies that also make it really easy to podcast. That's the problem.

How do we communicate differently what we do and speak to the customer in a different way? So the idea of a story brand is writing a story, putting your customers, the hero, making your product, the sort of guide in that story. And if you look at most movies, most books, it's the hero's journey. It's that classic plot point where there's a hero, they have a problem, they meet a guide somewhere along the way who gives them a plan, and it calls them to action. Like this is the plot of Star wars.

Yeah, I mean, helps them avoid failure and ends in success. So that's the hero's joining plot point. But that is essentially the framework for storybrand as well. What they've really done there is just taking something that works very well in storytelling, for screenplays, for books, all that stuff, and kind of put it into the context of marketing. And this really, really resonated with me because it's definitely, it's the way that I think anyway.

But Mark Zimbabwe, this is such a nice little framework, and you can go to the nth degree with it, but it really is as simple as that. And that is literally what they have in the book. So there's a bit of preamble, but the core of the book is about setting out this seven part framework, which. Is the

core goal of it. Is it around differentiation? Is that the prime aim of it, or other other aims for it, too? So it's because it's a sort of marketing position framework. Yeah, it's about differentiation, but it's actually more fundamentally about really simplifying your messaging. So the chunk of the book before it gets into the framework, what it really nails home is the idea that there is a crisis of clarity in the world. There's a crisis of attention

as well. And it's this thing we've heard all these times, we've got all this social media, we've got tiktoks, and we've got all these things. It's really hard to get people's attention. So in a world where attention is quite scarce, the more complicated your message, the more unclear you are about what your product is and what the point of it existing is and what it means to that person reading about it, the more difficult it is

to sell anything, to grow your business, to do all these things. So if you're not clear in that communication, then that leads to failure in your marketing and revenue growth. So that's. Yeah, it's really, at its core, it's all about simplifying the message. And that's why I really like this just simple framework that has a product which is called a brand script.

So you follow this framework, and at the end, you get this brand script, and that brand script is something quite practical that you can use to write about your product. Yeah. Okay. There's a bunch of stuff here I'd like to ask about. Right. The simplication, I think. Yeah, absolutely. As well. I went through the book a little while ago as well. And the customer is the hero thing, like, not forgetting that they are the hero, as opposed to you, your brand, your product is the hero.

I found really. It's really powerful, isn't it? I think, around that simplification, because it really brings home that idea that it's about their problems or their goals or where they want to get to. It doesn't matter that you've got XYZ feature, you've got 27 different ways to complete this thing. Does it get them to the goal? That's a big part of it, isn't it? It's resonated with me, certainly, William. Yeah, definitely. It digs quite deep. So there's the character

and then there's the problem. But the problem actually breaks up into external problems and internal problems. And I found this really, really, really helpful. So the difference between the two external problems are probably things that they're trying to do. Things are happening to them, are not happy to them. But the internal problems are definitely something that I think marketers like to put into, including myself, like to put into, like, Persona documents. But then it's actually,

it never quite makes it into your messaging. So the internal problems are like. So in the example that I'll show you a bit, one of the internal problems that our customers have is imposter syndrome. So this branch group that I created was for Alitoo, and one of the things holding back a lot people who want to make podcast is feeling that they arent somehow good enough. They look at some people that they look up to and they think Im not that good,

Im not that person, im not going to be able to do this. So thats something that certainly we hadnt considered in our market before. Actually, maybe the problem isnt so much like making the podcasting easy, its even before that. Its that internal thing thats holding them back. Its not the price, its not the features, its actually internally they don't feel like they have the strength or the ability to

do it. So it really breaks down, or it should do and it intends to break down the psychology of the character of the customer to better understand what it is that's driving them, what it is that's holding them back beyond just features and benefits. Yeah, the brand script is that, I mean, I, none of us need more massive documents to write. What does a brand script look like? Is it easy enough to put together? Is it complicated? What does it look like?

