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Expert Strategist Explains The New Way to Go Viral on YouTube · Gimbal Podcast

• 0:00
  When I got the job with Ali, I made a website on why they should hire me. What is the best way to get someone to convert into a sale? It's no longer a viable strategy to build a world-class YouTube channel on Outlier Strategy alone. For me, there's a science and an art, and that's why I love this game.
• 0:15
  On today's episode of Gimbal, we have one of the greatest YouTube education strategists in the world, certainly in the UK. His name is Saf, and he's worked with guys like Chris Donnelly, Ryan Dice, and even took Daniel Priestley from zero to 100,000 subscribers. Hey, I'm Saf. I'm one of the leading YouTube strategists for founders and thought leaders and entrepreneurs. Very impressive resume. I am subscribed to many of the channels that you work with. What are the core things that you learned while working so closely with Ali Abdaal?
• 0:42
  to paint the picture. Imagine going in every single day, being around inspiring people. Performance was really high. Autonomy and trust was really high. For people who know Ali's world, things pivot and change all the time. We're rapidly testing things. I was always astounded by Ali's speed of execution. And even when you were inside that environment, in his home office, he would...
• 1:03
  just do things so quickly. He would schedule four podcast episodes in a day and he'd be able to get through it. If he had an idea for a business, it's like, let's just do it now. And what's the easiest version of this? And you can see the excitement that he has in that present moment. And he just capitalizes on it there and then. You know, we interviewed Angus Parker a couple months ago and he had a similar story about the creation of PTYA, which is like, it was the first real YouTube course. It took over the industry.
• 1:29
  And he was like, yeah, we made it in two weeks. It was really easy. It was so quick. We didn't know what we were doing completely, but we made decisions very, very quickly. And then two weeks later, it was live. And you know what? I've worked with Cody Sanchez too. And like that is probably the core takeaway I've learned from working with her is like speed is the ultimate driver of success.
• 1:46
  Like to the point where, you know, things aren't 100% good, but like maybe they're like 90% good. It's better to ship them at that point rather than finesse or like be very thoughtful about the things. You can always course correct down the road. How are you doing that in your... So tell me about your new role, like the thing that you're spending most time with today.
• 2:03
  So Ali's PTYA was like a done with you or do it yourself YouTube course, right? You would, you'd pay like whatever it was, 997 and you'd go through a cohort or you go through a self-paced course and you would learn how to do the foundations of YouTube. And what we were discovering, because I was like teaching on their done with you tier, which is called the part-time accelerator, where people got one-to-one coaching.
• 2:24
  And when I was teaching on that program, what I noticed is a lot of people like needed more support than just being told what to do. Like, for example, I could break down to you, you need your first hire should be a video editor. I can tell you, you should probably go on Upwork and you should probably make a job post and you should probably screen for these things. And all it's a good practice. If you have one sentence that says, please reply with your favorite fruit. So I know you're not a bot. Like all of these different things would happen inside of a coaching call, but then like not that many people would go on to go and do those things and find success.
• 2:53
  on the other side and so in the interest of helping people to find more success with youtube what else could you do to help them there's do it yourself there's done with you but what about done for you and so it got to a point where one idea we were toying with internally was offering a done for you tier of like what this youtube thing could look like and that was a business idea that ali had wanted to run with internally and i was gonna spearhead it so we spent like a couple of
• 3:19
  doing that. We came up with a name for it, which was quite a controversial name. It was called Organic Eyeballs at the time. And Ali was like, he loved the idea of Organic Eyeballs and immediately bought the domain. I don't know if he still has it. But everybody who I mentioned it to was...
