About The Episode:
Max Hertan joins hosts Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolus to decode the art of content creation and personal branding. Max has co-founded multiple agencies and is currently the co-founder of Alto Studios with Sahil Bloom. We break down his strategies to grow personal branding initiatives, YouTube channels, and more.

Today, we'll cover:
- Max Hertan's journey from scaling a marketing agency to becoming a content expert.
- The significance of "solving it" in content – discovering the right mix of pillars, market fit, and production strategies.
- The allure of short form content and the tactical approach to premium visuals and unique branding.
- Insights on content budgeting, starting on social media, and the underestimated time investment in content channels.
- Max's pivot in content strategy and evaluating the long-term ROI of content creation for business growth and talent attraction.

What You'll Learn
1. Content Creation and Time Optimization
2. Content Market Fit Importance
3. Personal Brand Impact on Equity
4. Short Form Content Strategy
5. Content Budget Deployment Approaches
6. Consistency in Content Creation Efforts
7. ROI of Content Creation Investments

Timestamps
00:00 YouTube channel challenges, backflip attempts, stand-up comedy.
05:44 Performance social media and paid Google Ads.
09:08 Finding content pillars and market fit effectively.
11:12 Content market fit requires finding unique perspectives.
14:03 "Stand out with unique, engaging storytelling strategies."
16:23 Ran Doris grew on YouTube, emphasizes action.
20:58 Paused YouTube channel, focusing on written content.
25:34 Focused on animation, unique branding, premium visuals.
26:28 Creating unique brand style and professional appeal.
29:35 Observed their rise and strategy to success.

Persistence in Content Creation: "I had to land it by the end of the month, so I would just bandage it up and just keep going."
— Max Hertan [00:03:13 → 00:03:18]

The Power of Content in Brand Strategy: "I'm also a massive believer in content as a strategy for businesses, personal brands, brands. I think it's like if you can solve it, it's this unbelievable asset. It's challenging to solve for a lot of people, but once you get traction and content market fit and like a system to actually build out content, then it's building like defensibility mode for you."
— Max Hertan [00:08:32 → 00:08:56]

Content Market Fit Strategy: "But solving it to me means you found some content pillars that are working and you found content market fit and you've kind of found the overlap of something that's valuable to you, something that you're interested in, and something that the audience wants as well."
— Max Hertan [00:09:17 → 00:09:32]

Content Market Fit: "And I think you can either be an expert and share things from your own life and reflect on what's interesting from your own life. And if there isn't that much that's know, one way I think about it is how many standard deviations are you away from the norm and where are you most standard deviations away from the norm? And if you're sharing from your own life, then that's going to be interesting."
— Max Hertan [00:11:29 → 00:11:48]

Content Creation Strategies: "If you want to be like a storyteller or a researcher or things like that, then you might go down a different kind of line to try to find something that you're interested in as well. So, yeah, I think it's like analyzing what's working... figure out, are you an expert in certain areas that are kind of getting traction? Can you add your own spin on it? And then also, if you're not, is there something that you're really interested in that you want to research in, or that you want to learn the pillars of what makes really good content, like the storytelling pillars, and then take that to a content format where you can find something unique."
— Max Hertan [00:12:32 → 00:12:52]

Viral Content Strategy: "But if you're entering a competitive field and you're not so interesting, that alone should be able to go viral. Then you need to think more about what is the thing that's going to separate you? Is it the level of research? Is it the level of understanding the platform and get it the storytelling, right? Or is it finding something unique from your own life that you can pull forward? That's like drawing that attention."
— Max Hertan [00:14:23 → 00:14:47]

The Strategy for Growing on YouTube: "My friend Ran Doris, who's actually just blown up on YouTube, gone to like 200,000 subscribers in the last six months. One of his frameworks that he uses is like, there's a period of thinking and there's a period of immense action."
— Max Hertan [00:16:27 → 00:16:41]

Content Strategy and Brand Differentiation: "One of the other unique things around content is it's not as fast to get results as many of the other channels."
— Max Hertan [00:18:18 → 00:18:25]

Video Animation Trends: "The other thing that we're seeing is almost everyone has kind of homogenized to five different styles of animations. There's like the Alex Hamozi and then people just do like a 10% spin on the Alex Hamozi subtitles. And so there's kind of like just a few very clear, obvious styles."
— Max Hertan [00:26:07 → 00:26:28]

Innovative Branding in Digital Media: "So we'll be doing like a fresh brand book and new graphics and animations and things like that, where you can pioneer your own style so that people are copying your style as opposed to you're copying someone else's style, but also just making sure it's like above the threshold of professionalism where it looks really kind of cool and fresh and interesting."
— Max Hertan [00:26:28 → 00:26:48]

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Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Castmagic
Ramon Berrios - Co-Founder of Castmagic
Max Hertan - Co-Founder of Alto Studios

Essay #79: Sean Scalmer, ‘Direct Action: The Invention of a Transnational Concept’