It's one of those things that once you've got everything you need, it's fairly easy to do and it's meant to be simple and it's meant to be iterated on quite quickly. So the way that I did this, it was for a new segment that we hadn't really of our al two customers that we hadn't that we're aware of, but we hadn't put loads of focus on. We were more focusing on just everyone. So in our case, what we ended up doing was running

a survey, today's people, it was a fairly long survey. We got a lot of detail and we got a lot of these external and internal problems, for example. It's meant to be really easy though. So if you already know your customers really well, so if you're a coach and you're doing a lot of one to one time with your customers, you already know them, you don't need to go and do a survey. But for us, because we're running a software business, it's much more impartial and

we had to do that. But if you already know your customers quite well, you could sit down and write a brand script in an afternoon, easy, because by the time that I had all the information that I needed, that's really what it was, and I didn't want to put any more time into it than that because it might not be the brand script. Do you know what I mean? It has the right parts, but it might not be.

Yeah, it is going to change over time. And you might want different brand scripts for different things, you might want them for different customers, you may want them for different products. So it's meant to be something quite short,

quite easy to make, and really easy to iterate on. How does that apply to more of an entertainment creator business or somebody who just creates TikToks on dances or a YouTube channel on travel or that kind of thing, where it's their monetization, sponsorship and brand deals and stuff like that. How does that apply to you? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I think in that case, where the game is probably to,

is to grow the audience. That's how they're monetizing. The bigger the audience, the better they can monetize. Right. It's not necessarily about selling products. The brand script in that probably still, probably still applies just as much to these people because the customer or the, or the subscriber, it's the same kind of thing. You know,

I think if you're doing. If you're doing TikTok dances, I'm not going to pretend to know what the secrets are to creating a takeoff TikTok account where you're dancing, but there's lots and lots of TikToks that I TikTok accounts, TikTokers, YouTube shorters, all these people that do solve a problem. And I think that's

it. If you're solving a problem, and we always, and the way that we teach podcasting and the way that we talk about anything, we always advocate for finding the problem that you're solving, even if it is just making people laugh, that might be the problem that you're solving, might be that someone's having a shitty day, in that case. So in that sense, if you have quite a defined audience that isn't just anyone that likes walks and dances, then you can apply

that brand script. And it might not be about a product, it might be about growing, just about growing that audience. And it's just an exercise. And better understanding who that audience is and being able to articulate more clearly why they should subscribe to you and. Exactly keep consistency across the content that you're making. That's the key thing. And that's why it's going to be really handy for us, because, yeah, yeah.

At that point, you're the product, aren't you? It's around communicating why you are the solution to some of their internal problems and why particularly, and yeah, like you say, it might just be to laugh, it might just be to feel better, it might be to feel like you've learned something interesting for the day or whatever, but it's your, the product being the unique way that you offer that content, I guess, around your personality, your background,

all the different ways that you can make content unique. So, yeah, it still is around how they resonate with you, I guess, like what they're looking for and why you're a good solution for that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Interesting.

Yeah. The plan side of things, like the whole idea around trust. So you're becoming the guide and you've got a plan for them. And you mentioned around like frameworks there or did you? Yeah. So there's something around like actually having a real solid plan, isn't there, that's built into the story brand, isn't it? Totally, yeah. So the story brand is kind of like how you get there and it's thought behind it and all that stuff. But the product that

you get by following that framework is the brand script. And the brand script is the thing that you can have sat in front of you printed out. It's one sheet. It shouldn't take any more than one sheet and it shouldn't even fill the sheet, really. And it's, yeah, it's that hero's journey. It's just breaking down that hero's journey. In fact, they offer a nice little printout which is just, it literally goes from left to right in a nice squiggly line. And it just shows you, it gives you boxes

to describe. This is the character, this is the problem, the problems that are external, internal and philosophical. And then after that point, the third thing is actually describing yourself as the guide. Even down to creating that brand script. You're not talking about yourself first. It's all within the context of you. And I think that might be one of the things that is quite actually impactful about this. It forces you to talk about yourself in context of the customer rather

than the other way around. Because like I even, I was looking earlier on today at our website, podcastsource.com. and one of the ads that we have running on there for our book is we. How does it read? So it's for finally start your podcast, which is our book on how to start podcast. And this ad reads something like, we wrote the book on podcasting in 2024. And at the time that I wrote that, I thought that's quite definitive.