• 3:35
  was super shocked because it sounds like we were shopping for eyeballs out of tesco's or like your local supermarket or something so we ended up doing an mvp by running with one of ali's friends called ryan dice who needed a youtube channel and he was like dude i just need help with doing youtube can you come in and do it
• 3:51
  So Ali had like fully handed this thing off to me. And I remember hopping on the call with Ryan. For context, Ryan Dice is an entrepreneur in the States. He runs 17 companies that cash flow $200 million a year. I didn't know who Ryan was or what his authority was. But apparently he has like mentored and worked with some of the biggest names in entrepreneurship that we know on the internet. People like Dan Martell or Alex Hormozy or some of these other big names. So I was like, oh, damn. So you're the entrepreneur's entrepreneur. Yeah.
• 4:17
  You're like the OG digital marketer. And once I learned that he had a lot of things to be able to share and say, that's when we started working together to go and share it. It was super interesting. On our first call, he was like, Saf, I just need some help. Like, can you make it happen? I was like, yeah, let me explain to you exactly the process of how we'd make it happen. And I went and explained for 10 minutes and he goes, okay, cool.
• 4:36
  So when do we start? And I was like, no, no, no, no, wait, I haven't told you this next bit. So typically in this engagement, we're just a bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble. And you've got like 30, 35 minutes. And Ryan just got to the end of the call. He's like, dude, where do I wire the money? And when do we start? That was all he wanted to know. He's like a very straight, straight talking entrepreneur, like ready to get going. But that was like the first basically rep process.
• 4:55
  of doing done for you youtube and i was still getting used to doing that as was evidenced by that sales call anyway we worked with ryan our third video or second video with him went viral the third video did super well that was good proof of concept that he had ideas worth sharing up until that point all of the content was like really bad thumbnails like solid green colors with like tiny text and a facial expression it wasn't optimized it wasn't very good at all so the bar was quite low
• 5:20
  But I was still quite surprised because I thought it would be a dead channel and a lot harder to bring back to life. I did basically all of the work myself. I didn't really have a team at the time. But because it had worked so well, there were other people who wanted a channel like Ryan Dice. And so that led to more referrals, which led to a second client, a third client, fourth client. Fast forward to today, over the last year and a half, we now work with six clients at a time. And we have a team of 14 full-time people. We have like five or six video editors. We have a thumbnail designer. We have two YouTube strategists. We have...
• 5:49
  some script writing support from time to time, etc, etc. So it's called Talking Heads, because the thing we specialize in is Talking Heads YouTube videos. How did Ryan become your first client? Was that outbound? Did he come to Ali and express interest? It was a referral to me as a referral. So it came through Ali. I'm not fully sure how it happened. It might have been they had a podcast episode or a conversation.
• 6:10
  I'm just asking because I'm trying to figure out how to position yourself. Like, you've obviously done it, but there are many people out there who are excellent strategists or excellent players, but they don't, you know, people aren't just reaching out to them when maybe they could be or they should be. So I have some strong takes on this. Firstly, all of my stuff...
• 6:28
  I like none of it has, I don't have a website. I don't really promote my stuff through socials. All of it has been word of mouth referrals. I think that has been something I've taken very seriously because I know I have a bit of an unfair advantage there. Not least because I have an existing network that built up over the last few years, which is fantastic, but also because I spend a lot of time at networking events.
• 6:48
  or parties or flying and meeting people, going to conferences. And I love it. That's for me, this is, if I could spend all my time doing that, that's probably what I would do. And that's why that's my zone of genius and what I lean into. But there are other ways of advertising your services through content or through doing outbound. You know, one of my friends, his name is Cam. I don't know if you've had Cam. He's another YouTube strategist you should have on the pod. But he's like the cold email king. Cam Mensah? Yes, Cam Mensah. Okay, yeah, yeah. I would love to have him on the show.
• 7:15
  He's brilliant at having the perfect cold email or the perfect loom. And he lands some amazing clients that people like he just has no rights to be in their DMs, but he'll just do it anyway. He'll send cupcakes to their house just to be able to get their attention. No way. Yeah. And he does a really good job at it. And sometimes I think to myself like, oh, maybe I should be doing that. And maybe I could, but I'm actually, you know, very happy with sort of the path I've taken. And it's my unfair advantage and the thing, the way that I show up best in terms of finding business.
