Speaker 1 (00:00):
Content, content, content. That is what we're going to be talking about in this episode. How to unlock data points, how to unlock revenue from content, right? Every piece of content that you are posting is doing one of two things. It's either teaching you how to win or it's sitting in your draughts teaching you absolutely nothing. And right now, most of you're probably sitting on a gold mine of information about your audience, your market and your offer. But you're refusing to dig it up. You're just letting it lie. And here's the thing, it doesn't come before you start. It comes after you start. You have to be in the wild. You have to be posting content, you have to be seen. You have to be heard before you can unlock that data, unlock that gold mine, unlock that treasure chest of information. So we're going to talk through exactly how you can do that in this episode.

(00:44):
But before we get into that episode, and I hope you find it useful, I'd really appreciate if you could share this with a friend, a family member, a colleague, somebody starting out in business. If you found any of the previous podcasts useful. Hopefully you're going to find this one useful too. This doesn't grow without your help. Appreciate it guys. Hey, it's Oliver Bruce and welcome to the Unlock. Previously known as Success is in the Mind. I'm a UK entrepreneur, angel investor, a neurodivergent founder, and I recently exited my first business, which I scaled from my university halls into a multimillion dollar agency with no backing, no funding, just grit, mistakes and determination. I want to pass on some of the lessons that I've learned, the barriers that I had to overcome and the challenges that I'm still coming up against today. This podcast doesn't grow by itself, it grows with you. If you could possibly share this with friends, family, colleagues, anybody you're in business with, somebody that you think might find this useful, I would be greatly appreciative. Anyway, let's get into it.

(01:41):
This is what reframed it for me. When thinking about content. Every piece of content that you publish is a question, a question that you are asking your market. It's not a performance, it's not a showcase. It is a simple question. When you post a video about pricing, you are asking, do you actually care about this? When you are writing a post on LinkedIn, you're asking, does this actually land? When you try a new hook or a different format, you're running a test, you're asking your audience, is this a piece of content that you find engaging? The answer is through views, watch time, comments, shares, saves, dms. That is the data. Those are the answers that you are looking for. The data is screaming at you. It is there for the taking. But most entrepreneurs, they aren't listening because they're too busy asking the wrong questions.

(02:30):
They're asking, did I look good on camera? How did I sound? Did I say the right things? Was it polished? Those are ego questions. Ego questions don't grow businesses. Egos don't grow businesses. The business questions are different. Which topic got the most engagement? Where did people stop watching? What made someone actually message me? Which post drove a conversion that became revenue? Those are the business questions. That's the data, and here's why it's better than any market research that you'll ever pay for because people lie in surveys, but they cannot and they just don't lie with their attention. It's physically impossible. You can assume that your audience wants to see some kind of thought leadership piece of content about industry trends, but when they actually scroll past that piece of content on your industry trends that you think they want to see and they watch a three minute rant about a client mistake on repeat, well, that tells you the truth.

(03:27):
That tells you what your audience are actually interested in. So this is kind of a way of thinking about it, right? So say you post two videos in one week video, one details a breakdown of market trends as we've already kind of alluded to, and it took you hours of research, loads of stats, really, really thorough, incredibly glossy video. And then video number two is you ranting for three minutes about a mistake that you made and what it costs you. Which one performs better? I can promise you it's the rant every single time. Nine times out of 10, in fact, not because your audience is shallow, but because they're human. And we spoke about this in a previous podcast, around 360 brewer and the LinkedIn algorithm update, they connect with stories. They don't connect necessarily with statistics all the time, but they do connect with vulnerability.

(04:16):
Don't polish something, right? So perfection is the enemy of progress. It's a saying that's well known, but it's so true. You've just got to get stuff out there. Don't overthink it. You would never have known that Data Point existed had you not published both pieces of content. Your assumptions would've told you completely the opposite. But the data has told you the truth. And here's the key insight, right? Your content isn't just marketing, it is market research that essentially pays for itself, but it only works if you actually publish the content. So if content is data and it is, there's no getting around that, then what is the fastest way to collect more data? You've got it. It's to publish more content. It is as simple as that. More content out means more data points in. And what's the single biggest thing stopping you from publishing more content?

