.jpg)
Kickoff Sessions
Weekly podcast episodes with the sharpest minds in the world to help you live a richer & more fulfilling life.
Previous guests include Luke Belmar, Justin Waller, Sahil Bloom, Gad Saad, Peter Schiff, Stirling Cooper, Jack Hopkins, Sadia Khan, Matt Gray, Daniel Priestley, Richard Cooper, Justin Welsh, Arlin Moore and more.
Kickoff Sessions
#331 Eddie Cumberbatch - The 5 Billion View Strategy Killing Paid Ads In 2026
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Apply to Work with Voics: https://www.voics.co/schedule-youtube
Join Aura: https://www.aura-app.ai/
Guest: Eddie Cumberbatch
Youtube: https://youtube.com/@eddiecumberbatch
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eddiecumberbatch/
Generating Billions With Clippers
DarrenGenerating over five billion views. How does one person do that?
EddieYou get a hundred thousand clippers.
DarrenWhy are you so like big on clipping versus like traditional ways of marketing?
EddieSo much cheaper and it's so much more effective. Obviously, paid ads works, like meta, tick tock, all that stuff works, but the costs keep rising and it's just gonna keep getting more and more expensive.
DarrenWould you say that clipping is more suited towards people that are like already going viral? Or is it how you get viral?
EddieYou don't have to already be viral. You can actually industry plant yourself with clipping. You can be like no one today and start running clipping, and you can be someone very soon. All it just comes down to like all right, man.
DarrenLet's kick off. So generating over five billion views. How does one person do that?
EddieYou get a hundred thousand clippers. So the way it works is over the last like year and a half, I've been just recruiting clippers. These are video editors. Actually, most of them aren't even video editors to start. These are just normal people looking for a side hustle. Like teenagers, we even have a few moms. My barber's a clipper for me now as well. And uh, we've been growing a community on WAP where we have like some training on how to get started clipping and how you can make money with it. And then we'll go find a brand or clients that want more views, more attention, and they give us a budget. We take that budget, we make a campaign, and basically set rules on like this is how you make the clips, this is the content we want you to clip, and then we pay the clippers a rate, a CPM anywhere from like we have some campaigns that are like at 10 cents per thousand views, and then we have some campaigns up to like $2. And so we'll pay the clippers based off how many views they generate. And so we have 100,000 clippers that will join any campaign we have, and we have clients that want more views and want more clips posted. They give us budgets, and so we just kind of middleman that.
DarrenAnd you've access to like seven million clippers.
EddieYeah, so there's a lot of clippers that are out there, and uh, I guess depending on the campaign we get, we can tap into that network. Like on WAP, there's a huge marketplace, there's a ton of users that are clipping on this Discover page on WAP. So we could tap into that. But within my community, we have a hundred thousand that are like constantly active and we work with.
Organic Trust Beats Paid Ads
DarrenSo why are you so like big on clipping versus like traditional ways of marketing?
EddieSo much cheaper and it's so much more effective. Like uh I can't remember the last time I watched TV or even like watched an ad on TV, bought something from a billboard, um, and there's so much money being dumped into it. Obviously, paid ads works, like meta, tick tock, all that stuff works, but the costs keep rising and it's just gonna keep getting more and more expensive. And organic is just so much more effective where people they see something that's like organic and they don't know it's an ad, they trust it more, and they trust stuff from familiar faces. And so, like, if you can get a streamer to like react to what you do um or mention you, and then you can clip that up and distribute it, you just have a ton of social proof. Um, and it it it's so much better for building trust, and then it's so cheap now that you can have it beat out paid ads in a lot of cases.
DarrenYeah, man. I think the idea for today as well is to gonna go through I think it's almost to break the belief around clipping in general because a lot of business owners don't even think about it. Like if I'm thinking about how to grow my business, I just don't even consider this as an option. And I think there's probably it's would you I'll probably put that down to a lack of understanding too. So it'd be really good for people with like understand what it is, how is it done, and how is it effective? Because from having a team of editors, I find it so hard to manage editors. Yeah, yeah. So, like, how can you do that at scale? Is my question.
Why Retainer Editing Fails At Scale
EddieYeah, I also find it very hard to manage editors. I personally don't even have someone that edits for me right now. Uh, personally, like, I don't pay any editors on retainer right now. I kind of hate that model. I used to run a content agency in 2021. Uh, that was like my first ever real agency, was a typical short form agency. We would sign a client, they'd give us a retainer, then we would deliver them 30, 60, or 90 clips per month, whatever guaranteed. And I hated that model. It was so hard to run, hard to manage, hard to get results. With this, as the agency, it's so much better to manage because we have a huge network, and the average campaign that we launch for a client will get between like 2,000 to 10,000 clips posted. And so there's just way more opportunity for stuff to work. And we don't pay the clippers unless they follow the rules and the clips are within standard and they're getting views, and so it's like way less way less risk on the business side of like spending money on editing and content because you're not paying unless it performs.
Proving ROI Without Ad Pixels
DarrenSo let's go into from a business owner perspective, right? Yeah, yeah. What is the actual core benefit for the business owner? And then we'll go into some of the ideas about like how does this actually manage, right? Because if they're if I'm speaking to someone who runs, let's say a B2B business, how do you actualize that or just even visualize it? Because they need to know, they need to see how it's going to be done, right?
EddieYeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the first benefit is that it's it's profitable. Like we're we just started tracking some of our campaigns um for like our personal brands and typical info sellers, and it's profitable. Um, like we're running this campaign for this one guy who we're not even finished with it. I think at 40% of the budget being spent, we're profitable, like break even. And so we're running like a $15,000 campaign. They're taking clips of him on podcast, posting it, and then we're pushing people to his VSL and his webinar. Uh, we did a VSL funnel for like two weeks, and then he launched a webinar last week, and then we pushed that for like a week. We had like 3k clicks on his VSL funnel, and then uh like 1.5 clicks, 1.5k clicks on the webinar funnel, and they made 15k uh when they only spent 40% of the budget. We don't know how much they made from the webinar yet because they like booked calls, and so they're still closing those deals from that right now, but they were break-even at 40% of the spend. There's still 60% left. There's still gonna be so many more views, so much more traffic they're gonna get, and so it's gonna be fully profitable for them. And so we just started tracking it. Like before, this was the issue with the industry is like people are like, yeah, you should spend on clipping, but no one's really tracking how it's actually like I spend a dollar and I know I make this much back. It's really hard to track that because there's no pixel, it's not like meta or Facebook ads, but like the software that we run our agency on, they're working on the solution for that, and then we're partnered with a few companies to uh track uh Link Clicks, Trachio. Uh, we started implementing with most of our campaigns. But it is profitable. No one's just really tracked it and seen it. That's one. And then the second is just uh, I mean, if you grow a brand, you grow an awareness, you will make money back from that eventually. Even if you're not liquidating it like right away, maybe the sales cycle is a bit longer, maybe they have to go find you on YouTube. They find a clip, they go on your YouTube, they watch for like a month, two, and then they convert. But there is almost always a return if you do it right.
Omnipresence Through Mass Distribution
DarrenUh, I'd love to get some insights from you. It's like you're 21, right? Yeah. Yeah. Your demographic has grown up just with like crazy, just like TikTok vibe. Like the the world is like TikTok personified, basically, you know, where it's all about like mass distribution. I'd love to get your perspective on like the value of that huge distribution that you've seen for like that awareness, right? Would you say like a lot of clipping is like top of funnel, just like getting that name out there? If you looked at like Iman, maybe Tate, probably not a great example, just as like a as a as a as a role model for this, but like top, top end top of funnel. Would you would you think about that that way?