• 7:43
  I mean, I think that translates to even just applying for a job these days. There's so many people that just submit an application, put their CV in, and it's really hard to stand out for those kinds of people. So going above and beyond three or four years ago, it might have meant doing an edit for free and submitting it and saying, here's extra value that I can provide. We recently had Jay Yang on the show. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but when he pitched himself to Tyler Dank from Beehive, he was basically a nobody.
• 8:09
  And he had like a 15 to 19 slide deck that had full strategy and he just submitted it. And that got Tyler's attention. I guess that's really the strategy with cold outreach. It's like you need to find a way to stand out and be seen before you even get the opportunity.
• 8:24
  100%. I think for most YouTube strategists, they default to, I need to be a better quality YouTube strategist. I need to find insights other YouTube strategists can't find. But it's usually not the quality of the insights that are differentiating you from everybody else. It's actually being visible in the first place, and how you're showing up. When I got the job with Ali, I made a website on why they should hire me with like images of my story, where I live. And I was like, Angus told me afterwards, that website made its rounds in the Slack channel. And
• 8:53
  for everybody else to see before I had joined. And it's like the kind of thing that's very shareable. And I didn't engineer it to be that way. But I did want to go over and beyond and like, make myself visible in the best way possible. It's actually a goal of this podcast to help really excellent people who work behind the scenes get a little bit more exposure to, you know, everybody on the front side of things. I know a couple people who have been past guests who have used their interview on gimbal as kind of like a portfolio statement for either networking with other people, or being like a
• 9:22
  a demonstration of knowledge and value. It's like, hey, here's a bunch of things that I shared. Now you know I'm more than just a name on a page or something like that. You can learn the value that I could provide to your team. So I think that's pretty cool. So you are the king of talking head videos, as indicated by the name of your company. I wanna ask you what a really strong talking head video looks like in the year 2026. And maybe we can go beat by beat and just riff back and forth. Like where does a great talking head video begin for you?
• 9:51
  Good question. I think talking head videos have changed a lot. My idea of talking head began with an Ali Abdaal-style talking head video, and now it's looking like something very different. Well, wait, let's define what an Ali Abdaal talking head video is, because I actually reference that a lot when I'm speaking with my clients.
• 10:06
  For me, the Ali Abdaal-style talking head video, I can imagine it so clearly. It's like got the rotoscoped guy in the hook with the iconography, like throwing off a different, like sort of behind the scenes. You're sort of relying a lot on production quality to be able to signal that I'm a bit of a thought leader. They often looked like listicles. They often look like, you know, the list of side hustles that you can do to like make a million dollars. The reason I'm describing all of these things is because I feel like those were quite unique of the Ali Abdaal-style video.
• 10:34
  There are still principles from Ali Abdaal's talking head videos that apply to stuff that I think still work today. For example, I think the first step of a talking head video in 2026 is having a really good idea or a really good value proposition. I think ultimately people come to YouTube videos to be entertained or to be educated and there's some kind of transformation that they're looking for.
• 10:54
  And those transformations, I think they're universal transformations that people have around like money, love, around health and things like that. But there are also trends and ways of articulating those value propositions that feel more relevant today than they would have done way back when. I think the bar was way lower back then and it was a lot easier to stand out and it was a lot easier to be able to use outlier theory to be able to copy on the winners.
• 11:16
  But today, it's a lot harder to do that. And I think a lot more emphasis is around the value proposition and the idea itself. Does that also check out for you too with the Talking Head channels that you work on? Of course. Yeah, the idea is everything. The Ali Abdaal era of Talking Head video, I think a lot of it actually translates to short form social media right now. Like Ali said on Colin and Samir's podcast, which I think you were there for that taping. He said everything is a list. And that's always stuck with me because it's like,
• 11:45
  When in doubt, make a listicle kind of video. And I think listicles are like really winning on short form. The way that I think of an Ali Abdaal video is just like confirm the click. You know, if the title is seven ways to be more productive.
