Tipping Fast Food Workers:

Making Guys Call Their Crush:

And Fat Suit Tinder Date:

In 2016, my cofounders and I decided to pursue something bigger… the world of online education.

We got accepted into Y-Combinator, raised $1.8 million in funding from investors, and set off to create cinematic courses and rid the world of boring lectures.

In order to continue pursuing this mission, we have decided to rebrand our “Simple Pickup” assets into “Kong Pham” (my name). Our goal is to make it clear to our old fans that we will no longer be doing the “social experiment” type of content like we once were.

Instead, I will be uploading a new video every week that will hopefully provide value to your career and professional life.

Thank you for your understanding and stay tuned for some really cool videos in the next few weeks!

Simple Pickup is rebranding to Kong Pham was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before I dropped out of college to make YouTube videos… Before I started Jumpcut…

And way before I ever got the chance to travel the world doing cool shit like this:

I was this:

Just Kong, the cute asian baby.

Kong, the son of two immigrant parents who came to this country with nothing. Kong, the kid who was supposed to go to school, get good grades and become a doctor.

So you can imagine how hard it was for me when I wanted to drop out of college. My mom and dad left everyone and everything they knew just so I could have a shot at a better life. And I wanted to throw it all away ONE semester before graduating.

The problem was I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right.

It wasn’t just that the stuff my professors taught didn’t seem practical (Sorry Adam Smith, but theories from 1783 don’t really help you start and run a company today).

It wasn’t just that the stuff I did want to learn — like how to make YouTube videos and run Facebook ads — wasn’t even covered in any classes.

It wasn’t even just that I was in debt up to my eyeballs for a freaking piece of paper.

It was that it seemed like I was wasting my life.

All I could think is: It’s time to decide.

I realized I could keep complaining about how useless school was… About how much I wanted to be an entrepreneur and college was stopping me… or I could choose a path that wasn’t predetermined and definitely wasn’t going to be easy, but was what I knew deep inside I wanted.

Today, Jumpcut is bigger than I ever could have imagined (we’ve been backed by Y Combinator, have over 60 employees and, most importantly, tens of thousands of loyal customers all around the world).

The funny thing is a lot of people think that success came from a great idea or great timing or special connections.

But the real reason was because I chose what I wanted.

I didn’t do what society said I should do. I didn’t do what my parents wanted. I chose to listen to the voice inside of me saying I needed to change.

That’s why I’m publicly declaring 2019 The Year of ____.

☝Yes, that’s a big fat blank space for YOU to fill in.

Because unlike some gurus who sit on their pedestal and pretend they know what your year should entail, I’m purposely leaving the theme up to you to decide.

After all… Nobody knows what you want from your life better than YOU.

Of course, I’ll be there to share hard-won lessons and guide you toward more freedom, more success, more passion, and yes, more money than you’ve ever had.

But I want to be clear that the ball is in your court.

Because once you choose what you want, you can achieve things that might seem so crazy right now you can barely imagine them.

It’s true for me and anyone who’s achieved at a high level. You don’t find success by staying stagnant. You find success through ACTION.

If You Want It, Go Get It.

Recently I got this text from my friend who’s in medical residency.

I’ve blurred out his face and name for his privacy. But look what he says when I asked how things are going:

Notice my response:

“Why don’t you?”

Choosing to change may be one of the hardest decisions he’ll ever make in his life. But you can only silence that voice in your head for so long before you kill your own dreams.

When I dropped out of college, my family thought I was insane.

But I promise — you always have the choice to do something different.

If you don’t like your job, you can can choose to tell yourself that your circumstances are stopping you from succeeding OR you can make them the REASON why you must get out.

You can tell yourself that the only way to make it is to get a 9–5 job and show up at a desk for 40 years OR you can start building a business this year.

If you want to start a YouTube channel, you can choose to tell yourself that you’re not the kind of person who’s good on video. OR you can choose to see that you have a unique personality that some people will love.

Make this the year you choose.

Look at Amanda Hocking. She’s a 34 year old social worker turned famous novelist.

She’s the perfect example of what it means to choose a better way for your life.

She always had a passion for writing, but never figured out a way to turn it into a career.

She made the choice to do something about it.

So while employed as a group home worker, she wrote novels in her spare time. And in 2010, she chose to self-publish those books on Amazon.

By 2011, she’d sold over a million copies. Not long after, her books were optioned for a film. A Hollywood movie!

That’s the power of making a choice.

And she’s not alone in experiencing this kind of growth once she chose what she wanted to do with her life.

Jumpcut students Laurie and Kevin were both working in a furniture refinishing shop when they chose to do something entirely different with their lives.

They started a YouTube channel, The Icing Artist, where they teach people how to make cool desserts. Today their channel has 2,919,269 subscribers.