Eddie100%. If you think about anyone who's like at the top of the social media space, it's just mass distribution. They just have a massive amount of volume of clips being posted. The best example I like to say is like, you know, Kai Sanat, right? You know him because you saw one video of his that got 100 million views. You know him because you saw him like three, four, or five times a day for weeks on end. That like creates omnipresence. So that's those like hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of clips that were posted of him. Clav is doing this now. Like before, most streamers weren't actually paying for it, it just happened organically when they have a fan base. Now people are able to pay for it and actually make it happen. And that's like what's going on with Kik and all the streamers, like Clav. He had 70,000 clips posted last month.
DarrenI saw that. And like and you break that down for people too, because I I know that you know so much about this, but like I saw a video on that as well that blew me, that blew my mind away as well.
EddieYeah, so Kik is running a program where they'll basically they'll fund clipping for any streamer on the platform, um, as long as the clip like has the kick logo on it. And so all the streamers that are on Kik basically just have clips going out. Um, and the clippers are getting paid a CPM. I'm not sure what that rate is. I don't run that. There's another agency that runs that, but all of the streamers basically have an army of clippers that will take their content, clip it up, post it on TikTok. Um, and the top one, Clav, had 70,000 clips posted last month and 2.2 billion views. And I think they had like 300,000 clips posted total across Kik last month, which I think that's also a genius model. Um, because if you think about it, Kik is the business that's actually running clipping, it's not the streamers. Streamers are like they're like pawns for Kik. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And KIK is funding clipping, UGC content. Yeah, well, it's a massive logo campaign. It's like how stake ran logo clipping uh to promote their casino, like with streamers and stuff like that. I don't think they run it anymore, but that was super profitable. They were spending like five million dollars a month on that campaign uh to just have their logo clipped up everywhere. Kik is basically doing that by taking streamers and putting their logo on it and pushing traffic back to their site that they make money from uh ad revenue subscriptions, however else they make money. I think it's really genius, and I would assume it's profitable. I don't think they would be spending this much if it wasn't profitable
Can You Buy Virality?
Eddiefor them.
DarrenWould you say that clipping is more suited towards people that are like already going viral? Or is that how you get viral? It's kind of like, do you, you know, it's like almost like, do you get shredded after you go to the gym or do you get shredded first and then you go to the gym? You know, like what comes first in order to sequence?
EddieYeah, I think it's uh you don't have to already be viral. You can actually industry plant yourself with clipping. You can be like no one today and start running clipping, and you could be someone very soon. Uh it all just comes down to like budget and how much you're willing to spend, I would say. It's probably not the best route if you don't have funds to spend on it. Um, because you're paying a CPM, and so if you wanted like a billion views, I could go up to a uh a random on the street and I could I could for sure make them like famous like within a few months, as long as someone's funding the budget to like spend on clipping.
DarrenHow much would you need? Like what's the where where we started?
EddieWhat what what what level would we say like well?
DarrenIt's just interesting. You gave the example of 15k for that crew that entrepreneur. 15k for a webinar budget is fuck all. Like we paid like 60k on a webinar last week, and we pulled in people that were missing eyes and arms, right? It's like you pull in like the rarest leads in the world. Yeah, yeah. So if you're thinking about like ad budget, it's like if you if I think about it from that lens, yeah, 15k is nothing.
EddieLike for 15k, we've had like 13,000 clips posted and uh checked, but I would say we're at like uh 14 or 15 million views on the campaign so far already. Um, and this is like he's not like trying to go viral, he's like on podcasts giving value. It's like I would say it's pretty boring content. It's hard, like he's a harder client to make go viral. He's not someone that's out here that's just on podcasts clip farming and just doing random crazy stunts. He's using it to fuel his business, and then we started off small to test and prove that it's actually profitable. He's very smart, um, and it is profitable now. So we're gonna start scaling that up.
Making Clipping Work For B2B
DarrenSo this is interesting. So it's not about just being totally viral saying dumb shit on the internet. You can actually use it for, I would just say more like B2B offers, and like how do you think about that?
EddieB2B is a bit different difficult with clipping, I would say. Clipping is best used for like if you have an offer that you want to reach the masses with consumer, anything consumer it works for, B2B it could work, but I think it's a lot harder to track the like direct return. Uh, like in a B2B example, I would typically say, like, as a founder, you'd be the face and you'd use it to grow your personal brand, and then from there you'll acquire new clients for your business. But it's not something like this where we're just like actually funneling people, and like week on week, we could see, like, okay, we spend this much, or maybe like month on month, we could see we spend this much this month and we made this much back. I feel like it'd be a lot harder to track with B2B, and then it wouldn't be as effective because you're targeting a very specific type of person with the B2B business. Uh, with consumer businesses, you can reach the masses, and that's what happens with organic content. You can't really control who you're gonna target.
DarrenYeah, so I think it's that's quite interesting because it depends what the what the offer is, right? Yeah, yeah. As in if it's actual B2B and what I would consider that to be like enterprise, like you're selling like an enterprise software to something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, that's gonna be harder. But dude, we all sell consumers at the end of the day. If you if you really break it down, right? Yeah, yeah. Like if you're selling like um a 40k mastermind or whatever, you're still gonna be doing that consumer model, you know. So I was looking at some people you worked with. You worked with like even people like Dean, Dean Gardiosi, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, uh, like Jordan Welsh, but Dean's a great example because like he has a big personal brand, yeah, yeah. But he's still his programs are probably still like 50k, 100k, 200k, man, right?
EddieYeah, but he's using it with the personal brand lens where he's the face and then everything is downstream from that.
Campaign Setup Rules And Pages
DarrenSo, okay, so that's kind of the big reframe. So my my question on this is how do you actually implement this? Like how I think that's the biggest fear. Even for myself, when I was considering this, myself and my team were looking at this previously. It was just how how would you how would you productize this?
EddieAre you asking from the lens of like you are a business owner, you want to run this for yourself, or like are you asking me from like the aging perspective?
DarrenVice versa. Well, same same thing, right? It's like if you're if you yourself, if you're coming in to do this with people, like how is it actually done with all the with the volume of content, like the accounts being warmed up? Like that's a big shift for a lot of people to buy into, basically.
EddieYeah, so I'll just break down how we run things. It's uh it's pretty cool because we have full control, we can do literally anything we want to. Um, when we set up a campaign, it's ran through contour rewards on WAP. And uh, I view this as like the Facebook ads dashboard for organic content and clipping. Um, we set up a campaign and we can choose the rules. So we can choose however we want the pages to look like, the clips to look like, how they set up the hashtags, all of that. And so, like, if we wanted brand new pages that is like branded by your face, your name, we can do that. Um, if we wanted to use our network of theme pages, we could do that. We have a lot of big theme pages that like post entrepreneur content. We have theme pages for rap content. Like we worked with artists, we onboard the music pages. Um, if we work with streamers, we have streamer pages. Uh it just depends, but we can set it up however we want. Um, we even have some clients that are like they don't want people to know they're spending on clipping. And so we're just using like random pages to just make it seem like random people are clipping. Interesting, and it's not like like a it's being paid for if that makes sense.
DarrenInteresting, yeah. So it could be like a random like entrepreneur network page. When you're looking at the like how that's like structured, how do you how do you validate or verify what's going out as like approved, right? Quality control must be a huge thing though.