• 11:55
  You know, you confirm the click in the first two or three sentences max. And then you kind of get into a list of like seven different things. And then you provide as much value as possible in a short period of time. And I think that's basically what's working on short form. It's just compressed into one minute instead of like 15. So I still kind of point to Ali's past work as the way to win currently. But for long form, I agree. The idea is everything. And outlier theory is...
• 12:19
  known by everybody and explored by everybody and everybody and their cat is made. If you're ambitious but lazy, watch this. Yeah. One thing that made me really intrigued. I remember watching you virtually. It was either at the Dubai conference or it was a Mindvalley thing. You had a really interesting spin on outlier theory.
• 12:37
  Did you go into that a bit? Of course. Of course. It was called splicing and spinning. This was my attempt at basically codifying how I... So my biggest gripe is that outliers are being copied all the time. Everyone is using outlier theory. And when everyone uses outlier theory, everything looks and feels exactly the same. All the thumbnails look the same. All the titles look the same. Give me 54 seconds...
• 13:01
  Someone else had it, like, give me X seconds. Everybody made that. There are so many, and it's deeply ingrained in my brain. I, like, go to sleep, have nightmares thinking about these title thumbnail formats. They've come up so many times. I think there was definitely a felt sense that there was something wrong around it. But if it's working, why change it? And I think for a long time, nobody did change it or nobody did question it.
• 13:19
  However, when you look at some of these formats now, you'll notice that they don't get as many views as the original video did. Or in other words, if you tried to copy an outlier from 12 months ago, it's very unlikely you're going to get the same level of performance that you would have done had you made it 12 months ago. And so I basically try and explain to people that there's this concept of audience fatigue. And if a piece of content has a half life, that half life is just shrinking.
• 13:42
  and it's continuing to shrink and shrink and shrink, especially now we have AI tools that make it easier than ever to be able to copy and paste formats with thumbnail designs or video creation and everything in between. It's no longer a viable strategy to build a world-class YouTube channel purely on outlier strategy alone. Where I think outlier strategy is helpful is actually taking a step back to understand why it works. Outliers represent to me hotspots of audience interest, hotspots of where people's attention are gravitating towards.
• 14:09
  If you can look at a bunch of outliers and understand the data or the trends around why certain topics are doing so well, it can help you to engineer your own outliers, hopefully. Or at least to identify what are the big value propositions that audiences want to hear about, and therefore what are the video ideas that you can make. And to make this practical, I think two ways I like to approach outlier theory is by doing something called splicing, which is where you take two outlier formats together.
• 14:33
  the best take the best parts of both and combine it together and it's really taking a step back to study the title and the thumbnail do they use an authority lever do they use a fomo element do they use time do they use this enormous dream outcome what what is the reason why someone clicked what do they emphasize what are they repeated in their title and thumbnail that might have served the click or or not served the click but you're taking the best bits and you're splicing them together and you've sort of frankenstein your own version of it wait do you have an example
• 15:00
  Richard from 1 of 10 shared in the trading niche. It was like there's a certain scalping strategy and there was like a certain way of like boring, but works or something like that. And there was two different formats in two different places and sort of spice them together to create something different.
• 15:15
  There's another thing I like to do, which is called spinning, which is where you try and take an outlier format and then add your own spin on it, which is something that only you could say as a creator. For example, Jesse Itzler is probably the only guy that could say he sold a company to Warren Buffett. And maybe there is something around that that can make its way into the packaging. But there are lots of people who we work with in the space who have lots of authority and having a really good understanding of what those are will help you to understand what videos have a really unique spin.
• 15:44
  So an example for this one is Daniel Priestley appeared on Diary of the CEO seven times. He was like the most appeared guest. And that was something which he had not leaned on before. It was such a low hanging fruit. And so one of the video ideas I really felt strongly about was how Daniel Priestley made $10 million from Diary of the CEO. And that's where he does a deep dive into he's appeared seven times. What's it like to appear there?