It’s incredible.

There’s also Christian, another Jumpcut student.

Eighteen months ago, he was working at a department store selling clothes. He felt like he wanted so much more. And then he chose to do something different with his life.

He turned his passion for clothing into The Frugal Aesthetic, a YouTube channel where he teaches people how to dress their best.

Today, he’s got more than 500,000 subscribers and is banking over $150,000 a year.

I could go on and on with more examples but the one thing they all have in common is they chose what they wanted … and then went after it.

YOUR CHOICES = YOUR DESTINY

If you want this to be the year you finally launch your YouTube channel…

If you want to make more money than you ever have…

If you want to have a bigger impact on the world…

Let’s make this the year you do.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to release some of the most game-changing training Jumpcut has ever created.

Fair warning…

This isn’t the bullshit they teach in the “The Secret” where we just say “we choose to be millionaires” and sit around hoping big checks come in the mail.

If that’s what you’re looking for, just go ahead and close this window now. Block me on Medium. And never watch any of my videos again.

But if you choose to come on the journey with us, this could be the start of an entirely new chapter in your life.

Like I said, I can’t force you to do it. It’s always a choice.

You might have just read to the bottom of a 1,600 word article only to go back to work and living another ho-hum day.

Or this might be the moment when you choose something different for yourself.

If you choose greatness…

If you choose more…

If you choose to make 2019 your best year ever…

Stay tuned for the BIG reveal coming next week.

***LEAVE A COMMENT BELOW***

Let me know how will you fill in the blank?

2019 is The Year of _____.

Is The Year of Adventure? The Year of Travel? The Year of Doubling Your Business? The Year of Finally Starting?

Let’s hear yours.

Recently, a friend of mine asked for my thoughts on motivating employees. As a new founder, he felt that he wasn’t getting the effort that a founding team should be displaying — especially for his startup, which had just raised less than 1 million dollars, had limited runway, and was trying to tackle a vast market with a ton of known competitors. He needed every ounce of effort he could get from his founding team of 5, but he didn’t see it from anyone else.

At this rate, his company was destined to be among the thousands of others in the startup graveyard. Here’s what he asked in particular:

“How do I motivate my employees to break free from the 9–5 mindset and go above and beyond what’s expected of them?”

There’s no perfect answer. It’s remarkably case-by-case (e.g., stage of the company, founder personality, employee personalities, etc.) And motivation itself is inherently fleeting. It’s temporary, just like any other feeling — there isn’t “one thing” that’ll make it last forever.

I used to look for quick hacks to motivate people. Although these work in the short term, they don’t last. Keeping people motivated long-term requires you to do many things over time, on a regular basis.

Anytime you’re building a business, it’s a marathon. If you adopt a sprinter’s mentality, you’re bound to burn out before the race even begins.

Start thinking of motivation as a marathon, not a sprint. Create systems that will cultivate a culture of hard work.

That’s the key to keeping your team aligned with your company’s goals. It’s arduous, time-consuming, and, at times, ugly. But in the end, that’s what’s necessary if you want results.

Jumpcut was founded in the middle of 2014. Over the last four years, we’ve figured all of this out the hard way, and we want to share our journey with you. Here are the things we do at Jumpcut to stay on track for the marathon:

Constant, Immediate Feedback

“There is no failure. Only feedback.”

You’ve probably heard about Jack Welsh’s famous story about him accidentally blowing up a factory at GE. He managed to obliterate the entire roof and shatter all the windows of the Pittsfield, MA facility.

Jack’s boss easily could have fired him on the spot — A million dollar mistake like that is tough to swallow.

Instead, he chose to have a conversation with Jack about how the mistake happened, what he learned from it, and how GE could prevent it in the future.

Sure, this is an overused story, but it illustrated a key point:

There are no failures — only opportunities to learn.

Don’t alienate your employees by killing them for what they failed on. Keep it honest, but focus on what they can improve on instead.

In fact, honest, real-time feedback should be the foundation of all dialogue in your company. If you want your employees motivated, you need to establish a constant feedback loop with them. You’re not just actively watching over their progress — you’re a catalyst for their improvement.

If someone messes up, let them know immediately. Don’t wait until quarterly PD reviews or your next scheduled meeting. Pull them aside ASAP.

Proceed to have an open dialogue. When you do, there are a lot of ways to deliver the message. But, the three most important things, regardless of mechanism, are:

1. Keeping your feedback 100% honest. Sugarcoating helps no one.

2. Avoid “crossing the net” — this is what happens when you assume to know someone’s thoughts and intentions. Don’t do it. (Read this for more on crossing the net.)