EddieThat people are we can't really control what goes out. The clippers will do what the clippers do, they'll post whatever. But you can control what you say, yeah. You control what you say and the content that we give them. Yeah, so like if you if you care about your brand image, you wouldn't run a campaign on a podcast where you've said a bunch of dumb stuff, or you would just clip out the stuff that you wanted to actually go into the campaign and then give it to the the clippers. So we choose we give them like a uh drive with all the content and that they can pull from. And it's like if they don't pull from there, they won't get paid. Um, but the clippers will basically like read the rules, read the guidelines, set up the pages how we want them to, take the content, clip it up, post it, and then they will submit it to us. And so we have a dashboard where we could see all the clips that were posted, we could see the live links, go click it and watch it on TikTok, see the views, analytics, comments, and all of that, and then how much their estimated payout is based off how many views they got in our CPM. And then we have a full team who like literally just like watch like a thousand clips a day. Like a real human has to watch all these clips to ensure that um they followed all the guidelines and then also ensure that nothing's
Fraud Detection And Human Review
Eddiebotted. That was a big issue when this first started, like a year ago. Like uh a few people had a bad taste in their mouth with clipping because um it was so new. The software was so new, they were still developing like the systems for like uh preventing botting and botting and fraud, where like uh clippers would just like submit a clip into a campaign, it'd get approved, and then they would just go buy fake views for like uh less than a penny CPMs and just get like a million views or whatever and just get paid out like a thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollars from the campaign.
DarrenHow was how would you um how would you prevent that? Like, how does that happen?
EddieYeah, so there's there's a few different ways. One contour rewards has been like training an algorithm that just gets better at detecting like the view velocity, and so it's basically like how fast the the video is getting views and like the spikes. And so that algorithm's got you really good at like catching almost everything, and then anything else that's not caught by that. First, our team is the first layer, so we have a full team that does they literally watch clips for a living and they see the view view graphs. They see like like our average campaign gets 10,000 clips in a month, so they go through 10,000 clips in a month and they can they see the view graphs of all of them, and so they they know what it looks like. And if like it looks botted, they get uh the clip gets rejected, they get banned, they get booted off the platform. And then the second layer is content rewards also as a team internally that just does like a second check for everyone just in case, just to make sure no money's being spent on botting. And then, worst case, if a clip is approved that is botted, um, there's like a few-day window where you can like claw back the funds like through WAP.
DarrenPokemon, so it's a very manual process, yeah. So yeah, yeah. It can probably be systematized with tech some way as and as time goes on, too.
EddieI've had a lot of people I've talked to that have built like solutions for that, but at the moment nothing's good enough. And I I I would say that like this is the best way to run it. Um, I do believe that maybe one day it will get systematized, and we maybe won't have to have our our uh team members like spending their entire day going through like thousands of clips. But it also is like, will an algorithm really be able to tell what's good? Like, I know what my client wants. Um, I don't know if like the algorithm will be able to like tell that because like we we're we're doing some like interesting campaigns. Like, there's an artist campaign that I launched this morning. He's a pretty underground artist, but he's a really cult fan base. And like before we launched the campaign, he dropped a song yesterday, and I started seeing clips on my 4U pages from his fans, he's not paying for that. And like the type of clips they're doing, like, I don't know how to explain it. Like, I'd have to show you one of the clips, but I it's like you've seen the type of brain rot that's on social media, like it's like straight brain rot. And I don't know if like if we want to push that out there, how would an algorithm know if that's like what we want or not? You know, so I feel like it needs to have a a real human at some point.
DarrenYeah, that well, that's nuance and taste, right? Yeah, yeah. That's where like music always comes from, like that that taste component. I'd love to get your perspective though, just on the marketing, like marketing as a whole with this, because I love the whole propaganda and angle of the business. Like it's just so like bold and like it's such a fuck you basically just have like propaganda on top. But how do you think about this? Because you must have a lot of friends who are not doing clipping, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, what's your advice to people that are doing the lower volume content who are really struggling to to just basically even grow their brand? Because it sounds like it's based on volume, but it must also be based on the quality of what's coming out
Start With One Winning Clip
Darrentoo. 100%.
EddieYou can't polish a turd. And so, like, if you hand me a piece of content that is stale and it sucks, then there's like it's not if I post it 100,000 times, like, yeah, we'll get 500, 200 views on the clips, and technically I'll get you however many views, but like that's not quality views, and so it all starts at the top with the core piece of content that we're working with. And so what I like to say when a client comes to me, they're like, How do I know if I'm ready to launch clipping? Do you have a winning piece of content? This could look like a few different things, but basically, do you have a piece of content that has hit the algorithm? And if you are trying to use this to get some type of return, has that produced leads for you? So, like, for example, if I've posted a TikTok and it got, let's say, 10k, 20k, a million views, whatever amount of views, plus it spawned in leads for me. If I go clip that up, it'll work. And a great example of this is when I was at WAP, Hostage Tape launched a campaign. Uh, the like tape for when you sleep. Yeah, and Joe Rogan had mentioned them on his podcast. I don't think they paid for it, but he was just like, Yeah, I use this every night, it's a great product. Like free free shadow. And they came to uh us with that and we launched a campaign, and that clip had already gone viral multiple times for them, and it made them a ton of sales. Then we clipped it up, posted it 800 times, and they were like, Yeah, we need to stop this campaign, we're out of stock. And so you need a one winning piece of content, is all you need. Really, you don't need a like hours and hours of footage. If you have one winning piece of content, you can clip it up and like just milk it until it stops working, and it won't stop working. Like, if you've seen the why are you gay meme? Yeah, yeah, then it will never die, and it can always be clipped and reposted because that's a winning piece of content. Like every year I'll see it like a few times, and I'm like, bro, this has been around since I was in middle school. But you just need a winning piece of content.
DarrenYeah, well, dude, it's funny because like the best ads actually can always be rerun, but just from like slightly different angles, a different positioning, different marketing. I'm just thinking out loud, like because I have like a three-hour free course on YouTube. I actually just ripped a four-hour free course at the weekend, and we did a million in sales, I think a million in cash, should I say, um, since like June with that. Wow. So we we have some short form running on it. Yeah, yeah. It's all many chat keywords. And I checked yesterday on a call. We probably have like anywhere between seven to fifteen thousand keywords like on that video. And I'm just thinking out loud, like that video wasn't made for short form intentionally, but it's all like loom video overviews and like lucid charts and shit. And it just it just ripped really, really well. So what I'm trying to think is like, is that the piece of content that you're looking at? Uh bear in mind, that's like that's that's let's tactical content.
EddieYeah, yeah. It it definitely could work, but I feel like with something like that, that's a scenario. I haven't ran anything specifically like that. What I would do if you were looking to test that is I would take a budget and we would just let the clipper we would keep it pretty broad, let the clippers just choose whatever they take. Um, but then we are pretty dialed on like the funneling aspect, so we could see if there's any winning pieces of content. The cool thing about running a clipping campaign is you're able to. Just spawn in like and test like tens of thousands of creatives at once. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 510K, you get 5,000 to 10,000 clips posted, and then any of the winning ones are new now ads you can run. You own all the IP from the clipping campaigns you run, and so you can run those all as ads. Um, a lot of people, like um streamers and all the like TGR, he'll take his best clips and post them on his main. Most of my clients will take their best clips, post them on their main. So you can take that, run them as ads as well. And so it's just like a really good way to get a ton of ad creatives. But uh, I would have to see how that would work. I'm not really sure. I think it could work because like uh Jordan Bone is a really good example of this. Uh he was using like clipping pages to run to a free course. Jordan Bren. Uh there's two Jordan, they have a similar name. E-com, e-com free course. Yeah, I think it's Bone. I don't know how to pronounce it. I probably butchered it, but whatever. Uh he's a G. Um he was using that. And I talked to him a bit about this. He wasn't using this model, it was in-house retainers, um, like few clippers that were doing that, but it worked really well. It was just like videos that were like clips, and then they would like CTA to the free course, and they're using Many Chat, and it worked really well.