It's quite confident. It's the book, you know, but actually coming back to it after going through this whole journey of trying to put the customer first thing, who's the hero? On that. We're the hero on that. That's horrific. I only wrote that three months ago. You know what I mean? So, yeah, there's a matter of emergency going to rewrite that, ads. But, yeah, it's. Yeah, that's not, that's a real change that I've actually, you know, felt in my brain in three months from having

gone through this is. It sounds like you. I don't know, it's hard to describe because it probably just sounds like. Like I'm kind of excited about it and it's just a framework that you can apply, but. And I am excited, but it's just a framework that you can apply. But for me personally and actually using it, I've actually felt a difference in the way that I'm looking at how I write copy looking at copy that I've written before and the way that I am thinking about how

do we communicate with the customer? And it's not just that it's like a good recommendation or it's best practice to think about the customer first. Yeah. It's actually when you start looking at it and you break down some copy, some products that you think are communicated very, very clearly, very, very well, you can actually, you can see it in practice. And it may not be called story brands, it may not be called. It might not be a brand script that they've used to write that, but it is pretty,

pretty ubiquitous. You know, there'll be some brands that you can think of, some products you can think of that you just, you just. I don't know, something about it. It's a bit different. It's not an abyss. I don't know, it's not. It's not like, it's not like a. It's not totally centric on themselves in the product. There's just some things, you know, and you go back and look at it and you can actually see, yeah, this is. This is why. This is why it feels different.

This is why I have a different affinity to this brand. The biggest example is apple. Apple or the best people in the world or where slightly less so recently. Once upon a time, we're certainly the biggest and best company at putting that customer first and making you the hero. And you can still see it in their marketing. If it works for a company of that scale, it would definitely work for it for us. And otherwise. Yeah. One of the parts of it that I love that

really ties into that actually is the challenge or the call to action, I should say. But the challenge to call the customer to action so the big part of that story is giving them that call at the end. We challenge you to make a difference. Here's the story. Here's the problem. We're here ready to guide you. We've got a plan for you now. Are you ready? Are you going to actually make the move? Are you going to, you know, have the guts

to do something about this? And I think, I feel like, well, I mean, what's Apple's classic, one of the classic lines from Apple? Think differently. Yeah, that was one of their big lines. And that was. That is putting the customer first. But it's also a challenge to do something. A challenge to. That's not even a challenge to go and buy their product. It's a challenge to, well, in their terms, like, be different, be more unique, be like, take action to, you know, stand out,

I guess, isn't it? It's a really interesting one that really ties all of that. It's a great case study because we obviously remember think different, and we remember probably the posters with all the kind of famous people on it. That's one visually, actually, that is putting the people that they value ahead. There was a tiny little colorful Apple logo somewhere on that poster. But this campaign that saved Apple, by the way. Really? Yeah, it saved Apple at

that time. Well, this is just when Steve Jobs came back, so. Oh, man. I could do a whole episode on this because I'm actually in the middle of writing, like, essentially an essay on this from my own blog, how Steve Jobs saved Apple with storytelling. Because when he came back to Apple, he brought two things with him. The first thing he brought with him was technology. So he developed the operating system that went on to became macOS as we know it today. His company next, it was way overpriced.

They weren't selling enough. But it was fantastic software. Apple had bought that because they were struggling. Now, everyone attributes Apple turned things around in the late nineties to Steve Jobs returning with that operating system from next. But I disagree. I actually think that what saved Apple was what Steve Jobs brought from another company that you worked at. And the time that he wasn't at Apple and that was Disneyland. Sorry, not Disney. Pixar.

Pixar. Yeah, he worked at Pixar. And if you look at Steve Jobs before that and you look at Steve Jobs after that, the thing that sealed his fate in having to leave Apple was the original Macintosh launch, which was all about having the best hardware, having the best features, having the coolest computer. It was not about the end user. It was about him. And his own obsession, really? Yeah. Yeah. But you look after and straight

out of the gate. He spent all these years working at Pixar, developing Pixar, telling stories, and becoming open to the idea of telling stories and understanding how important that is. And it wasn't just like a passive investment. He was really, really involved in Pixar. And we get think different and we get that kind of visual campaign. But the thing about the campaign that people forget now, because it's not so visual was the story that it told.

And it's not just the story of the pictures, but there's actually a small story that he tells. There was audio to go with this campaign, and I'm not going to go, I won't recite the whole thing. But it starts off with, here's to the crazy ones, and it continues on, describing the very people that Apple, for the next 1015 years, would build the Macintosh for. It was the square pegs and the round holes that people dared. Exactly. The people who dare to think they can change the world do.