3. Bringing up what’s frustrating you about what they’re doing, even if it’s small. Make sure your employee knows how you feel. The worst thing you can do is bury your true feelings.

Doing this has helped us tremendously — there are countless potential issues we’ve avoided just by addressing them early on.

In most cases, you won’t need to pursue any disciplinary action. Instead, focus on how you can help them avoid the same mistake in the future.

On the flip side, if someone does exceptionally well, let them know immediately. It’s too often that we focus on having long conversations for fuck-ups. For some reason, we ignore that aspect of things for excellent work. Let bad-asses know when they’re awesome.

We use a trophy system to acknowledge each other’s good work.

At our bi-weekly all-hands meeting, we set aside time to recognize excellent efforts over the past two weeks. There’s a trophy for every Jenn that comes in at 7 AM Saturday morning to finalize paperwork for our new office. There’s a trophy for every Jessica that edits a bomb hiring advertisement. Anyone can nominate anyone. A trophy is paired with a $40 Amazon gift card as a thank you for good work. You get the picture.

As CEO, it’s crucial for me to set aside regular 1 on 1 time to participate in the feedback loop as well. We do this once every six weeks, but ideally, you should do it once a month, especially if your culture needs significant improvement. Doing so gives me a chance to listen to what my employees have to say.

Use this time to have a sincere dialogue. See what’s bothering people. Ask what you can do to make the workplace better. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions and bring up “awkward” topics (here’s a great blog post on that).

Value feedback.

A Strong Company Vision

“A leader’s role is to raise people’s aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.”

Vision goes far beyond just a simple mission statement. Communicate that to your employees.

Jumpcut’s vision is to be the best business education platform in the world. There are over 1.3 million college students in the United States today majoring in business, but the classes they take are hideously outdated, and irrelevant to their future careers. Business education is fundamentally broken.

That’s where we come in — to develop the next generation of entrepreneurs. Our online courses help people develop the skills they need to turn their passions into a successful business.

We don’t just teach — we help people’s lives change dramatically. Student results are our number 1 priority.

And it’s hard to put how that feels into words, but I can tell you that it’s one of the most fulfilling experiences on this planet. Any Jumpcut employee would say to you the same.

When you explain your vision to your employees, don’t just talk about what the company is doing. Make it abundantly clear why you’re doing what you’re doing.

When we decided our next course would revolve around digital product businesses, every single employee understood the impact of selling information products.

They knew how selling information products allowed me to start a multi-million dollar business around my passion for self-improvement as a college dropout (without any severe capital investment upfront.)

They knew I was able to build an audience of 2.7 million+ subscribers on YouTube — people still recognize me on the streets to this very day.

They knew that people still send me invitations to their weddings due to how much value they’ve received from me.

They knew how much it changed my life. And they knew we were going to teach people something immensely valuable.

Likewise, don’t just talk about how the company will reach goals. Talk about the people that’ll be positively impacted by those goals.

Without Jumpcut, Laurie would still be working 9 to 5 at a furniture shop she hated, instead of being recognized by millions as The Icing Artist, the YouTuber that bakes incredible cakes.

Without Jumpcut, Jahtna would still be in heaps of student debt, instead of making 3 to 4 times what she did working her retail job — completely debt-free.

Without Jumpcut, David and Harshyt would live the rest of their lives wondering “what if?” instead of being full-time death metal musicians that live their passion every day.

Let your employees know their work affects something more significant than just the bottom line.

Anytime we get a success story from a student, or a profoundly moving customer service email, we post it on Slack for everyone to see.

Why? It’s imperative for everyone to recognize the part they played in adding immense value to one of our student’s lives.

Jumpcut employees know that they aren’t just helping sell online courses. Thousands of people across the globe can wake up every day, pursue their passions, and live their dream lives doing what they love — all because of Kel’s captivating script writing, or Terry’s super personalized email response, or Brandon’s eye-opening marketing copy. Our customers almost feel indebted because of how great of a job the team does.

None of your employees should feel “My work has no impact. It doesn’t matter.” Make every day a reminder of that.

Hire A-Players

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

Don’t hire anyone who isn’t an A-player.

This might sound obvious, but it’s super easy to not adhere to this. It’s a mistake I’ve seen tons of other early YC founders make. It’s a mistake I’m guilty of making myself.

Often, this meant accepting people who were “good enough” on our team for the sake of avoiding conflict. Then, when I realized that they weren’t good enough for the job, I shuffled my feet when it came time to let them go because I didn’t want to destroy our “team dynamic.”

In reality, accepting mediocrity was what destroyed our team dynamic. Don’t get me wrong — people were doing good work. But rarely would they push themselves to do great work. And pushing each other to do great work was even rarer than that.