DarrenI'd love to get your perspective on some of those big guys like TJR. Did he create was he using clippers?
EddieYeah, he uh he did a 30-day marathon like um last month. I could not escape him. And uh there's a clip of him, he said he spent 125k the first week, and that's like the power of it. Like, everyone that I know could not escape him that week because he was just live all the time, and so there's a bunch of winning moments that were coming from the live stream, and then there was like I would assume there was 100,000 clips posted from that stream, and like I would look at the clips, and it wasn't like they were going super viral. Some of them definitely did, but it was like a clip could have like 5,000 views. But I'm seeing it and I'm watching the full clip, it's a good clip, and so there's just so much volume posted on social media that I literally couldn't escape him for like a week.
DarrenSo for him, was he were the clips you were seeing, were they trading info inf information, or were they just like random fucking TGR shit?
EddieIt was a mix of both because what he would do was in the morning he would do uh live stream trading, like on the charts when the market was open, and then after that he'd go do lifestyle stuff and just go mess around, do whatever. Um, and so it was a mix of both. And I think that's actually like a really good way to go about it. Like, I don't know if you've seen the reels I've been posting. I'm about to launch a campaign for myself, probably with this podcast, and then some of the other stuff I've been working on, but uh I haven't ran clipping for myself in a while, but I've just been posting content, like I've been posting like 25 TikToks. I saw man, and um I was gonna ask you about that.
DarrenEven like your organic is just like fucking random shit in your kitchen, and it's working, it's working really well.
EddieI I've had so many like massive companies come inbound from these videos, and like there's like videos that are like PR risky to say, like that. I've I've posted. I I like I've just said some shit that I'm like, let's just throw this out there, see what happens. And like I'm still getting a ton of like inbound from that, and then if I just take that and amplify it even more, it's we're gonna
Polarisation, Narrative And Avoiding Beige AI
Eddiebe cooking.
DarrenSo you're looking at that as like your winning signals of where to direct your content.
EddieYeah, I'm just trying to figure out like um I typically always do this, like I'll I'll I'll test angles and formats and and messaging. And so, like, okay, all the stuff I've been doing in the last like two weeks on my main is just testing the messaging for like how I'm gonna put like talk about this stuff because I haven't talked about what I do, and I want to figure out how to talk about it in a way that people understand.
DarrenHow do you test messaging? I want to go through your mental model.
EddieJust say shit. Yeah, just say shit, you know. I don't know. I don't know if there's a science behind it. It's just literally like I make videos, like I'll uh I have a hook pop into my head of like, oh, I could frame it this way, and maybe this could capture people's attention, uh people's attention, and then we would uh like just do the body in a few different ways.
DarrenLike I watched a Serbia clip of the Serbian girlfriend, and I looked at them and I was like, I don't know, I was like, what the fuck is this? But it's good, man. It gets you like it keeps you in that loop, you know?
EddieYeah, yeah. And with that, what I'm trying to do is like build a brand outside of just being like the clipping guy.
DarrenYeah, I just want to ask you too, is like, how do you see that your brand being built as a result? Because it is important to pull in like uh as I call them the characters, right? You know, we have the dogs, we have my wife, we live in Bali, we travel a shit ton, like that's the characters in the narrative. Yeah, yeah. How do you think about that narrative design for marketing?
EddieWell, it kind of depends on who you're targeting, first of all. With me, I'm I'm trying to target the masses, like I'm gonna go pretty big with my brand. Um, I want to be able to bring in businesses for my agency, but then also we train agencies, and so I need to bring in more agencies, and so this is gonna literally be anyone I could work with. And so I want to build a brand where people know me for me, they know the way I think, they know that I'm like funny actually. In the past, when I was building brands, I seemed like so serious. Um, like the content I used to make when I was doing the growth operating stuff, so serious. People thought I was scary, they thought I was mean.
DarrenDude, I remember watching a podcast review, and like some chick was like doing your hair in the buzz.
EddieI was getting a tattoo actually. Oh, you get a tattoo.
DarrenI got this tattoo on a podcast. Um, I'm actually. We thought someone was doing your hair at one point, like dreading your hair.
EddieDid that happen?
DarrenI don't know. I thought under the tattoo, I I saw I thought you had long hair then, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
EddieYeah. I think I was in Columbia at the time, and I I got these tattoos. Uh, that was the first podcast I've ever done. Um, and I was like, first tattoo as well, might as well do it. And I actually have a tattoo scheduled right after this. Um getting the propaganda tattooed. Uh fuck man.
DarrenSo the voices tattoo. Yeah, get the voices tattoo. So we all got our company. Well, not all of us, we're on the way to getting all of our company, get uh get the company logo imprinted on our hand. But how do you um how do you pull in different factors of your life so into your marketing? And how how can people do that? That's an that's a good way to kind of tee this up.
EddieWell, just talk about what you do, talk about what you like to do, um, who you are. Like, I made a video about why I cut my dreads because I used to have dreads, I talked about it. I definitely like click farm uh clip farmed a bit with that video. Um, I I rage baited people and I got quite a bit of heat in the comments about that. Well, but I did that on purpose. Um so the hook was like, uh here's why I cut my dreads. Like I grew out dreadlocks for like four years, they were cool, but I needed to denigy myself. And like I'm getting like so much heat in the comments, but it's like that's good. If people aren't, if they don't have an opinion about you, I genuinely believe if people do not have an opinion about you, you're failing at your job. And so you either need to get people to hate you or love you. And like when you when you say some crazy shit like that, some people will understand and they'll like you, some people won't like you. It's the same thing Tate did, he polarized everyone that's ever made it to the top of social media, they polarize people and they they pull out emotion. Like you have to get someone to make a decision on if they they like you or they they don't. If they're indifferent, you're failing.
DarrenYou're just beige as fuck, and that's where AI content as well makes you super, super fucking beige.
EddieYeah, yeah, yeah.
DarrenAre you like completely against like all scripting with AI, scripting in general? Like, like how do you think about that? Because if it's coming top of mind, like again, you're you're a smart dude, you get copywriting, you get structure, yeah, yeah. So it kind of like comes to you.
EddieYeah, yeah.
DarrenBut like a lot of guys online that are like Incel Pareto Biz Operos, like they they just basically take a script from like Chat GPT and and mash it into their words.