• 16:07
  What's the impact that's had on his business? There are a bunch of things that we could really lean into that only Daniel Priestley could say and only he could do that just made that totally unique. Taking that approach has meant that the YouTube videos that we put out, sometimes they look and feel the same as others. I think you can't get away from outlier theory. When something works, it works and that's just the name of the game. But there are always opportunities to be able to test, explore,
• 16:29
  and try new things. Like, do you always want to be in the back foot, like following outliers? Or do you want to be on the front foot and like creating the kind of content that other people copy? That's like the ultimate compliment for me. If I can get to a place where I'm consistently doing that, which is very difficult, that would be a good place to be.
• 16:44
  Okay, let me see if I can manufacture a splice and spin right here in the moment. So a popular title is 40 Harsh Truths I Wish I Knew at 20. Another popular title is it took me 39 years to tell you what I've taught you, to learn what I've taught you in 15 minutes. So would it be splicing if it was like, it took me 39 years to learn these 40 Harsh Truths?
• 17:09
  Yeah, but then when you're looking at those two titles, it's also like isolating. Like I will write the title out and then I'll highlight in red, like that was the authority lever. That was the time lever. That was this lever. And so when you do that, you actually have building blocks because you've said it one way, that's the splice. But there's like another way you can splice it.
• 17:29
  And I don't know what your approach is for exploring packaging ideas, but I will have like a list in Notion of the different title ideas that we could go with for a video. We'll splice it loads of times, we'll have a bunch of non-spliced options, and then you can see them for what they are and then say visually that's the one, or that's the value proposition that really stands out. Or even better, just ring up a YouTube strategist friend and show it to them. But listen,
• 17:52
  I've done this so many times. I've like texted Seb Lozado, who you should also have on the podcast, is someone I spoke to about that Diary of a CEO episode. And I was like, Seb, I need to get this video off the ground. Here are the title ideas that I'm toying between. What do you think? And it often helps to get the perspective of someone else when you've just been like looking at it way too closely. The labeling thing, I don't think, I don't think enough credit is given to that because that's where you're understanding the different levers. And some levers work better together than others.
• 18:19
  What do you mean by levers? Like, can you, do you have a list of levers? Where did these come from? And what are some of them?
• 18:25
  I don't have a list, but I could probably create one if I thought about it long enough. You said authority lever, there's the time lever. These are just observations you've made by playing the game for years and years now. I would say that a lever for me is a piece of information that serves a purpose in your title and your thumbnail. One lever could be the authority piece. And so the authority piece could be, I'm a $200 million CEO. And that's maybe the way we start the title.
• 18:54
  Like, or $200 million CEO explains. Immediate credibility, like immediately off the bat. It's like, okay, what's $200 million CEO going to explain to me? So it's a piece of information, but we're categorizing that information because it's doing a job. And in this case, the job of the credibility is to tell the person like, hey, hey, hey, trust me, I'm worth listening to. There's a whole host of other videos you can watch, but you're gonna wanna watch this video.
• 19:18
  So credibility could be one. One lever, another example of a lever, which I found to be super powerful, is the FOMO lever. And I think Diary of a CEO does this very well, where they create a lot of FOMO, a lot of urgency. That's the word. The urgency lever is like, why do you have to click right now? There's something happening in this imminent. And if you don't click now, you're going to miss this very critical piece of information.
• 19:41
  A third example of a lever is identity-based framing. Can you try to speak to your viewer? You can use really broad language, but can you try and speak to him? So for example, Jay Shetty, if you're anxious and lonely, watch this video. Or we, words to the effect, describe this very universal experience if you're blah. Identity-based stuff is good because you're leaning into sort of the fears or the hidden desires that people have. Another good one is...