That doesn’t happen when you have A-players on your team. That’s the quality that separates an A-player from the rest, and that gap was extremely apparent at Jumpcut.

Think of it like this: If you have a bunch of A-players on your team, people who are always working hard no matter what, it inspires others to do the same. Hard work pollinates throughout your office.

If you don’t have a bunch of A-players on your team, you’re setting the expectation that mediocre performance is OK, and that will pollinate across the office.

Nowadays, I don’t hire anyone unless they’re an A-player.

Personally, I define an A-player by asking myself “is this person constantly impressing the team or me with their work?”

If someone is always eager to learn new skills outside his or her job description, bringing in their outside knowledge to contribute to projects, or improving steadily in their current role, the answer is yes.

If the answer is “no” on a consistent basis, we let them go.

If you aren’t sure if someone is an A-player, then you already answered the question — they’re not. Your team will probably notice this faster than you.

Keep them too long, and they drag other people down. Let them go quickly, and it sets a culture of only accepting excellence.

I guarantee this will be one of the hardest things you’ll have to do as a leader. It’s never enjoyable to have that conversation with someone.

Not for you. Not for that person. Not for anyone on the team. It sucks.

But it’s a necessary evil. Everyone you hire should be better at their role than you are at it. People should be inspired by each other’s presence, not stifled.

If that’s not blatantly obvious with any employee, then the chances are that it’s in the company’s best interest to let them go.

Don’t settle for less.

Clear Goals, Deadlines and Ownership

“A goal without a deadline is just a dream.”

This is another area I messed up a lot in the beginning.

When we used to start a new project, our mindset was that everyone could work on their own terms. We were a startup. We’re all about breaking the stereotypes of the traditional workplace, so we opted for a very loose workflow.

The problem was, we conflated “working on your own terms” with “lack of structure.” Don’t get me wrong — we’re very flexible when it comes to things like employee hours or vacation days.

But we didn’t realize that it wasn’t the same thing as being late to meetings where people are dependent on you or leaving early while your work was unfinished, and never putting in extra hours to make it up. It wasn’t conceptualized for people to “take things easy.” Giving people the flexibility to work the way they work best was supposed to help them excel at their job, not provide them with an excuse to do mediocre work.

Because of this attitude, our process reeked of poor communication.

Deadlines were vague. Expectations weren’t vocalized. Project responsibilities were never established.

Here’s a typical scenario:

Imagine you’re our Director of Marketing, Brandon. You just finalized the script for the marketing funnel videos for our latest course. Weeks of hard work toiling on paragraph after paragraph finally finished.

Instead of celebrating, you find out that, without consulting you, the shooting location was suddenly changed to Hawaii.

Now, you’re spending the next two weeks revising the script for continuity, instead of rewarding yourself with extra guac at Chipotle. And you’re not even the one that has to deal with all the additional coordination need for traveling to Hawaii — booking flights, scouting locations, managing schedules, etc. (e.g., two weeks of VP of Content’s time.)

A single, unannounced decision added two entire weeks to our project — one that should’ve been made months ago.

When this unequivocally avoidable miscommunication happens, it only leads to chaos, resentment, and burnout.

Without the right systems in place, we found that when launch dates approached, tasks that needed finalization were just getting started. Stress was abundant. Launches were delayed.

We’ve fixed all of that now.

Today, there isn’t a single initiative we have that isn’t tracked using Asana or Google Sheets.

A project manager is always designated to be responsible for a project. Everyone’s duties are explicitly laid out.

Now, we always set expectations and deadlines for projects. More importantly, we assign that project to ONE person — so that even if they pull in others to help, they’ll ultimately be accountable for it.

And by setting that structure, you’re giving your employees the freedom to experiment and excel within their tasks. By getting the process right, you’re allowing them to get jaw-droppingly creative and go beyond expectations.

Our former intern Charles was in charge of directing and editing an advertisement. After we set the expectation and ground rules for it, he exceeded expectations tremendously and added a bunch of special effects and snazzy editing to it — his personal touch. You can see the ad here.

To date, that ad has made us over $2.5 million in sales so far. Given full ownership, Charles blew expectations out of the water.

Our lead video editor, Jessica, was tasked to create a shitty, MVP hiring video to attract recruits. We just needed to prove out the concept before making a full-fledged video.

Jessica not only produced that MVP, she created an MVP that completely dazzled everyone in the office. In fact, it was so superb that we decided to use it as our final version. Again, given full ownership, she exceeded expectations.

With that said, make sure you explain the “why” here as well. Make sure everyone is on the same page. Do so, and deadlines, more times than not, will be crushed. (In a good way!)

Human Connection

“Work Hard, Play Even Harder.”

This is the one area traditional “9 to 5” companies overlook the most.