EddieI don't think that'll ever work. It probably does work to an extent, but I don't think it'll ever work where it's like you're building something like at the top of the top top of a brand. Mainly because like AI pulls from what AI knows. Um, and so that means it's like probably been said somewhere. Maybe it's like switching it up a bit, but it's not like new ideas or new perspectives. And so, like new ones, yeah. With my brand, I just I stopped posting content for six months because I realized like I don't have anything genuinely interesting to talk about. Let me just go do some cool shit and then come back. And that's how we landed on like the government stuff. Not really, like, that's not how we landed there, but like we also had that idea, and I was like, okay, this is cool. Let me go actually just cook on this for a while, and then I'll come back and talk about that when I have something cool to talk about. And now, like, that's that's also a part of my that will be a part of my brand
Government Money Through Tourism Marketing
Eddienow. Like, I'm chasing government contracts for a clipping agency. No one else is doing that, no one can do that, no one could talk about that, and so it's very unique, and that is like a layer of my brand that that pulls in outside of just me being the clipping guy. It's like all the different things that I do, and the way I I think, way I experience things, if that makes sense. Yeah, how did you do that with the government agency? Like, what's so we haven't closed a deal, we're working on it. Um, basically been running this agency since October of 2024 or like October, November, around then it started. Took on a bunch of free clients, worked with some of the biggest artists in the world, biggest entertainers, like we did uh Drewski, Sketch, um, Ken Carson, uh, and then the list goes on of like other crazy like artist names and people that people will know. I can't name drop most of them, but the top of the entertainment industry and like typical like media, we've worked with a lot of them, and then we just realized, like, yeah, this is cool, these are big names, but I don't ever know if there will be big money in this space. Because when you work with one of the biggest artists in the world and they only give you a 20k budget, you're like, okay, will I ever make big money from this? Because we take a percentage of the budget, we don't take the full budget. Um, and so I was like, okay, how can we make real money with this? Because I know this is a model that'll work and it's scalable, and like people would spend millions of millions on this if it's the right person with the right funds.
DarrenYeah, yeah, true.
EddieThen I was like, okay, maybe we could just go find some billionaires that want to blow up and like start a personal brand, we run clipping for them. That's like that is a really good uh niche, but like I'm not gonna do that. Um then we were like, okay, businesses, and then we spent months trying to figure out how to make it work and be profitable for businesses. And finally the the code has been cracked and we we've like really figured it out. Almost like this past month and a half, we started tracking it for them, and so we've seen that all of it's profitable. We're getting those case studies, we can go get bigger budgets and scale with them. But then we're like, okay, where's like real money at? Where's like big money at? And then we thought about it. Like we were in the process of moving to Dubai, and I was like, bro, the only reason I ever wanted to move to Dubai was because I saw uh TikToks from when I was like 16 about Dubai, and I was like, wait, I wonder if they're spending on clipping. There probably are. There's like already like a lot of people that spend on it. And we looked, we couldn't find if they're already spending on clipping, but they spend $400 million a year on tours and marketing. So I was like, okay, there's big money there, there's real money there. And then I started doing some digging, and then I realized, like, oh wait, Trump's running clipping. He has 70,000 active clipping pages, or he had during the last uh election. There's uh there's an article, some someone did research and dug into it, but even if you just go look Trump on like TikTok, you'll see hundreds of pages, hundreds and hundreds of pages. They they said it's anywhere between like 30 to 70,000 clipping pages that were ran during his election. I almost guarantee you he wouldn't have he wouldn't have won if they weren't using that um to win. So it's like okay, one government is already like a case study, the US is already kind of spending on clipping, or Trump's team, whoever, whoever's paying for that and running that. I can now go take this to other countries. And I don't want to get into I don't want to get into like the whole political propaganda.
DarrenUm that doesn't help that your company's called propaganda. You start going into like El Salvador, yeah, yeah, Colombia.
EddieYeah, I don't I I don't think I I'll we'll get into the political stuff because like I don't want to have to ever worry about if I have blood on my hands. But the alternative to that of still being able to work with governments and like make govern government contract money is uh tourism marketing. Like you were talking about how you moved here to Bali in 2020, and it was like not many people here at all, right? Why why do you think there's so many people here now? Social media, yeah. And so this economy has probably seen so much growth, like just because of social media and like people talking about it. Dubai's seen the same thing, and we wanted to take that somewhere else. And so the first place we tried was Kenya. I'm Kenyan. My mom was born there. Uh she grew up there until she was nine, and then she left. And um, she knew some people, that knew some people, that knew some people. So we started asking, like, yo, who could we talk to and like tell them about what we do? And so we ended up getting a meeting. We had a meeting booked actually with the president of Kenya. Um, and we had to prepare, like, we're in Dubai at the time, just like trying to figure out how we can like get in contact with the government. And I called my mom and I was like, yo, do you know someone? And she's like, Let me see. And she called some people, and then um she was like, Yeah, I actually got someone. Um, and he said, like, he's gonna he's he's in contact. We'll let you know soon. And then, like, two days later, they're like, Hey, can you be in New York in on like Saturday? And we were in Dubai at the time, and I was like, Oh fuck. It's actually happening. Like, at first, this was just like a big swing idea that I had. I was like, This would be kind of sick, this would be cool. Booked call show show raid from the president, yeah, yeah. And so they're like, Yeah, the president's gonna be in New York uh for the United Nations General Assembly, which is like almost every president in the world or all the presidents of the UN were in New York that week. And they're like, we can get you a meeting with him during this week, and so pull up, and so we're like, okay, fuck. Now we have to make a fucking pitch deck and presentation for for the president uh of Kenya, if that's who we're talking to at pitching. And so we spent like two days just like doing as much research as we could, figuring out how we could actually uh angle this. Um, and so that's when we started doing all the research, actually on all the Trump stuff. We saw all of that uh because we wanted to show them all the use cases, but we weren't gonna pitch them on like all that. But we ended up making like or edits of the president just to show them like we showed them like an example of a Trump or edit that we found, and then we would make one for him in this pitch deck just to like show them the the visual of it of like what clipping actually is and how to actually break it down to him. And then we found examples of like Dubai clips, made an example of a Kenya clip. So we made this pitch deck in like 12 hours, booked a flight to New York, go to New York, and uh they're like, Hey, do you have suits? Like, you can't meet the president without suits. And I'm like, uh it's like no, no, no, we we're in info, we don't have suits. It's like bro, I make online money. I haven't worn a suit since like prom in high school. So I uh we're like, okay, cool, let's go to a suit supply in New York. We go there, get some suits. Um, because they were like, you cannot meet with the president of Kenya or the government officials without suits. And Kenyans love their suits, man. Like, you you can walk down the street and like you'll see your everyday person in a suit just walking down the street. It's it's I love Kenyans. They're this type of people. Um, and so we're there, and then they tell us, okay, uh, tomorrow pull up to this hotel. Um, and we'll you'll you'll meet there around two. And so we go on a run in New York that morning across like the Brooklyn Bridge. It was uh such a vibe being back in New York, like after I'd left for so long. And then um two o'clock comes around, we go pull up to this hotel, and uh first thing we notice is like there's a ton of like black SUVs and like black vans, a ton of people, like a ton of stuff going on outside. As we get closer, there's like um secret service and like security, metal detectors, all this stuff. I've never been through like security that that intense, but we walk through, uh, get scanned, get checked, and then we go inside the lobby and we're waiting. And the whole time, uh, so the the the guy that my mom knew was there, and he was there, like he's like explaining to us what was gonna happen. He was like, Well, I'll connect you to all these people here that are from the like Kenyan government, um, and uh you can make your pitch to them, and then at some point today we'll have a chance to meet the president. I didn't realize this at the time, but when he said, Come to New York, we'll we'll get let you meet the president. He meant the president's gonna be coming out of the elevator, leaving a meeting and leaving, and I'll have five seconds to shake his hand. And he was like, When you shake his hand, you have five seconds, or how you have as long as you're shaking his hand to pitch him. Wow because he's gonna be talking to so many people, and so you like you shake his hand, tell him, like, yeah, hey, this is what we do. Like, I would love to like point me in the right the right direction for whoever in your team we need to talk to. And that's what he told us we needed to do. And I was like, Oh, okay, well, this is not gonna work out the way we thought it was going to. And so we're then just sitting there waiting the entire day for that to happen. And that time we're just talking to different people that are like related to the the government there. Um, we met like the ambassador to the US, we met some other people, and then um we got there at like two, and it was already like 6 p.m. And we're like, where is this guy at? And they were like, uh, he's in the UN meetings, he's busy, he'll be coming down soon. I think we saw like uh a group of secret service walk out of the elevator. At one point we thought it was him, but it was the president of Haiti. And then this girl does the hotel. Actually, Trump was staying there the next day after we were there, and then um I think the president of Serbia was there as well. Um but he didn't he never came. 7 p.m. came around, and they're like, okay, guys, he's still in the meeting, it's not gonna happen. We can try for tomorrow. But uh in the meantime, let's go to dinner. There's gonna be a bunch more people from the government there. We can meet them and talk and see if we can make the right connection happen and then get a meeting. And so, me and my partner Danilo, he's white by the way. We go to this dinner and we're in suits. There's like videos of us walking around New York. We walk down New York with uh two of the Kenyan guys in suits, it's such a vibe. Uh, and we ended up in this restaurant and they rented out the entire basement. And it's like 20 people, these are diaspora from Kenya, and then like some some government people as well. And it's like a table in a bit in a basement of this Mexican restaurant. All of them, me and my business partner who's white. He's the only white guy there. So I was like, he fell so out of place, and then they're like, um, they did introductions, everyone stood up and introduced themselves, and he's like, I'm I can't do this. Like, I'm not supposed to be here, I'm like white, and like everyone here is is is Kenyan. And I was like, bro, you're good. But I ended up speaking for him. We ended up meeting a bunch of people, and then the meeting the next day never happened with the president, but we ended up uh getting a meeting booked in with the uh PS of Tourism, which is principal secretary of tourism. And so we had a meeting with their whole team, pitched them on it, walked them through it. We went back to Dubai and did like a Zoom meeting with them and pitched them on it. Um, and uh we asked for a seven-figure budget, and they told us they didn't have the budget at the time, but the budget's reset in June or July. And so we're gonna revisit that very soon and hopefully we can lock that in.
