CG 🌲 #064: Lean on Data, Not Ego

Deep Dive

Creator/Brand: Jake Heyen

Who is he:

Jake is a creator I connected with a few months back and chatted about him embarking on his creator journey.

Over the past months I have watched as Jake has committed to posting.

Now he is hitting some traction with a few of his posts going very viral!

Watching Jake build has been great and I am proud to feature him as my first Deep Dive case study on this newsletter.

How can you find him:

Instagram | Youtube | Newsletter

Big Lesson:

If you watch Jake’s content, it’s clear he has a good pulse of what is happening in his niche.

During my interview I was curious about how he stayed so up to date.

He mentioned the key for him was to immerse himself in the content.

Subscribing to newsletters, reading the news, following other creators.

Basically, he lives and breathes his niche.

This is why I truly believe you can only be consistent as a creator if you truly love what you are creating content about.

In order to be efficient, it needs to be a seamless immersive process.

Moreover, Jake shared his system for creating content.

Any ideas he comes across go onto a Notion page.

From that page, he spends 1 hour a week developing ideas into scripts.

Then he spends 1-2 hours shooting a week (sometimes 2) worth of content.

By working in batches he can ensure efficiency and consistency in his appearance and delivery.

Carl’s Critique

1. Curate more

Creating content is great, but I believe any good strategy also includes some element of content curation, especially in the early stages on growth.

Jake admitted that one of his biggest videos was one he took inspiration from another creators viral post.

This is great, but why reinvent the wheel?

I would advise that he reuses proven viral content and add his commentary before and/or after the curated clip.

Just be careful about your approach to avoid an uncomfortable situation.

2. Back end systems

Jake is doing a great job of getting discovered. As a “new” creator his delivery is great.

My major concern is the lack of back end systems.

Of course these things take time to implement and I know he will get there.

But I would hate for him to be distracted by vanity metrics.

Not all views and follows are equal.

By only measuring success on views or follows you collect metrics on content performance but not full business performance.

I would love to see Jake set up a system for growing his newsletter in order to give viewers a chance to consume more of his work when they first discover him.

Not every view will become a follower, but they might become a newsletter subscriber if you use the right system and call to action.

Thinking that traffic will always go from discovery → follower → newsletter subscriber → community member → paying customer is a bit of an illusion. If the system is built right, the most engaged and educated cold traffic can skip many of these step.

I’m no expert, but I know the things that I took too long to implement and I can only imagine how much value I did not capture for my brands.

Jake is solid though and he will figure this out sooner rather than later.

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