On top of respecting each other’s work, people want to enjoy the company of the other people around them. And that’s completely normal — it’s human nature to be social.

It’s impossible to achieve that if the whole team focuses on work 24/7. Time dedicated to creating interpersonal bonds is not an inefficiency — it’s a necessity.

Your employees will quickly tune you out if you treat them like cogs in a machine. They should come into the office every day, not because they need to, but because they want to.

Working at your company should be so awe-inspiringly great, they have no excuse not to work hard.

Here are some of the small things we do to facilitate that:

• Weekly team lunches
• Bi-weekly social events (e.g., checking out a cool bar, going to an event nearby, poker night, etc.)
• A Slack channel called “Jumpcut Quotes,” where we post weird/stupid/funny things that people say.
• Cracking jokes and heckling (respectfully) at all-hands meetings.
• Highlighting each other’s lives outside of work via formal presentations during all-hands meetings.

And it’s not just small things — it’s big events as well.

Our last company trip was to Vegas for four days.

Nightclubs, pool parties, great restaurants, sights, private shows — we did it all. And of course, my most favorite activity — gambli…I mean, bonding with the team.

Ultimately, we’ll have memories from that trip that will last a lifetime.

From the times we had exciting new nightlife experiences:

To the times we were dead tired:

From the times we won big:

To the times we didn’t win at all…

Trips like these from time to time do wonders for your social culture. You can’t replicate an unceremonious, carefree environment in your office, no matter how “chill” things are. Bonding outside of the workplace lets people put their “professional” guards down and get to know each other on a deeper level.

Old bonds strengthen. New bonds form. You’d be surprised what quirks you find out about each other.

That doesn’t mean you have to go wild in Vegas every event — a camping retreat or ski resort trip is just as fun. If you’re all enjoying the venue, that’s all you need.

The result of all this human connection? Our team isn’t just a group of hard workers — we’re a family. The relationships we’ve cultivated go beyond our professional lives.

While you don’t have to do everything we do, this part of the culture is really going to come down to founder/team dynamics.

Find what works for you.

******

These systems we have in place at Jumpcut are responsible for our employees’ “long-term” motivation. Saying they’re deeply rooted in our culture would be an understatement — Jumpcut might not exist today without them.

That being said, we could be a lot better. We’ve been at this for four years, yet we’ve only scratched the surface.

We still make mistakes. We’ll forget to revisit these things. Sometimes, we’ll even compromise these systems in favor of “higher priority” items.

We’re not perfect, but that’s okay. Like I said, building a business is a marathon.

Creating this type of culture is like sedimentary rock — it’s formed layer by layer, slowly — a sort of accretive culture. Day in and day out, what you do will dictate how people work and how motivated they are. There are no quick fixes or hacks. You have to layer it slowly over time.

Keep in mind that what works for us might not work for you. The culture of a company ultimately comes from its CEO — be aware of what resonates with you (and your co-founders.) Embrace those qualities and make them your competitive edge.

If you have any thoughts on how to build stronger company culture, leave them in the comments. We’d love to hear them and might even implement a few going forward.

Kong

CEO, Jumpcut Inc.

P.S. — Read The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s probably the most practical book I’ve read on leadership and management. If you’re looking for a self-help book without all the fluff, I highly recommend it.

Elite Work Ethic Has No "Magic Pill" was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Soon after Jumpcut was founded in late 2014, we started playing around with paid ads on Facebook. But there was one problem: nobody could dedicate their time to it. There were too many other fires that needed putting out.

That’s when we had a genius idea: let’s assign it to our intern. We put him in charge of paid ads, and then sent him an email with a profit-sharing goal:

Bonus is 10% of all paid ads profit during your time here. Very simple. Obviously, if we lose money on ads, we won’t be holding you to anything at all, but if you make any profit, you’ll see 10% of that.

He was smart, and we put a good incentive structure in place. How hard could it be?

After six weeks, we were $1,000 in the red, and after looking at how little sustainable long term progress had been made, decided to give up the test. Over the next two years, we tried similarly silly tests, in bits and spurts, to get paid ads to work. People would spend a week or two here and there. Nothing worked.

It was only towards Q4 of 2016, when when our burn rate was going up and our revenue was going down, that we made a decision as a company to do it right: put a full time employee full time on paid ads and just make it work. We put our best marketing person on the job, hired an external consultant who came with great referrals to advise us, and treated the initiative as a long term project, instead of a quick win.

It worked. Over the last year, we’ve grown revenue from paid ads to over $2 million dollars for our online courses after spinning our wheels for years. Paid ads have become the most important driver of revenue for us. Single campaigns on Facebook have made over 6 figures in revenue and are still profitable almost a year after creation.