DarrenMan, it's fucking insane. But like, what was the general feedback when when you were telling them were they were they excited about it just in general? Because they see like distribution of everyone that's probably insane about Kenya, like uh all the things you could do there. But what was just a general feedback because like that's the ultimate litmus test for like a business, then it's obviously government, but it's a business.
EddieYeah, I think they all fully understood it and they were all really excited about it. I'm not sure if they told me they didn't have the budget because they actually didn't, or if maybe I did a bad job of pitching it. Could objection handle them, yeah, yeah.
DarrenBut in a setter and a closer following up with them 500 times from here.
EddieNo, I definitely followed up a bit, and I was like, okay, maybe I thought it might have like, okay, maybe I asked for too much because like, yeah, maybe a seven-figure budget for a pilot. It's kind of crazy, but we're we we guaranteed like 200 million views. Um and uh I went back and I was like, we can start with a lower budget and scale it up, and they were like, no, we actually have like no room at all on our budgets until next year. So I'm assuming the budgets get set, they get allocated, and then like pre-seller funds get disappeared. Pre-sell it disappointments.
DarrenIt seems like an info style way to sell to the government. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or just yeah, just piss litter, don't worry about that. Um that's cool, dude. Like, that's insane because now that just kind of proves the model for even for businesses. That's why it it's all it's it's all about the nuance here of the context. Yeah, yeah. Like for them bringing in westerners into Kenya to spend a bunch of money domestically seems like a great idea. Yeah, yeah.
EddieI mean, their economy is already mainly ran through towards the marketing, and if they could just keep growing that, they'll be good.
DarrenCrazy, dude. Here would be a great location.
EddieIt's like 98% of the revenue is from you think they want more people though, it's very busy right now. There's a lot of people. There's other islands, you know.
DarrenOh, true. There's many other islands, you know. Um, yeah, there's several different islands that are really booming. Like Lombok is really, really growing super fast as well, and it's a lot of Middle East are coming there, because predominantly uh Muslim. So a lot of like uh Middle East countries are getting marketed to come out there for the winter or when it's super hot in Dubai and so on. Because that's why people spent like six months here, six months in Dubai, generally, because it maps the weather, you know.
EddieOkay,
Inside Whop And Platform Competition
Eddiethat makes sense.
DarrenWalk me through uh what was the experience like in WAP? Like, why did you join there? What was that like? What was the experience inside the company?
EddieYeah, bro, it was so sick. Like um I I joined in October of 2024, and prior to that, they had been reaching out to me for like almost a year straight. Uh, I think they were just trying to get me to to hop on the platform and process my payments. Before I got into this clipping stuff, I was doing something called growth operating. If you don't know what that is, it's basically partner with a creator um that has an audience that's not selling info, and then you launch an info offer, you operate for them, take a percentage, like a Rev share. And I was pushing a lot of traffic to school. Like a lot, a lot of people were signing up to school and using school because of that. And uh they saw that I think they wanted to poach me. And so I finally heard them out in uh October because I was like at a crossroads. Me and my business partner ended up splitting, and I was just like, let me see what's like next. Maybe I continue doing this, maybe there's something else that I could do. And um, I heard them out, they showed me what they're building. I was like, Oh, that's crazy. Because I actually tried a clipping agency in 2021 or 2022. When I was in high school, I saw Tate Blow Up. I was running a Discord at the time and I was doing like marketing for them and operating. And I was like, Oh, let me try this for this Discord. And uh, we got clippers and uh I think we had like 800 clips posted. We got 50 million views, and it was clips of me, and these still exist actually. You could go like on TikTok and search up the hashtag, uh, I'll leak it, folks. It's reseller's basement. Like if you go search up hashtag reseller's basement, you'll see a bunch of clips of me as like a 17, 18 year old in my parents' crib talking about sneaker reselling. But it was a shit show to run that because there was like no way to track it. I was paying my clippers with Cash App, I was paying them through PayPal, and um couldn't really track the views that well. And so I was like, okay, this isn't this is something that is like going to be big, but I can't do this right now. And so I ended up going into like a different route, tried SMA, tried growth operating. Um that worked. And then when WAP showed me they were building a solution for this, I was like, this is sick because I was this was like this is much needed. And like when I was growth operating for all that time and running that offer, talking about that, the biggest difference between someone that has success with it and that that doesn't is the type of funnel, the content. And so like every creator needs like better content. And so, and I'm also a creator myself. I love content like more than like actual business. Like, I don't enjoy the back end, I enjoy sales and marketing. That's like all I love to do.
DarrenTypical info good dude. Yeah, just let me run a webinar and then that's gonna be it.
EddieYeah, typical course seller. Um, I was like, this is sick. I because I could spend more time being creative, thinking about different angles of the content, and like and so I started working at WAP then, and um, yeah, I worked there for seven months, like really, really great phase of my life. Learned so much, met so many cool people, uh, got to work on so many cool projects. But uh yeah, it was so fun. Learned so much.
DarrenWhere like what was the kind of trajectory of the company when you were there? It was just about they were hiring so many people, they're building so much stuff. Yeah, yeah. Like you were you saw a lot of things that people wouldn't see, you know, like how the company was run, like how to bring in more people, like what was that experience like? Because obviously you didn't have a background in like startups and stuff as well.
EddieYeah, yeah. It was really interesting to see how like a billion-dollar company is actually ran because I'm like an info seller running like online business, but to see how they have it structured to see like what it's like working with the full team in person, I've never experienced that. Um, going to an office every day and having people, and I think it was definitely a different experience from like normal jobs and normal like corporate stuff because everyone they hired were like entrepreneurs, yeah.
DarrenThat's why it was so interesting, right? Yeah, yeah.
