Kickoff Sessions

#262 The Exact System That’s Made $2M+ Online

• Darren Lee

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The content game is rigged—and most people are playing it wrong.

You’ve been told to:
- Chase trends
- Post daily
- Go viral

That’s why 99% of creators fail.

What actually works?

The boring stuff.

The systems, the consistency, the strategy.

It’s what made me over $2M online—
- Without going viral
- Without a massive audience
- Without wasting time on trends that die in months

In this video, I break down the Content Growth Flywheel—the only system that turns content into a real business in 2025.

Here’s what I cover:
- Why most creators will never make money (and how to avoid their mistakes)
- How to grow sustainable while posting less
- The one mindset shift that separates broke creators from six-figure businesses
- How to monetize fast—even with a small audience

Most people won’t do this in 2025.

They’ll keep chasing viral clips while others quietly dominate with systems that actually work.

If you’re tired of running in circles, watch the full breakdown now!

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Speaker 0:

Most people online are lying to you. They tell you to post daily, go viral, follow trends to succeed, but guess what? That's why 99% of them fail, get overwhelmed and quit and leave the market. The truth is the simple stuff. The simplicity, the consistency, the repetition is actually what builds a true content business, and this system has made me well over $2 million online. This isn't sexy, it's not trending, it's not a TikTok dance, it's not something an online guru will tell you, but the difference is is that it actually works.

Speaker 0:

The content growth flywheel is what I've been using for multiple years and I'm going to show you exactly inside my content business how it all works together. See, I didn't start with fame, any connections or really even understanding production and content. I started with a $60, microphone and a simple idea for a podcast. Today, this boring podcast generates millions of dollars and feeds our entire ecosystem in our media company. So if you want a system that actually works it's not based on works, it's not based on tricks, it's not based on hacks Keep watching. If you don't, you can click off this video now.

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The reality is, most creators and entrepreneurs fail, and a lot of people that are watching this will also fall into that bracket. But I'm going to show you how you can avoid that, because a lot of things you've been told are actually not correct, and it starts with your belief system. Most people believe they need to be famous, well-connected, have a huge audience or have even a lot of money to get started, and the reality is none of that matters. People spend the majority of their time creating content that is nothing and I mean nothing to do with their business. They move around in a perpetual loop, putting stuff up online, trying to get validation, trying to get all of the sympathy from their audience, without actually showing them how to do anything. This is why their positioning sucks. Their strategy is wrong and they're not getting any results. They're chasing the wrong metric. When you chase likes, status, all the vanity metrics the ones that truly matter, which is the impact you can make, the problems you solve and the revenue that's generated all fall aside. That's where our content growth flywheel comes in. This has been tried and tested across my own business, number one, which is the most important. I've done this for myself for many years, and we've also done this for so many other of our actual done-for-you clients, where we physically do defer them in many different niches. This could be tech, it could be AI, it could be HR, it could be payroll, it can be fitness, it could be any sort of niche you can imagine. But our content growth flywheel is a systematized boring mechanism for you to build a content business that actually can generate millions of dollars online, and this system is split out into three key elements. The first area is positioning, the second area is growth and the final section is monetization.

Speaker 0:

However, this is more of an equation versus a step-by-step process. If you don't have your positioning right, growing your content means nothing. If you're just growing random content but the positioning is wrong, it's also pointless. It is only when you have your positioning dialed in and the growth dialed in that monetization is unlocked. It is simply an equation Positioning plus growth equals monetization, and with every equation, without one, you can't have a complete equation.

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Specifically for positioning, most creators get this wrong and blame everything else but their content. They blame the algorithm, they blame the government, they blame their parents, they blame their dog, but they don't blame their own positioning, and that's why most creators jump into content. We're creating content that feels good, but it's not good for their business. This is quite literally a recipe for a disaster, and it's why they don't solve any specific problem. And I was in this exact same position. I am not up here trying to talk down on these people.

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I literally did this for many years. My podcast started as a broad business show and then it was a broad career show, and it was only until I put in 50, 70, 100 episodes, which is two, maybe even almost two and a half years of progress. I was able to dial in the problem that I'm solving and what my podcast Kickoff Sessions has always solved is helping young people build online businesses. So this can be a combination of building their audience, building their offer, building even a team, their sales marketing, but it is a problem. One clear sentence that we're able to help people with and the reality is I wasn't even there In the beginning. I didn't even have a system for me to be able to build a business, but I was learning from a lot of my guests. I was learning from other people that I was interviewing and they were almost teaching me and I was looking at them and seeing specifically what actually is that thing that makes them successful, what's that unique mechanism? And it was their positioning. It was a problem that they are solving.