Here’s just one example of an ad that has gone “viral” for us:

That’s 3.4 million views, 17 thousand likes, and over 7,000 shares on an ad that isn’t even our best content. That’s just one example of how we’ve gone viral through paid.

Doing this — mastering paid ads — is what has helped us transform from a cute, small online business to a real company. Because of paid ads, we’ve been able to connect with our core audience online and scale our course offerings to everyone who needs to see it. The revenue generated from paid ads have been the engine of growth for Jumpcut over the past year: our increased content production and headcount have all depended on our ability to sell through paid.

Of course, it wasn’t all roses getting to this point. We hit dead ends and burned a ton of money before we were able to hit profitability. We’re writing this post now to help you avoid wasting the same amount of time and money.

Here are the three biggest AHA! moments we witnessed over the past year with paid ads. We’re hopeful that you’ll be able to apply them to your journey as well.

1. Test everything, even when it doesn’t make logical sense.

In Q3 2017 alone, Facebook made over $10 billion dollars in revenue, mainly from showing ads to its users. Google did over $27 billion in the same way.

Just to put those numbers in perspective: we pay around $4 per lead we get from Facebook. If every company had the same cost per lead as us, that would mean Facebook collected over 2.5 billion email addresses in the last 3 months — or 321 email addresses per second from ads that they’re showing you (mainly) in the newsfeed.

These are huge platforms, and it’s all controlled by software. Their algorithm controls how your ads get seen, and despite having a really impressive amount of customization, the distribution mechanism is still sometimes a black box, where you don’t know how one subtle decision you make will affect what your end user sees. Because of this, there are holes and logical inconsistencies that don’t make sense. Innovative startups can use this to their advantage. That’s why you should test everything, even if it doesn’t logically make sense.

Here’s an example. When we were playing around with our ad sets one day, we decided that we would take an ad that was running at $200 a day and duplicate it. We created literally the exact same ad, and then ran both identical ads at $100 a day. The result? The 2 duplicate ads at $100 a day did much better, in terms of cost per lead, than running just one ad at $200 a day.

Why? Who knows. But it worked.

Here’s another example. One of the most annoying things about Facebook (thanks, Russia) is that when you submit an ad, you’ll have to wait a certain amount of time before your creative gets approved. Instead of waiting for the arbitrary yes/no decision from Facebook, we would just duplicate the ad we wanted approved multiple times, wait until one of them was approved, then delete the other ones. On average, this shaved nearly 2 days off waiting to run our ads. (For Adwords, this hasn’t worked — but what has worked is calling them, which has shaved our approval time down to 10 minutes.)

There are all sorts of things you can figure out when you play around with the software and really immerse yourself in it. Follow the step by step guides they give you, but go off the beaten path as soon as you feel comfortable. Question what you’re doing and think of ways to do it faster.

(Also, if you have a Facebook or Google rep, take their advice with a grain of salt. They are here to help you, but don’t trust them blindly. We’ve found that things they’ve said have crumbled under the weight of our own testing.)

By testing different ideas, we’ve found ways to improve how many people see our ads, lower our costs, and improve our profits. Here are just some examples of things that worked for us:

• Using the existing post feature on Facebook instead of making new ads each time. By doing this, we were able to show the same ad to different groups, and bring old comments along to those new audiences so that they were more likely to share and comment.
• Reusing old ads on new audiences. When an ad “deprecated,” instead of retiring it completely, we used it again on a new audience…and it was as good as new. No banner blindness.
• Using ads where the narrator is similar to the audience. We’ve found that using a female testimonial on a female audience works wonders.

…and here are some things that haven’t worked:

• Trying to target people who show search intent with Google Adwords (e.g. people who search, “how to make money on YouTube.”) After testing, we realized that just because they Google search the term doesn’t mean they actually want to pay for information — many of them are just curious about how people make money on YouTube, which (surprisingly) doesn’t actually equate to them wanting to pay for a course on how to make money on YouTube.
• Targeting people based on who Facebook thought were “high spenders.” Just because people spend money on other people’s products doesn’t make them more likely to spend money on yours — they are just more expensive to target.
• Using ads that worked on Facebook on YouTube and vice-versa. We had confidence in this one, given how much success the ads had in their respective platforms — but when we tried them on the other platform, it became the worst performing ad on that platform — low engagement and even lower click through.

Put together in the aggregate, the impact of testing has led to huge gains on both platforms. If we did everything by the book, instead of constantly testing, we’d be making 50% less than we are right now.

The takeaway? Test everything. And don’t get too caught up in losing money when you’re running these tests. View it as the price you need to pay to learn the platform, as long as you’re taking a scientific approach. Do things even if they’re not what’s recommended, or intuitive — you never know what will work.

2 — Use a marketing funnel.