EddieAnd so who else was kind of there to join with you, Ralph? Uh Brett Malinowski was there. I think he's still there, but he was there before me for a few months. Um, Malcolm Bryant was also like in the same space as me before. Uh he was growth operating, then he ended up operating from offer that I was running at WAP. Um, who else was there? So many different people, bro.
DarrenUm Daniel never worked there, right?
EddieNo, no, he didn't. He didn't.
DarrenUm I remember, dude, uh I met Brett in New York. I think it was probably December 2023. And he was like, Yeah, there's a thing called WAP. And I was like, You mean like the band? And he was like, No, you retard. And he was like, No, that's not it. And then like a couple of months later, like absolutely boom from there. Yeah, yeah. So 2024 or something like that around that time, and that was my first entrance in him. Then he went in as was he CPO at that point?
EddieUh, I don't remember what he started at, um, to be honest, because he he was there before me. I think when I went there, he was already like heavily involved in marketing. Um, so I'm not sure.
DarrenWhat do you think about like the kind of the warfare between like school, WAP, fan bases now? Like, what's your just observation because you've been in that space of not only like the info side but also seeing the platforms?
EddieYeah, it's it's very interesting because um I saw a WAP from the very beginning. Like I was very, very early user for WAP. Like when I was running my first Discord uh in like 2021, it was on WAP. And like I met Cam and Steven back then. Um, and at the time we had ran like some of the biggest WAPs, but this was like only reselling communities, it's like for sneak sneakers. Um and then I found school a bit later. I was like, oh, this is sick. Learned about Sam Ovens. I learned about how so many info people actually just like learned from Sam and like blew up. And I was like, oh, okay, this guy's the go. Let me go hop on this platform and go use it for a while. And it was cool. School school's a school is a good platform, I feel like, for the community aspect, but like um, I don't know, it was just I don't I don't bros asking me to start beef now. Um I just I I don't know if I'm very bullish on uh their growth. I think WAP is like dominating, bro. WAP is dominating all platforms. I think they they they understand it, they're doing it right, and um yeah, yeah.
DarrenYeah, it's just interesting. It's like uh these community platforms aren't new, but I feel like when WAP in school went kind of head to head, they had to make this stuff great. Like you always had just like random shitty platforms in back in the day, whereas now a lot of them need to be like opt like really, really optimized for these things, and like it's funny because a lot of this now has gone from course platforms to payments, yeah. Yeah, that's like the kind of next phase on this where it's like okay, Stripers knocking everyone out and banning everyone. Um, let's compete now on like actual payments and that processing side of things too, which is it's just like a it's just like the next world. That's why we say that info is actually super sophisticated.
EddieYeah, it is, it's so sophisticated.
DarrenBut it's just like it's just funny because the guys that are running them are just like absolute kids, you know. But but it actually is like very, very, very, very sophisticated. Like probably a lot of our mutuals because of our software, we uh we obviously work with them, but a lot of them actually are like growth operators traditionally they would have started. I'll mention some of the names later too. But um, some of the platforms that they've built for their own clients are crazy, like client dashboards, payment dashboards, uh fulfillment webinars, everything like they've built these things custom code. I'm like, man, like you could fucking work at like a Fortune 500 company, and the guy's like 19, and he's like, Yeah, I just figured it out on Twitter. But that's actually the reality of how it comes around, you know?
EddieYeah, yeah. I I realize this as well because uh why about uh a lot of young people there, and then I just talked to another company that I think will be pretty big. It's like a company for um building apps with AI, and they they they were saying that they've actually cracked it. Most other people that have claimed it to do that don't actually do it right. Um, but I spoke to someone on the team and he was like 18. He was young. He was the one representing them when they were talking to me about running clipping. Um and like they hired him because he like had made money online and he had a lot of experience, and now they're gonna he's gonna help them with the marketing. And I was like, I was breaking down how I think that they should run it, but I was I thought about it after the call. I was like, wow, this is like a company that just raised like 15 million dollars that just hired like an 18-year-old, and he's like in charge of like a lot of stuff, and it's like he's like cracked, he knows what he's doing, but he's like so young, and it's just because he's been like he came up in like the online money space, like in the world.
DarrenDaniel Bitten, you know, because you speak to Daniel and he just he has like two sides to him. It's like he has the content creativity side, yeah, but then he has like the operation side. No, I know obviously he works with a bunch of people too, but even if you're like 40% at like the operation side of things, you're still way better than someone who's just like a random marketing manager for someone. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Like that's one thing about the space that's very undervalued, like people don't realize that, which is why you could bring it to other industries, yeah.
EddieYou know, 100%.
DarrenLike for our software, we use a lot of the info style selling for selling software, like annual plans, um, like painful discounts, uh additional setups, all this kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. The stuff you would take from like traditional info stuff, yeah. Um just because you've seen it and you can readopt it, you know.
EddieAny any BNPL?
DarrenIt's hard to BNPL uh $97 a month, you know, like a 55-way split. That could be a good
Brand Risk, Regulation And Deal Cycles
Darrenoption. What's your thoughts on uh like a lot of the crackdown of like content and offers and FTC stuff like with clipping as well? So I've seen like a lot of stuff last year, especially speaking to more like American only focus offers. Like obviously we sell to America too, but I mean, guys that are in America selling to only Americans, like it seems like to me a lot of the regulation around fucking everything is becoming a lot heavier, whether it's payments or whether it's like regulation.
EddieYeah, with I think the clipping side of things, it's still pretty much a gray area. Like a question I get asked a lot is like um there's these things called logo campaigns I was talking about earlier, like the state campaign they're running. Like when I go and pitch a company on this, um they're like, okay, this is cool and all, but what about like content rights? Like, are we not gonna get sued? And the response is like Yeah, it's uh there's no it's like a it's a gray area right now with it. Maybe in the future it will be something that can't really do. Um but how would you get sued, sorry? For so logo campaign. So like if the brand is taking uh their logo and putting on other people's content, I don't think they would actually end up getting sued. Um, I mean, there's a chance if it's like a big enough company. Like I spoke to a Fortune 500 company this past week, and they're talking about clipping as a strategy for something they're planning this month, but they they have like a really big brand risk, and so they were like, we can't take any risk at all with this at all.
DarrenAnd so um it's a kind of it's the gray area, right? It's like um we have this sort of sales team. So we're on an outbound sales team. It's like you target the small guys and it's a total fucking waste of time. Like you're wasting your money, wasting your time, it's a heartache. You target the huge companies and it's a waste of time because there's so much procurement and there's like seven different types of Kellys that need to review something. So there's just like this kind of Goldilocks zone, yeah, yeah, which we determine like 100k a month to 500k a month, where it's like you can get to the business owner, you can implement something like clipping, like Frostex software, and it's just easy. Like it's easy. But if we go above that threshold, it's just meeting after meeting, and then before that threshold, there's just no wiggle room, right? They can't spend for on a clipping campaign, they're not even booking calls, it just doesn't make sense.
EddieI might that might just be sauce for me because I might be going too big. I've been trying to take big swings and like low key, maybe maybe I've gone a little bit too big. I need to come back down to like a medium, medium-sized player.
DarrenThe way I think about this, because for our agency, the content agency, it was corporate. So we were getting a few issues. We were getting issues about payments, so they were paying us out like net 60 days. I'm like, bro, what the fuck? Like, it was just crazy shit, you know. It was like net 60 days, net 90 days for a corporate client with invoicing, and that was my biggest realization. And we'd worked with a lot of big banks for their content because they do a lot, a lot of podcast stuff back in the day, a lot of stuff, which was great, and it was very good retainers and all this kind of jazz, but as you know, like it was just it was harder. So, okay, take a step back. That sales cycle took so long. The way I thought about it was if that took me 180 days to let's say get a client that would pay me 100k in the year, well, during that six-month period, could I guess get a bunch of 40k clients that would surpass that? Yeah, yeah. So that that term is called cannibalization, which is are you actually forfeiting the the gap between what you could be making and what you're at currently making by targeting like the wrong people or having the wrong wrong pricing?