• 20:11
  the time. So if you can, you know, give me X minutes and I'll teach you to do Y. X minutes is the time. It's like, I want this dream outcome and you're going to tell me to do this dream outcome in like 30 minutes. Yeah, this is obviously worth my time. I could probably go on. There's probably maybe only like six, seven or eight of these different levers, which I think
• 20:31
  for me, appear consistently. And I'd love to get perspectives from other people in the industry who have a different way of seeing these things. But now when I'm looking at titles and thumbnails, thumbnails too, thumbnails do this as well, really well. I'm trying to understand what are the different levers that they are
• 20:46
  pulling to be able to earn the click and in specific industries i think certain levers work better than in other industries for example in the retirement space um fomo is huge and we work we work with a big retirement creator who has like 200k subs
• 21:02
  And we're helping him to try like rebuild the channels to get some more traction. And all of the analysis have been done for him. We've found that the fear of missing out is huge because people who are approaching retirement, they just do not want to miss out. They consume so much retirement content all the time. They're approaching social security age. They don't know what to max out, what levers to pull. Do they work with a financial advisor? Oh, there's new legislation. There's a whole like rabbit hole of content for a demographic that I can't quite relate to.
• 21:28
  But by taking a YouTube strategy lens, by collecting enough data, by looking at the trends in the industry, what are the outliers doing so well? For me, I discovered it was the FOMO angle had worked really well over there. All of this to say that different industries have different levers that you can pull and you can identify. So in the example that you spliced, I think that is an example of a splice. But it's almost like sometimes too reductive to be like, yeah, we just take this, take this, bitch, bash, bosh, Bob's your uncle. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:54
  I think for me, there's a science and an art, and that's why I love this game so much. Because when you figure it out, you're like, oh my god, I solved the equation, I solved the problem, and it did this really well. I think for years, the core value prop of YouTube has been, if you make an evergreen piece of content, it will continue to provide monetary value to you and get more views over time. Probably some of Ali Abdaal's most viewed videos are ones that he's made two or three years ago that are still bringing in constant views.
• 22:21
  Gary Vaynerchuk has a different take on this right now, and he's calling social media interest media. He's like changed his framing around it, and he says that people don't follow creators for who they are as much anymore, and they're just following the interests that they have. And some people are interested in things for a year, and some people are interested, like those same people might be interested in something else for a shorter duration of time. The way that I've been thinking about packaging in regards to interest media is that everything needs to be much more timely. And I'm curious if you,
• 22:50
  agree or disagree, like challenge me if you disagree. But I think that evergreen content is not the power that it used to be on YouTube. And I think it's actually much more powerful to embrace the timing of whatever's happening in the world in the zeitgeist in your niche and claim a million views in one month. And then that video kind of dies. Have you seen anything like that with your clients? Or have you been thinking about it at all like that?
• 23:16
  That's a really interesting framing. I hadn't had the language to describe it like that before, but we've definitely seen examples where we have pushed for very timely videos that have performed disproportionately well relative to some of our evergreen stuff. For example, with Daniel Priestley, we made a video about why you must build a personal brand before you get replaced by AI. And for this particular video, coincidentally, it came out at the same time that ChatGPT was getting cancelled and everyone was like jumping onto Claude.
• 23:46
  It was this huge thing. It was literally in publishing week this transfer shift was happening. And I decided that for the packaging of this video we're gonna have Dan hold a glowing clawed icon because I could just feel in the zeitgeist that there was this massive shift happening in the AI space. That video did really really well. It performed really... It's not necessarily just because he's holding a clawed icon but it was an example where
• 24:10
  we were trying to lean into the zeitgeist a little bit, like what is actually working at that point in time. I still remember like my LinkedIn feed was blowing up with people trying Claude with different prompts and you know different skills and those types of things. At the same time, do I think evergreen videos are dead?
• 24:25
  I don't think so. I have seen like our number one performing video on the Daniel Priestley YouTube channel is a sales masterclass. It's like, you know, 25 years of sales knowledge in 45 minutes or something like that. This video was like a really slow burner off the bat. Like it was so slow, like a seven out of ten or six out of ten. I was A-B testing this thing from the beginning and I was like, holy hell, I've run so many tests on this thing. I'm confident this is the best packaging that we have.