Way too often, I see ads on Facebook that look great. They’re eye-catching, written persuasively, and direct me to a sleek looking landing page selling their product. But there’s only one problem: that landing page is usually the only contact I ever have with that company, ever. And that’s because once I exit out of their landing page, I’m done.

Especially for companies I’m not that familiar with, or those with a high-priced item they’re trying to sell, there’s no way you’re going to convince me to use my credit card information on the first visit, no matter how well the page is designed.

There is, however, something that I’m much more willing to do: give you my email address.

This is what 90% of marketers get wrong with ads. Instead of trying to capture an email, they try to make the sale instantaneously. The reason why we’re profitable on paid ads is because their sole purpose is to capture the user’s email address. Once we get it, we enter a weeks (often months) long relationship with them via email, as we establish our credibility and give them value. We’re not betting the farm on the one minute they take to read our landing page. Instead of losing them forever, we maintain a direct line of contact.

And after you get that email, what’s even more important is creating the right email funnel for the user. Our philosophy is pretty simple: the longer emails, the better.

Most people don’t know what Jumpcut is. We owe it to ourselves to give them the most valuable information. And we don’t hold back. Our emails are 7 pages long. Our videos are 20 minutes long. Because the content is interesting and valuable, it gets our customers to trust us more, and helps us develop a “true fan” relationship with them.

A mistake that we see startups making is sending the shortest emails possible after getting someone’s email address. We think that’s the wrong thing to do. Don’t be afraid to send out much longer emails — you won’t be bothering them if the content is great. In fact, we get customers who reply to us and say, “I knew you were going to sell me something at the end of this, but I don’t mind, because I learned so much from this.”

As you’re creating your email marketing funnel, make sure to focus as much — if not more — time on it versus your ads. In general, optimizing the value of the funnel is more important than optimizing your cost per lead. Why?

It’s all about sizing the opportunity. The ceiling on improving your funnel is effectively infinite. Every step in the funnel where you increase the click-through rate (e.g. decrease the drop-off rate), and every dollar you can add to their average purchase value has a multiplied effect on each other as your user buys from you.

But there is an absolute floor on how low you can get your ad costs — the CPL, CPC, CPM (if you don’t know what these mean…go look them up) — because it can’t go to 0, and it gets harder the lower you go.

We’ve found that it’s much easier to boost the value of a lead than to reduce the cost of a click. That’s what your funnel is there for. It will market your company, educate the consumer, and turn a stranger into a fan. If your funnel can turn someone who would have never bought something from you into someone who will spend $2,000 on you, it doesn’t matter as much that it cost you $17 to acquire that user, versus $5. You win when you educate your leads. Focus on the funnel.

3 — Targeting different niches through video works really well.

This is something that we’ve barely scratched the surface with, but targeting different niches on YouTube and Facebook through video is something we see barely anyone doing, despite how profitable it’s been.

Currently, when you’re on YouTube, most of the ads you’ll see playing are generic — right now, I’m getting a bunch of Grammarly and Wix. But they have this sleek feel that doesn’t talk to me, personally. It feels like an ad. That’s what you’ll get with most of the video ads you see online right now: a company will make one video, and then play that video to all niches.

In contrast, we’re running ads that are directed to a specific niche. For example, what’s worked for us on YouTube is creating an ad that speaks to every animator on YouTube. In the first 5 seconds, we will literally say, “If you’re an animator, you’ve got to listen to this.” And suddenly — you’re speaking to them! People pay more attention, and it’s partly because nobody else really does this yet. This type of personalization is undervalued.

The main reason why people aren’t making these custom videos for niche audiences is because it seems like too much effort. But there’s a way to scale it. In fact,we were able to make 7 different ads in the span of 2 days, all for different audiences. All you do is make a general video, and then change specific parts of it to fit every specific audience. Here are some of the successful ads we made, where the first 15 seconds are different from one another, but the rest of the video is exactly the same.

Here’s our ad for general audiences, which we use for targeting lookalike audiences and remarketing audiences:

Here’s that same ad for animators:

And here’s that same ad for musicians:

If you find yourself wanting to do this, don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to make one new video for each niche. Find a formula you can tweak at the edges, and then apply it to every niche you want to hit.

Bonus — Create great ads.

The three above mentioned tips will work 100x better if you have great ads. Viral ads. Ads like these:

Keep in mind that people don’t think with logic. They think with emotions. The best videos will elicit an emotion from you: Happiness. Sadness. Anger. Nostalgia. Hope. Laughter. Inspiration. As you create your content, ask yourself this important question: “What do I want my audience to feel?”

Much of the best content online does this — and, what’s really important to note, is that it can be done without a huge production budget or slick visuals. Emotion can be captured on your iPhone camera; you don’t need a set of movie-production level cameras, like Blackmagics.