And what happens over the next ten to 15 years, Apple becomes the premier brand for creatives, the premier brand for people who do dare to think differently, who do dare to think they can change the world. And oftentimes, many of the things that have changed the world that we live in today, that, you know, in terms of art, in terms of technology, it's all developed on a map. So I actually think that that is one of the most powerful case studies for the power of storytelling and

applies to companies of all sizes. Yeah, it really ties into the, all of the ideas around storybrand. Like, they highlight as well in the storybrand framework. Like, every humans, every person is trying to avoid their own tragic ending. So there's, like, the whole thing around think different is don't just be part of the crowd, don't just, like, be a sheep, like, following everyone else. Like, you're going to think differently and that's going to be your, your heroic

ending, not your tragic ending. And the challenge that's built into that, too. I mean, I think that's something that just about anyone in their content can bring in. Can't they always think at the end of anything you're creating, whether it's the marketing around it or whether it's actually the content itself. Like, have a challenge in there, have something in there that's challenging the person to do something with that content that really showcases,

here's what's going to happen if you don't put this into action. Like, we've just taught, I've just taught you something. I hope you've enjoyed it. But here's what's going to happen. You're just going to go and do nothing with this. What's going to be the consequence of that? You're going to not do this, you're going to not do that. You're going to end up in this tragic ending. So here's your challenge.

Go and actually take action on this and do the thing that I've been teaching you to do that you're obviously interested in because you searched this out and I think that's a huge part of it. And that's all story, isn't it? It's like the triumph reaching your really positive end as opposed to falling into tragedy. Yeah. Do you know that's actually, that is part of the story brand framework

as well. So sure, it's about getting the hero from this sort of first problem towards success, but you're dead on that. Actually, avoidance of failure is as big a motivator as seeking out success. And that should probably be part of your messaging. And it's, you have to be tactful about it because you can't just say if you don't buy my products you will die. That's not going to go down well, but you can be empathetic about the things that they're worried about.

So you can be empathetic and say for us, I know you're struggling with the tech and I know this is going to be a hurdle for you and if you don't find a way to get around it, you might not be able to make that podcast and certainly thats how you feel. So acknowledge the possibility of failure and actually understand it as well. If you dont, you have to hit the

mark with it. This is what I mean, youre going to have to iterate on this brand script and you need to figure out whats wrong and whats going to resonate. But I think it is just as important to point out the failures or point out what the possible failure might look like in a way thats empathetic. Thats nothing. Fear mongering. Yeah, there's a lot of research that shows that people will work harder to avoid negative outcomes compared to achieving

positive outcomes. And also the reaction to negative, the reaction to losing ten quid is far stronger than the positive reaction to finding ten pounds or gaining it in some way. That's funny. We hate losing things that we, if we already have something, we'll work so hard to keep it as opposed to how hard we'll work to gain that exact same thing if we don't have it. It's funny.

That's really true. That's really true. And I was just thinking myself, yeah, I've definitely been way more annoyed about dropping a tenor on the street than finding one. I find it and I'm like, that's nice. Right in the pocket. Never think about it again. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Do you have any, before we tie this up, do you have any other, any tips on your work over the

last little while? Looking at this, implementing this, how would you, how would you put it into action if you're a creator out there thinking about how to use this? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what I've

actually done. So the first thing that I did with this branch script is we set up a landing page test. So I'd suggest picking eye traffic page that you're going to get enough, you're going to get enough people through that you're going to be able to get the numbers to tell. So we were aiming for about 1000 visits on our old landing page compared to the new one. I use crazy egg, which we talked about on a previous episode, and I used this brown script to rewrite our landing page

for Alitoo. And we just ended the test today. And within the confines of the tests, the new landing page using this brand script converted 30% higher than the old one, which is awesome. Really, really pleased about that. So it's basically that make it and split test it. Split test it somewhere where you can actually see a difference in real kind of business metrics. If it's a landing page for a book, if it's a landing page for a course, something like that, possibly even an email,

that would work as well. Just test it compared to the old one. And it's. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think even like, if you don't have products, you don't have services. It's less of a business and more of a content outlet. Just looking for growing an audience. Like a b. Testing the way you ask people to subscribe,