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And if you're not solving a specific problem, you're just creating noise. Every day you bark on the internet. You just say things that don't resonate with people. So, understanding clearly what actually is that niche you're tackling? Let's say you enjoy sales, you go after the sales niche, you're teaching people how to increase their revenue with sales and through that content, you're helping them on different components of the sales niche. That is insanely valuable to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of sales reps in the world who struggle to close more deals, to generate pipeline, to do all the things that are necessary in that specific niche. So think for a second what actually is your niche? What is that burning desire that you can help people with Gives people a huge unlock in their content and it'll always fit into three different buckets the health side, the wealth side and the relationship side. It is almost a perfect fit and all problems can be solved inside there and all problems are incredibly valuable to you as a business owner and to the prospect and customer as the buyer.

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To grow your content business or podcast there needs to be a clear, succinct system for you to get there. Most creators burn out and say that it is a problem with the platform. The algorithm is forcing me to post several times a day. That's actually not true. You don't actually need to post more. Some of the best podcasts and channels post quite infrequently, to be perfectly honest. So it's not really to do with the volume and we always see this over and over again because the quality of your content one it can only be achieved when you put out quantity. So, as you're putting in your initial reps, you will start to get better.

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Quantity is basically the first step into quality, but you don't need to be crazy with this and go absolutely wild with this. Instead, you need a content system that works on your behalf. So we do not create 18 TikTok videos a day, we don't write four emails, we don't write three LinkedIn posts and we don't have to DM everyone on Instagram saying, hey, bro, just bumping this up, can you buy my stuff? Instead, we focus on a very clean, crisp, elegant podcast that solves a very specific problem for a painful user that's easy to find online, and when we solve that problem, we're able to bring this into our content. And when it's in our content, at that level, we can use mechanisms from the long form piece of content to be able to grow your brand. So, at the very least, all you need is one clear video and if you put time into having an amazing title, amazing thumbnail, even a great guest, it's well-structured you don't really need to do anything else.

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Remember, short-form content is only around for maybe four years, five years. People grew content businesses before that. But when you get to the point whereby it is dialed in, your positioning is clear and you want to grow your show. We can have short form content running off it. We can have tweets coming off it. We can have treads coming off it. We can have individual posts and learning your craft. You will become a better speaker.

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So, as a result, you're going to be able to sit down, focus on some great quality content and that will feed your entire business, and to think about it like this the content you produce is like a sales rep that runs for you 24-7. It will be there working for you day and night. It's not going to be calling in sick. It's not going to be telling you its problems. Your content is the best employee that you could ever hire. It will show prospects exactly what you can do. It will allow them to almost solve their own problems. It will operate as a frequently asked question. It will be able to show people exactly how your product and service can help them, and then there's no sales calls needed. There's no hard selling. Everything is elegant, everything comes natural. And because it comes natural, you'll want to do more of it, because content is the highest point of leverage. You don't need to go figure out code, you don't need a bunch of capital to invest. Content is free and it's here. The winners are the ones who solve the problems. The losers are the ones who focus on showing their ass and abs on Instagram. We don't need that content to be successful. What we actually need to do is connect to people, build a trust, build a reciprocity and over time, that content system will grow and it will increase the amount of people that want to work with you. Quite literally, your velocity, the speed at which you're able to sell, will dramatically increase.

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In the beginning of our journey, we had the basic client services, where we produced shows for people. This allowed me to book up calls. It allowed me to have more demand than supply, and then we had to hire people and build a team and build departments in the team and really focus on that component. I had more people inquiring than I could even serve, because I am literally doing what I say I'm gonna do and in the online world, most people are not. You have fat personal trainers, broke financial advisors, divorced relationship coaches. You don't have people who truly love what they're doing. Except that's exactly what I focused on. I was producing that content every single day. I was there right in the middle of it showing people how I'm actually doing it, and we were able to build the client service business as much as humanly possible and we're still growing that to this day. And we had an oversupply, which is why we built our incubator, which is teaching people how to launch, grow and monetize their podcast. All of this is based off demand. Now that the positioning and growth is finished, what's left? Now? It's time to finally get paid.

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And with content businesses, most creators run them as charities. They're not running them as actual businesses. They're almost too afraid to give the offer. And that is what we need to solve with our monetization, because most creators are too afraid to sell to their audience. They either wait too long to monetize their audience or they slap a random product of tea whitening and skinny tea in front of the random audience. And I've seen this time and time again because I've consulted with some of the biggest companies in the world and I've worked with some of the biggest podcasts in the world and, quite frankly, a lot of them are broke when it comes to the alignment between their podcast, their content and their business, because everyone is thinking about their podcast in the wrong way. It's quite literally the bridge between your products and services. You don't need to wait to monetize your show. You can monetize your show right out of the gate and if you do it correctly, you can do this literally instantly, because if you solve a painful problem for a specific user that's easy to find online, it's going to be quite easy to give someone an offer, because that is the feedback that's going to come from people. If you take the example earlier from a sales podcast, if you get sales reps messaging you asking for advice, you can quite literally coach, consult, help them quite easily and I've used that indirectly through my own podcast by putting in the reps over 250 episodes, over 40 million views across four years.