EddieThat's interesting. But I I think I think for me, really my own goal is just to have like one or two clients on an unlimited budget. Yeah, but that's there's like uh there's actually a few campaigns live right now on content rewards. I don't run them, but they're companies that are willing to spend as much as the agency can liquidate. And so, like, I've seen one of them. I'm I won't name them, but I think it's one of them. I don't uh they never told me the names of them, but I've just been watching and I see like there's this one company that is already burnt, like or not burnt, but they've already spent 100k, and then the next day you'll see like another 50k campaign. It goes away in a few days, another one comes back. And so that whether the agency that's running that is like cooking, they're printing. It's awareness, really. It's profitable for them. It's very profitable for them.
DarrenAnd it's probably awareness uh campaigns they're running at the end of the day.
EddieYeah, I think I think it's uh some of them are logo, some of them are streamer clips. They're running multiple campaigns. They're doing like I guess they I guess with clipping you'd say there is different types of levels you could go. You could go top of funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. Um, and they're running like all of them. Um they're running like streamer clips, they're running um logo campaigns, and then there was another type, I think it was like UGC as well they were running um through content rewards.
A Simple Playbook To Start
DarrenSo, yeah, I think the big kind of takeaway here is like if you're if you're clear with the intention of why you're doing it, well, then it's obviously going to clearly work if you have the right killer piece of organic content, you know? So if you had to put together like a roadmap for someone who's not doing this right now, they're in the online space, they're creating organic content. What's your recommendation for them really to move towards this model?
EddieSo this is someone that wants to build a brand?
DarrenWell, they want to grow their brand, and they're doing the traditional content right now, which is just your YouTube videos, your podcasts, but it's slower, right? Yeah, like even that's the same. My my brand, like my brand isn't huge, but we have the traditional content approach.
EddieYeah. Well, if you have podcasts and you have YouTube videos, you're ready to go with the campaign. And like I would say just test it. If you're at a place where you can like um put up a budget 5, 10k into clipping, just test it.
DarrenThat's nothing, man. When you look at editors and how much editors cost you, you know, like I remember for our agency quite recently, it was like 50k we paid in editor expenses for a lot of editors for what though? Uh for clients, for like for our servicing clients, it was like 50k in total. Oh, which is crazy.
EddieThe craziest thing about that is like you're paying them like a retainer or cost per video, and there's no guarantee that the video is gonna perform well. Exactly. With this, if you're spending money, you're spending money on views, the views are coming in, and so it's like it's a much safer bet, I feel like. And so if someone is taking the the the traditional approach, there's like no reason not to like at least just try clipping. Because if you put up a budget into clipping and you don't get any views or no clips are posted, you're not spending that money, and then that money is still in the campaign, it's not gonna just like get spent, you know. Whereas if you go hire an editor, they're charging you a retainer or whatever it is, and like that clip might flop and get no views, and you just you're out you're out of money. And I've seen that happen so many times. Like, people will like like uh even Jordan Mulch, when we worked with him, he was like, Hey bro, I have two clippers, I pay them a retainer, it's like $1,500 a month each. I think I'm spending $3K a month, and like I haven't even hit a million views this month. And he was like posting banger content on YouTube. And we launched a campaign with him, and um, I forget the exact CPMs that we had, um, but I think we got it down to like a 21 cent CPM. And so I think he spent like either four or five K for 21 million views or something like that. Where before that he wasn't even cracking a million views a month for like 3k worth of retainers for editors. We had way more clips posted. We actually had clips going viral, and so it was just like so much more effective. Spending 3k for uh uh 800k, 900k views, spend four or five K 21 million views. It's like it's a no-brainer.
DarrenYeah, that's fucking mental. How do you think about like views versus leads?
EddieYeah, I mean, I definitely think that like there's so many different approaches to social media. Trying to run a business, trying to get leads, you could go the route where you're not going viral, you're just speaking to your ICP. But I also think that there is a world where it makes sense to go super broad and just be able to speak to your ICP as well and attract them in. Like almost I guess you could say they're like they're like B2C, like all the guys that have grown really big personal brands, Iman, um Tate, Belmar, all of them, they have offers for like the whole spectrum, and so they capture like all of that attention and like we did it. Um I guess if you only have one offer, maybe that doesn't make too much sense. But I I I genuinely think that everyone should be trying their best to like get as much attention as possible. Now it is. I don't think there's any reason to not be trying to get as much attention as possible.
DarrenUh I was speaking to one of the guys that did a lot of the brand work for Iman and uh his name's Gosha. Really, really cool dude based in like his name's sort of like Belarus. Um the way he said it to me was like, let's just say you're getting 100 views in a video. If you improve the scripting, the structure, the storytelling, you'll go from 100 to 120. If you improve how it's designed, like the product the production of it videos, you'll go from that 120 to 150. Now, if you just slip that to leads, that's just the exact same equivalent. So there's no cost, there's no cost because you're still going to bring in your base views, like that their base views are base views anyway, because you're putting more time into production value and scripting, you know? Yeah, yeah. Crazy. Uh last question for you. So if you wanted to go back and redo it for your brand, how would you have rebuilt your brand around clipping for now?
EddieWell, the first step is get good content. So podcast step one. Step two, I'm filming a vlog, filming content. Um once I have good content, then I'm gonna launch a campaign. Use my agency. Um I'm gonna use my own clippers and it'll be like a meta concept. It'll be clips of me talking about clipping, it's gonna be interesting.
DarrenIt's how you grew your how you grow clipping is by using clipping.
EddieExactly. And so yeah, uh basically do a little bit of clip farming here or there. It doesn't have to be like crazy clip farms, but just like be aware that like if you want to like grow, I would definitely recommend to like have some more aggressive takes, be a bit more controversial, polarize people, uh, provide value as well. And then um, yeah, once you have a few winning pieces of content, you can launch a campaign and things will do well. I would also make sure you have your like offer and funnel dialed in if you're like running a business, you're trying to use clipping for it, because like I can send traffic anywhere. If you don't have a good system, like it's not gonna be profitable for you. And so, like the guy that we were tracking it for right now, and that is profitable for his system's really doubt. He's already making a million a month from his offer, and now he's like um he runs an offer um training Muslim guys how to build a halal business. Might have met him at the masterminds you were talking about.
DarrenOh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know a lot, I know a bunch of guys doing that. Okay. Yeah, I know I know a lot of guys doing that. Though man, those offers are actually crushing it. Yeah, yeah. There's one guy we work with in aura that they're doing uh like they're booking hundreds and hundreds of calls a week with that offer.
EddieI wonder if it's it might be, I don't know. Possible because uh you're talking about you're at these masterminds, and amount of mastermind.
DarrenUm but uh it's all the same people going masterminds, man. Same people.
EddieUm but yeah, it's and uh he is a really dialed funnel. He's already making a lot of money with it, and now we're just pouring more fuel in the fire. Um and so that I think it's the playbook. Winning piece of content, distribute it. That's it.
DarrenMan, big, big thank you. You're an absolute legend. I think I need to start fucking clipping, to be honest. Thank you, man. You're a legend.
EddieAppreciate you having me.