for example. Yeah, that could be some way. Like your goal is to grow your subscriptions and therefore you outline using the story brand over a few sentences, even like why the customer is the hero, why you're the guy that's there to help them get to their goal and what the consequences are of not doing it. What's going to happen if they don't subscribe? They're going to go on to their tragic ending. Yeah, there's elements, I mean, there's only. Yeah, you can definitely build that

into this kind of thing. Like, even if you're just that type of creator. Yeah. If you want to see an example of how we're doing it, you can go to altoo.com. and just under the hero section, we have an entire little section actually dedicated to what is essentially life before Altoon, life after Altoo. But it is hitting really directly on those points that are, these are things that customers have actually said to us. This isn't a, what we think necessarily. It's actually some of it is directly

quoted from customers from that survey. So that's what I mean. If you don't already have a really personal relationship with your customers and you know them quite intimately, I'd recommend doing a survey, doing it a little bit longer, making it a little bit longer, a little bit more detailed than you think you might need, because that customer language is really, really, really gold. Like actual quotes. How do they describe what it is that is holding them back? Like, how did they describe what

those internal problems are? And you have to dig, you do, you have to keep asking, why, why, why? And then you can get to it. It's much easier to do if you have, if you do have that face to face time, if you have interviews with them, that kind of thing, you can. You can just keep saying, but why? You know, and you can get down to it, but that's it. The deeper you get into those sort of internal factors, I think the better, because you're going to get the external factors quite easily.

Like the what of what the problem is. Do you know what I mean? Like the actual thing that they're trying to do and what's physically holding them back from it. That's the bit you probably know well enough. Yes, it's digging deeper, isn't it? Yeah, for sure. Okay, excellent. Again, link in the show notes for the book if you want to check it out. But it is just building a story brand by Donald Miller. The framework's

in there, isn't it? You know, the script framework? Is that what you're talking about, Jake? That's in the book? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, perfect. Okay. Right. I've got a creator of the week. Just have a wee chat through. And it. I think it leads on to a question as well. Actually, I have a question about what something she does and how that ties into kind of some of the work we do as well. So the creator, you said I mentioned the

name beforehand, but not much more. You said you might recognize her name, so I'm curious if it rings a bell. So it's. Steph Smith is the person that I want to talk about. She's a content producer, a podcaster. She hosts podcasts, but also produces them, too. And she just creates a whole bunch of stuff. So did you figure out, did you write the name resonates, but you can't think we're from. Oh, I have a funny

feeling she might be part of our community, part of our podcast community. Maybe. Maybe. That's where I've seen. I don't know. I don't know. I'm gonna let you keep going, and I'll think about it in the background. I don't think that's true, but I could be wrong. I may have missed that she's popped in, but she's certainly not a big contributor, I don't think. Anyway, Steph, I met. How many years ago? 29. No, when was it?

22. So two years ago at an event, a conference, and I did a panel talk with her, actually, she was one of the people on a panel with me, and I. I learned a bit more about her at that point, but she'd worked with a whole bunch of people like, you know, the. My first million podcast. Yeah, she worked with them for a while. She's. She's appeared on that show a fair few times. She now runs the A 16 Z podcast for Andreessen and Horowitz, isn't it?

Yeah. So she runs their show. So she does some really high profile podcasting, but. But, I mean, that's part of it. So she does some great content that way. She knows how to put together a great podcast. But actually, the thing that really kind of struck me when I started looking into her stuff a little bit more quite recently was just how much stuff she's produced. She's just one of these people that just ships things. She just puts things out into the world. She's got. The thing that popped up

on my radar was a content course. So she does a course called doing content. Right. I say does. She created it about two years ago, and from what I can see, she hasn't done a whole lot with it since. So I ordered it, and a lot of the emails I got were kind of referenced around that time. So it's something she's put out. But then she also runs a company. I think her more recent thing is Internet pipes, and she mentioned this on an episode

of my first million that I heard, actually. Internet Pipes is her community and training around how to use the Internet for research, essentially. So whether it's for creating content, whether it's researching a business idea, whether it's finding a business idea. She's got a whole bunch of, she's kind of

an expert through experience in figuring all these things out. And she says she's developed loads of frameworks and found loads of tools that help her find ideas and research ideas and really kind of figure out whether something could work, whether it's, like I said, content or a business. So that's Internet pipes. That's kind of our current main thing. But then on top of that, she's also got a time management course, she's got communities