Speaker 0:

What I've learned is I was finding out the problems with my own audience. They couldn't build content businesses. They couldn't build a podcast. They were scared of wasting time, money and energy putting everything into it, and it kept a lot of people up at night because it was so public. They were afraid that they were going to be embarrassed and their old high school friends would think they're a loser. But it's actually reality. No one even cares. That is the actual reality of this, and when I started to learn this, this became our first offer. It became our client services offer. It scaled up. I figured out more problems. Then I figured out ways that we could split even our own audience. We had some people who wanted high ticket, we wanted some people that wanted mid ticket and, of course, we wanted low ticket too. But by literally solving this problem at a high level, we were able to add in an extremely high point of leverage that generated millions of dollars online.

Speaker 0:

So ask yourself this why are you afraid to sell to your audience? And if you are afraid, you are not running a business. You are running a charity Build offers that your audience actually wants and you don't even sell your offers, just sell themselves. And unfortunately, most people will never follow this system, and I tried to figure out over the past couple of years. Why? And because it's boring, it's not sexy, it's not flashy, it doesn't involve TikTok, sounds and trends and dancing like a turkey. Instead, it's built on systems and processes and problem solving. But that's the actual thing that makes a successful six, seven and hopefully one day, eight-figure business. And, truth be told, if you're not willing to work on the boring fundamentals that are almost the easiest to do, you're not going to succeed. You'll be stuck chasing the next shiny object on the next irrelevant platform while people who base their entire work on systems and processes dominate. There is no surprise that people like Imam Ghaji, alex Ramosi and even Ali Abdaal crushed it for this exact same reason.

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And you might be thinking well, I don't have an audience, I can't sell to people anyway. You have to realize that I started with literally zero no friends, no connections, no revenue, no audience, literally nothing. And I had also no access to information. Everything you see in this video was not available. It was nothing to do with really building content businesses in 2020. It wasn't really a thing, whereas now the access information couldn't be easier. And also, you don't even need an audience when you have a specific problem. You just need to focus on helping one person, and that one person is almost a case study for helping 10, 100, 100,000, and even 1 million someday.

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And if you're still stuck in the monetization trap that you need to give, give, give for your entire life, just think about it like this If you can truly solve someone's problem, they will actually want to see that problem solved for them, because you're not shoving a product down someone's throat. Instead, you're just allowing them to take the next step with you to be able to solve their problem faster. And people pay for convenience. If you can help people get to the goal faster and easier, without the pains and struggles, through your content for free, they will pay for the implementation through whatever offer you create. And lastly, my favorite one is that I don't have time, and that is exactly why you create a system at the content growth flywheel, because, with the right positioning, the right growth and an offer that sells on autopilot, you don't even need to invest time. The system is designed to be able to work on your behalf. The content operates as multiple sales reps that sell for you when you're asleep. The system is designed to improve efficiency and effectiveness that most creators will never get to, because creators are not business owners and business owners are not creators.

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We are doing the hybrid version to become creator entrepreneurs, and so that you don't just watch this video and then go back to TikTok and scroll onto the next thing and move on to the next problem. Here's your action steps. Here's where you get started. Focus specifically on that one problem. Create a series of episodes and jot them down in a spreadsheet or whatever document you want to use. See how this can scale, see how many problems you can solve within your niche and then slowly, ever so slowly, put in those reps. Record one, two, three episodes in silence. Make sure that no one is there to watch you right, it's just you, maybe the guest, or maybe a solo podcast of you solving the problem. Once you feel you are ready, at that point, release the episodes. Put the reps in.

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Every offer and every business in silence has 100% success rate of failing 100%. There is no product, no service that is in silence that succeeds. It has to be in the market, it has to be in your customer and prospect's hands for you to succeed. And if you're ready to go a little bit deeper into the content growth flywheel, I've broken out the exact system and a step-by-step guide right below for you to follow through. This will show you in detail which buttons to press on your laptop to be able to build a content business in 2025. And I'll leave you with this. The flashy stuff builds status. The boring stuff builds wealth. The systems, the consistency, the repetition is what works. The question lies are you going to chase status or are you going to implement the systems? Because it's up to you and I hope you pick the systems.