(05:05):
And I already know the answer to this. It's not time. Don't tell yourself that it's not ideas. Don't tell yourself that. Stop getting hung up on the fact that you think it might be the fact you haven't got the right equipment. The reality is the reason that you are not publishing content time and time again and getting those data points back is the perfectionist. The perfectionism dressed up as standards. It's your want to look good on camera. It's your want to make sure things are perfect. Perfectionist mindsets are the enemy of progress. Perfection is the enemy of progress. It is a well-known saying. So there is a framework that I work to, and it's called with the S of respect. It is called Start with Ugly. And there are three steps that you can follow. Rule number one is that your first 50 posts are tuition.

(05:52):
They're not marketing, they're you learning what works and what doesn't work essentially. They're not supposed to go viral, they're not supposed to be good. They're a price that you are paying to learn what good looks like for your specific audience in your specific niche with your specific voice. You wouldn't walk into a gym for the first time, right? And be annoyed that you can't bench press 150 kilos. You just wouldn't. You'd accept that for the first three, maybe four months you'd be building the foundations. You'd be learning, understanding, working hard to eventually be able to push or press 150 kegs. Content is the same your first 50 posts, are you learning to bench the bar? Stop trying to load up the plate, stop trying to push too much on day one. Stop trying to win straight out of the starting gates. Make sure that you put the content out there.

(06:45):
Take the learnings, understand what's working, and go again. 50 pieces of content equals learning. Rule two, record like you are talking to essentially one person. When I record these podcasts, no matter how many people are listening to them, I record it as if I'm literally speaking to an individual, not an audience, not a camera, just one person. Someone you actually know, someone you want to help, someone you want to build a relationship with a client, a mate, someone who has asked you a question in the pub and you are giving them an honest answer. The moment that you try to sound like a content creator or a presenter or an influencer or whatever it is that you're trying to sound like is the moment that you start performing. And that is the moment that people stop trusting you because of what actually makes people believe in you, which is you being real saying it, how it is.

(07:34):
No script, no teleprompter, no rehearse, delivery. Just look, here's what I think, here's why, and here's what I'm going to do about it. Take it or leave it being real, real talk as they call it, right? Pick up the phone, hit record. Talk for three minutes about something that you actually know about and don't rehearse it. Don't script it. Don't even think about the lighting. Just talk. And yes, it will be rough. And yes, you will probably say 40 million times and your eyes will dart around the screen. If you're doing a video and it may feel a bit awkward and your hands might be jittery, you might not know where to put them necessarily, but who cares? Just put it out, be real, be heard and see what the audience think. It will hit far better than something that's scripted, something that's glossy and something that's overly thought through.

(08:17):
Rule number three, the audience literally doesn't see what you see. They don't care about what you care about. This is one of those sort of methodologies that freeze up your mentality when presenting. It allows you to be who you actually are. But when you're first starting out, you will watch your video back and you'll obsess over the weird face that you may have pulled for a couple of seconds, or the thing that you said at some point throughout the video that the audience aren't actually going to remember. You might have stuttered at one point, but the reality is the audience won't notice. You know why? Because they're not studying your face. They're not studying the way that you speak. They're not studying the specificity around how you have pronounced a word. They're not decoding that in the first three seconds. They are basically listening to you because they have an interest in what you are saying.

(09:07):
That's it. That's the entire evaluation. They care about what you are saying. They don't care about how you look. Your audience has two mental categories, useful and not useful. That's all you've got to remember, right? They don't have a category for useful, but the aspect ratio was slightly off. They don't have a category for great point, but his background was a bit rubbish. They don't have a category for, he looked a bit tired. I don't like the chat. That doesn't exist. Okay? There's two categories, useful and not useful. Just remember that. And here's something that data actually shows slightly rough, slightly unpolished content regularly outperforms the slick production. Essentially high value content that you might see for instance on YouTube, right? So on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok being more rough, being more ready, being more UGC performs far better than being glossy and being high production value because it looks real.

(10:02):
It looks like a real person, not a brand. And people trust that. I'm going to double click in a minute into the perfection side of things because it is the main bit that people get hung up on perfection being self-sabotage. But what I want to do is just reiterate the start with ugly framework. So it's super simple. Remember this, it's 50 post sequels tuition. It's talk to one person, not an audience. And it's remember that that audience that you happen to be talking to through that one individual, they don't care. They don't judge you. They're not interested in what you look like. They're not interested in your background. They're interested in the authenticity, the content, the narrative, the story arc, what you are saying, not how you are saying it. So if we just double click now into essentially the numbers around how perfection equals failure, and that's a bold statement I admit.