• 24:52
  We're going to leave it and move on to the next one. Lo and behold, like fast forward two or three months, it's one of those slow burners that starts down here and it just kept climbing and kept climbing. And it's now like 500k views. It's the highest views per hour that we have on the channel now. But that video is like six months old or something like that. So there are examples of both in my case. And I think it's always hard to have like binary thinking around it. But I definitely do feel this shift away from the Ali Abdaal talking head
• 25:19
  permanent evergreen asset that he sort of like staked a claim for because there just weren't that many creators in the space to now everyone's doing the same thing and people i think have shorter attention spans they have interest for a year like you say they dip in dip out there's so many creators on the platform it's really hard to build that sticky loyalty but yeah i don't think it's so binary at the same time
• 25:38
  You are the talking head entrepreneur niche expert. I want to ask you about CTAs, calls to action. What is the best way to get someone to convert into a sale? It starts with having an epic organic video in the first place and not having a disguised ad, I think a lot of entrepreneurs have a product or service they want to sell and they'll just think, what's the video idea I can make to promote it.
• 25:59
  The second thing is having a very, like if you don't ask, you don't get. And so you need to ask in the scripts of the video for the CTA to your product or service. But there's a way of doing that that naturally ties into the value proposition of the video that doesn't disrupt the viewer. And then the third thing is as a best practice, the first line of your description should be the CTA to what you're trying to promote.
• 26:18
  If you're burying it below the fold, there's not that many people who are going to click through to go and find it. It's just too many clicks. Or worse, if you have multiple links, you're just sending people in different directions. They don't know where to go. One link, first line in the description, don't ask, don't get, and make it a really good video. Can you promote something in every single video or do you pick and choose very, very closely?
• 26:37
  pick and choose very very closely like if it were up to me i do this for like the love of the game and i i want to see the best organic performance possible first and then the commercial stuff second so i would try where possible to find videos where it makes sense to link to another youtube video make that the cta like create an organic flywheel make a channel that's worth subscribing to i want something i want to subscribe to and so that's
• 26:59
  why I pick and choose which videos should have the CTA, where it's very organic. It makes a lot of sense. There's a natural tie-in versus ones where it's like a little bit forced or we're intentionally trying to create a flywheel between two videos where we think they're both going to do very well in the first place. That is some sage advice. Who is a creator or some kind of operator behind the scenes who is on your radar and worthy of a shout out?
• 27:20
  Great, great question. Josh Saunders, who works with Chris Donnelly, that is a man you should have on the podcast. He is a treasure trove when it comes to LinkedIn content specifically. Why is he so good at LinkedIn? I think firstly, he understands the platform extremely well. He has been the guy responsible for Chris Donnelly's growth on LinkedIn.
• 27:38
  Secondly, he has actually blown up his own personal brand as a result. There are not many creators behind the scenes who blow up their own personal profile. The fact that he's done that already makes him one of one. The third thing is I know him personally and I know how dedicated, hardworking, respectful, all around nice guy that he is. He's able to balance
• 27:55
  sort of like the commercial side of things, but also with the creative side of things. And the closest one-to-one match I could find is like, imagine what Angus Parker is to Ali, Josh Saunders is to Chris Donnelly, but completely different flavour. I think Josh is a lot more public, he's willing to put himself out there, he's really willing to share a lot. And he also has deep expertise in LinkedIn, especially 2026 LinkedIn, which looks very different to maybe the old model of how things used to work.
• 28:20
  Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode. If you're new here, please consider subscribing. Or if you're listening on the audio platforms, leave us a review. It takes five seconds. It helps us more than you can imagine. If you're a creative director, producer, strategist like Saf, and you want to come on the show, please reach out to me. I would love to have you. I'm sure you have some great knowledge to share. We put a new episode out every Thursday. So we'll see you then. Goodbye.