that she runs around all of these. So she's a real community builder as well. So I just, I love the fact that she's one example of one of these people that puts out great content on a consistent basis. She's even paid by people to create this content for them. But she still, on the side, just puts out this stuff and just ships it just gets out to the world and sees, sees how it goes. And a lot of it's like, it all seems really, it's really good

quality, the stuff that I've come across. So definitely worth a checking out her stuff. But it came out, the question occurred to me around and it was, this is no disrespect to Steph, so many people have done this and we do it as well. The content course, for example, I feel like a lot of the marketing around that the emails I got hadn't been updated in a couple of years. Again, many examples of us doing this in

our content. Creating something and really just going on and creating something else and then going on and creating something else

like that balance. So I guess the question I have for you is how do you balance the momentum and the fun and the action and the potential success that you can get from having an idea and just putting it out there into the world in sometimes a minimum version, sometimes a maximum version, but just putting it out, but then moving on and having another idea and doing another thing and not actually focusing on any one thing. God,

yeah, that is tough. I think. I mean, one way to do it would be so depend, I think it depends a lot on your personality as well, right,

as the creator. Because if you are the type of person that will make something, put it out into the world, and if it gets traction, if it's within your brain chemistry to then say, right, I'm not gonna make anything else, I'm gonna focus on this and I'm gonna double down on it because it's working well then that's one way to do it but the other way to do it if you are not that type

of person. I think it might even be something as simple as I'm not simple as if it's something that's doing well that you think, right, I need to keep this updated and going. It might be a case of actually getting a little bit of external help on it. Do you know what I mean? If it's doing that well, getting someone not even necessarily regularly part time but maybe actually just someone every year, every six months

or indeed just yourself. One thing that I've seen serial creators do is they keep a very exact spreadsheet of these are the many and varied things ive launched and heres the exact revenue for it and it depends on what your KPI is. But if its revenue from most creators it probably will be then look at the order by revenue. These are the things that even though im going to keep creating, these are the ones that I really should either give my time to or find someone else, some external help to keep

them updated and keep them going because yeah. You know I think yeah I think that's. I think there's some good insights in there. Really good insights around yeah. Outsourcing, taking on partners. Like even if something. It's a case for putting someone out there testing that out. If you do get some good feedback on it, yeah, take on somebody, give them a bit of ownership. So I've created

this product. I know you so say with Steph's content course, finding somebody else who's really interested in product but just earlier stage interested in content, got content experience and saying look here's 30% of the company, 50% of the company. If you want to do this with me, you help keep it updated, I'll help promote it. So yeah, definitely an idea. I think there's one of the things I struggle with on this is the fact though that very rarely does that traction just happen from the launch.

More often than not I think it does take over months, even the years building on from that around finding iterating for a start. It's rare that you get something out there in the first place in the right form. I suppose that comes with the experience. So Steph, us, whatever, we've done this for 1015 years, whatever, you've got a better chance of hitting a better target with the first version. But even still, it's still really hit and miss. It's still tricky.

So there's something around iterating over a year to really kind of hone in that product market, Fitzhe. So I don't know. I mean, this company here is an example of it. Like, I had maybe three things running back in 2008. 910, more like ten to twelve, actually, probably. I had. The podcast host was the blog I started in 2010, just writing about it. I was running a mountain biking content outlet, like a website, some podcasts, stuff like that.

I was doing some stuff around beer as well. My brother was getting really into craft beer at that point, working in the industry, and I was doing some website stuff, random content with him on that. So there was three, four different potential companies that could have come out of all of that. And I did just do a little bit on all of them as a hobby, essentially. And the podcasting stuff took off quicker. I've talked before about the

fact I got the Amazon check for dollar 50. That was the one that came through first. That was the money that came through first on the four of them. And that was what really decided my direction to jump into it. So I suppose there is something in that, like throwing things out there in the world. And even if it's only a tiny bit attraction, just that tiny little nibble, it's the little line shows you

a direction. Yeah. Yeah. And it's. I mean, it's a good way to do it because you have to, I think as a creator, you have to accept that most of the things you do won't work. You know, I saw a really interesting post just the other day that was a breakdown of like, the top artists in terms of. Sorry. In terms of terms of music and how they've charted. Like, 80% of their songs did