(10:49):
But if you actually break it out, and I'm going to give you two parts, pass A and pass B to illustrate this, you will see that those that procrastinate or focus on being perfect often don't come out on top. Why? And I said it earlier because perfection is the enemy of progress. So let's run the numbers path A right? You spend two weeks perfecting one video, scripting it, rerecording it, editing it, colour, grading it, obsessing over the thumbnails, two weeks for one video, 26 videos a year. That's all the output will be. Path B, however, the same two week period, but you record and publish 10 rough UGC videos. They're not perfect, they're not polished, but they're out there. They're in the world, right? That is the equivalent of 260 videos a year. And when we talk about content being data, that is the equivalent of a 26 data points, right?

(11:44):
Or path B 260 data points. So path A 26 chances for someone to find your video over 260 chances for someone to find your video. That's 26 experiments versus 260 experiments, there is a 10 x difference. It's super simple. What's really wild is that most entrepreneurs won't go for path B. They'll go for path A, they'll put out 26 videos across the course of the year. Why? Because it protects their ego, it protects their identity, it protects their brand. So they think because to them putting out something imperfect feels risky. But actually when double clicking into this and actually looking at what that real risk is, it's not that somebody might see an imperfect or a rough video and think less of you. Nobody's sitting at home keeping a scorecard on the production quality of your content. The real risk for entrepreneurs is invisibility is not being seen by putting out less pieces of content, less videos across the course of the year, you are minimising the chances of being seen that nobody sees you, nobody engages with you because you're too focused on being perfect.

(12:54):
Hey guys, sorry for interrupting the podcast, but I thought you might find this useful. If like me, you found that one of the biggest headaches when running a business is managing money across different tools, currencies, and expenses. Then I think I've got the solution for you. Incar is built to fix this headache. Incar is a new financial platform designed specifically for high growth, modern businesses. It gives you multicurrency accounts, connected banking and smart spend management all in one place. The really cool part is the rewards with Incar, you earn up to 2% cash back on things that you are probably already spending money on, like advertising, SaaS, tools and travel. Every time you spend, you generate points and you redeem them instantly for cash directly in the platform. So if you are building or scaling an online business and you want a smarter way to manage your finances, check out in card using the link in the description.

(13:46):
Thanks so much for taking the time to listen to this. Let's get back to the episode. So the rule that I use to kill the perfectionist mindset, if you will, is a rule called the 70% rule. And it's pretty simple, right? If it's 70% right, it's a hundred percent right in my eyes. So post it, get it out in the wild, get it done. It doesn't need to be a hundred percent, it doesn't even need to be 90%, 70% will do. Now the gap between 70% and a hundred percent takes literally five times as long to actually close. And your audience frankly can't tell the difference. What feels like a huge gap to you, an imperfect edit, the that you didn't cut out a slightly clunky transition is completely invisible to somebody scrolling through their feed. They don't even see it, they genuinely don't care.

(14:28):
The 70% rule also kind of kills that revision loop that you'll know only too well. The one way you record something, you watch it back, you tweak the script, you rerecord it, you tweak it again, you record it, it goes on time and time and time again. The best take is the first take. Get it done, get it to 70% and get it out there. Next time that your internal monologue kicks in and it says it's not quite right, maybe I should do it again. Ignore it, shut it off. Just get it out there. See what happens. I guarantee you'll be surprised, and I guarantee you'll realise that the thing holding you back was never quality. It was just simply fear. Fear of being imperfect, fear of wanting something to be perfect. Disregard that, get it to 70% and get it out there. And once your content is out in the wild, you're going to want to farm those data points, right?

(15:15):
So you're going to want to get that return on your investment. And right now it's not going to be financial, but you do want that return to be data. And there is a four step, very, very simple framework that you can follow. It goes like this. Metric one, attention two, retention, three, action, four conversion. Simple as that. Attention is the hooks. Okay? So it's getting people to watch your video. Measure this with views, impressions, reach, whatever the platform might call it. And it can vary depending on the platform metric. Number two is retention. So how long has somebody watched said piece of content for what is that dwell time? And to drive that, you need to have a good storyline, a good anecdote, something that people can hold onto, right? Metric number three is action. So what are they doing after the video? Are they commenting?

(15:58):
Are they sharing? Are they saving it? Are they messaging you directly? Are they visiting your profile? Take learnings from that and understand why they're doing that. And then metric number four is the one that essentially everyone forgets, and this is conversion, okay, so did someone actually DM direct message you after that post? Did someone book a call? Did someone actually mention your content on a sales conversation when you were having a conversation with them over the phone? Did they see your content and did they do something that thus drove revenue? And you don't necessarily need a fancy attribution system for this at all. You can keep a simple note on your phone or on a Google Docs, whatever it might be, where you just simply say, post it about X, got a DM from Y, they booked a call at this point. That's literally, it doesn't need to be complicated, just needs to be enough detail for you to go, okay, that's working or it's not working.

(16:49):
Do this over three months, right? Do this over the period of time that you're posting 50 pieces of content and then you'll find an average. You'll go, okay, that piece of content hits really well with that audience, that piece absolutely flocks and never going to do that again. So the weekly rhythm is this. Every Friday you should sit down for 20 minutes, pull up the content from the last seven days, analyse what has worked, what hasn't worked, why it hasn't worked, and ask yourself two questions. What should I do more of and what should I do? Less of it is as simple as that. That is the entire review, not what's my optimal engagement to impression ratio across platform verticals. I mean that is important. Granted, but not at this point, just more of this or less of that every week on a Friday, on a Monday, whenever works for you.

(17:38):
Small adjustments over and over again. It's the 1% club, right? Just small adjustments every single day and you will keep winning. And here's my promise, my guarantee to you that after three months of doing this, you will know your audience far better than anybody who has been studying the market, who has done a survey, who has done any of those polls, because you've got real data from real people about real behaviour relating to real content from you, not theory, not assumptions, not what some marketing blog told you, what actually works for you in your niche with your audience. And the beautiful irony, right? The actual irony here is that you can only get this data by publishing ugly, by being imperfect. 70% is good enough, 70% is a hundred percent. The perfectionist who never posts has zero data. They can't and they won't win. Zero insights, zero learning.

(18:36):
They are literally flying blind and calling it preparation. You are getting stuff out there and winning. So let me tie this whole thing together because this is essentially a system. It's not just a collection of tips. It is a system that compounds over time. Step one is start with ugly. Record something. Don't overkill it. Your first 50 are tuition. Step two, publish at 70%. If it's rough, it's good enough, hit post, feel discomfort, but do it anyway. Step three is run the content scorecard once a week, right? Friday, Monday, whenever works for you. 20 minutes. Attention retention, action conversion. More of this, less of that. Simple as that. Step four, feed it back in. Take what you've learned and apply it to your next batch. Ugly week one becomes slightly less ugly. Week two, less ugly, week three, and even less ugly come week four, right?

(19:29):
You'll be fine by the end of it. That's a flywheel and like a flywheel, it's heaviest at the starts. Month one feels like you're pushing a boulder uphill in the rain. Month two, the boulder gets a bit lighter. Month three, you notice it's starting to roll on its own month six, it's spinning and you couldn't stop it even if you tried. Now the unlock is that the willingness to be ugly beats talent that stays hidden every time. Simple as that. If you are happy to have imperfect content out there, then you will beat the individuals that are wanting to be perfect every single time. Now, the last thing, and I promised before I leave you is that the gap between where you are now and where you want to be with content is not filled with better equipment, better scripts, or better editing software. I want you to understand this.

(20:19):
It's filled with reps imperfect, slightly uncomfortable reps that teach you something new every single time. Content is data. Treat it that way, right? Start with ugly post at 70%. Read the score, cast, adjust, rinse, and repeat the version A you that exists six months from now with 200 posts out in the wild and a tuned in turned on content engine. We'll look back at this moment, the moment that you listen to this podcast and be grateful that you stopped waiting for perfect and just started perfectionism is just fear in a nice outfit. As I said at the top of the podcast, take that outfit off and hit record. Now it's over to you. You've got to go and do it. Appreciate you listening to the podcast. Hopefully found it useful. For those that want to read up or learn more, head over to my LinkedIn page, Oliver Bruce online, where you'll find a weekly newsletter called the Brucey Bonus, where we double click into more detail and give you more tips and tricks around how to scale your business.

(21:18):
If you want to share this with friends, family, colleagues, business owners, people that are in your circle then might find it useful. I would be super appreciative if I said at the beginning of the podcast, this does not grow on its own. This grows with you and we do it for you. So thank you so much for listening and catch you next time. I mentioned earlier, but I do think something that you guys might find super useful if you are running a business and managing multiple transactions across multiple platforms is in card. It's a new financial platform for modern online businesses, giving you guys multicurrency accounts, connected banking and smart spend management all in one place. You can open up an account in minutes, attach cards for expenses, and earn up to 2% cash back on everyday spend like ads, SaaS, and travel. Check out incar using the link in the description. I.