not make it into the charts. But we still know them as top, top performing artists that are always in the charts, but it's only because of this tiny little amount of stuff that they put out. So it doesn't really matter how successful you are, it's always going to be a little bit. You're always going to have to throw stuff at the wall and see what sick and what sticks. You know, it's based business. Yeah, yeah. And in your case, like, I mean, what's your question

for you? If it was the ale blog that, that sent you that first check, do you think that would have been the direction that you pursued? Or was there something inherently about podcasting that made you. There's definitely, like, in hindsight, there's definitely a whole combination of things in podcasting that really make it a great area for me, particularly. Like, it's the. I've talked many times, like the combination of geekery and the tech and the software with the teaching, the education side

of things, which really resonates with me. Too, which you had like an unfair advantage in that it was a good thing to double down on. That's true. Yeah, yeah, that too. Yeah. And even just the fact that I just love podcasts as a product, like the personality that the type of in depth content you create, the much more high touch, all that kind of stuff. But then I suppose you could argue that with some of the beer stuff too. Like the

industries were very similar, actually. Like craft beer was having such a massive growth spike around then, similar to podcasting. I like the product. I don't mind a beer every now and again, but I'm definitely not as passionate about it for sure. But then again, that might be just because I have spent the last ten years in podcast. Yeah, you never know. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah. I'm not sure,

but it's one thing that occurred to me. I get these little light bulbs all the time, but it really kind of resonated with this and it popped up at the same time as I was thinking about this was the I've got a course I spent maybe a week creating five, six years ago called immortal content. And it was partly because I was looking at Steph's course on this as well, and it was around content prompts. So it was an email based course. You got an email

twice a week. One was giving you some prompts for some ideas, the type of content you could create. For example, versus posts work really well. Is there a versus post that you can create in your industry, like this tennis racket versus that tennis racket? I'll come back to you on Friday with some further examples. And so you got them planning it, and then on Friday I came back with an email which was kind of how to put together the structure of that post.

And that would go on for months. Essentially, you pay a smaller price. And I created, I spent like a week or two building that, and I still think it's a really good concept. I think it's really good content in it, and I've done basically nothing to promote it whatsoever. And it even ties into like all of the stuff we do now. Like, we could put that into our academy, but just these little things just fall by

the wayside so easily. So I love your idea, actually, of actually everything you make, having a database of it, whether it's anything beyond just a single piece of content, like anything beyond a podcast or an episode or a blog post, anything that's like, could potentially be a product of any kind, from a tiny wee PDF

checklist up to a full scale course. Just having them in a database so that you can refresh yourself every month or two and make sure that there's nothing in there that is really resonating with something you're doing now that you can bring forward, just to remind yourself. Yeah, yeah. So easy to get as well, especially for yours. The sort of serial creator type to make something move on. And then, I mean, do you think steph knows that course exists other than when the

check comes through occasionally? I'm sure she does. Again, no, it's totally up to date as content hasn't changed that much in too well, content has changed a bit in two years, but all of us, I'm sure, still relevant. But yeah, it's hard. It's hard to keep these things up today. I was just updating some stuff in a couple of our courses yesterday and then ended up leading me down a rabbit hole of oh no, this is out of date and that's out of

date. And now I've got them scheduled in for updates and it's difficult. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that's fine. That's our, that's our job. And I love doing that. It's a cross wheel spare. Cool. Okay. Hope that was insightful. Anyway, I hope that gives some kind of outline of the challenges and potential solutions to it. Anyway. Okay, anything else you want to cover today, Jacob? I think that's

it. I think that's it for me. That was very pleasant. Thanks again for listening out there. If you do get anything from this content, we'd love you to go and check out Alitoo. It's definitely the way we support our content. Also, the podcast host too. We've got Alatu as the tool for creating your podcast. That's over at alitu.com alatoo.com. and the podcast host is our blog, which teaches everything about podcasting. So that's the blog we've been running for 14 years now. Mentioned it a few

times on the show. So answers just about any question you'll have around podcasting, and a lot of more general creator questions as well, like coming up with the idea for your content, creating customer avatars. All of that stuff relates to some of the story brand work too. So go over and check out thepodcasthost.com and that kind of leads to all of our coaching and academy stuff too, if you're interested. So yeah, excellent. All right, thanks again

for listening. We will talk to you on the next episode. Cheers. Cheers.