Make sense? You’ll need to evoke emotion if you want to capture the imagination of the viewer and get your ads shared organically.

Creating great content will have to become one of your core competencies if you want to succeed in paid ads. This isn’t one of those situations where you can set it and forget it. Ads fatigue over time. When people see too much of the same ad on YouTube or Facebook, they’ll skip over it. Banner blindness is a real thing, and we’ve found that creatives need to be refreshed once every 2–3 months to prevent costs from increasing dramatically. (Sometimes, it’s as simple as flipping a vertical subtitle bar to horizontal, or changing the title card from green to red.)

Creating great ads isn’t a passive endeavor. It’s an active, creative one, and while it’s a lot of work, it’s one of the best ways to make your company scale.

Closing thoughts: we’ve only scratched the surface

This isn’t a humblebrag, but we had over 50 strategies and tactics for Facebook and YouTube ads that we didn’t include here because this guide would’ve been WAY to bloated. Just know this: even if we shared all those tricks with you, we’re only scratching the surface. We believe we’re less than 5% deep in this journey.

There’s so much more to learn — Facebook messenger ads, coding our own bidding strategies, and creating ad funnels… just to name a few.

Whatever your skill level, I encourage you to join a group or community where you can share and aggregate your learnings on paid ads. There are groups for all levels out there: from newbies to those with some experience to those who have spent at least a million dollars. And if you’re truly just starting out, there are some courses that we’ve found helpful, and even agencies that we’ve worked with on a contractor basis to help us get over some early bumps in the road.

Above all, stay patient. The first two years of Jumpcut were marred by ineffectiveness with paid ads because we didn’t put in the time to experiment with the platforms. When you’re ready to dive in, dedicate at least one employee’s full concentration to it, and stick with it, especially at the beginning, when the learning curve is the steepest and most expensive.

Once you get over the hump, the rewards are more than worth it — once those base learnings are in place, you’ll be able to develop a culture of success in paid ads. Since we’ve started, we’ve been able to train and hire other employees who have never done Facebook or Google ads before, to the point where, within a month of starting, they were scaling our current initiatives 2x, cutting costs, and taking over the entire day to day. Create this culture of apprenticeship and knowledge sharing, and your organization will only continue to grow.

Good luck!

Cover Photo by Vivian Lau.

Lessons learned scaling paid ads from 0 to $2+ million in revenue in 2017 was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remember the good old days of the web? There was a strict separation between content and presentation: markup was separated from styling.

Then React happened! React, and component-based development as a whole, helps developers to decompose the design of a web page or widget into individual components. The traditional way of separating styling from markup does not work for components, because components are meant to be reused. This approach suggests that markup and styling should be bundled together and shipped as a complete package.

A debate soon started.

What is the right way to style components and an entire React-based app? JSX not only allows you to write inline styles directly into the component but recommends doing so. Should we keep doing CSS the old way or try what JSX recommends?

This debate will not settle any time soon, but here is a list of some of the most popular ways of styling your React components and summaries through a simple example.

1. Plain old CSS

Independently developed and required CSS is alive and well, used by the majority of web applications and loved by a lot of developers. We at Jumpcut are still using CSS (compiled from SASS) for all our styling, but like most people, we feel the need to improve our method.

In CSS everything is global by default. Selectors are matched against everything in the DOM and that can be a big hurdle for scaling the app. There are ways of improving it, like making the selectors more specific and utilizing a naming strategy, but these rules are hard to enforce, very easy to break, and eventually you end up with a lot of CSS that is scary and almost impossible to clear.

We put a lot of effort in maintaining our SASS files in a clear state and removing any unused code after a redesign, but we can still see how our CSS code grows after each design modification, sometimes even after removing some features (and we admit it).

That’s just one of the disadvantages. Christopher Chedeau, an engineer at Facebook summarizes many of the problems with CSS here.

• Dependencies
• Minification
• Dead code elimination
• Sharing constants
• Isolation
• Non-deterministic resolution

Before we move on, CSS is still one of the best ways to style your web pages. Even if there are a lot of disadvantages, that does not mean you need to change the way you do styling. When using React however, there may be better alternatives.

2. Inline styling

Inline styling is (was) regarded as a bad practice and is arguably the reason why we first started managing styles in separate CSS files. React, just like html generated by javascript, makes us revisit these “bad” practices. Why?

React’s core idea is that our app needs to be divided into small components. Each component will store all of its HTML and JavaScript in the same bucket, so you can easily reuse it. React encourages you to specify how your elements look alongside the HTML and JavaScript, and the simplest way of doing this is with inline styles.

So instead of code that looks like this:

var App = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    return <div className="header">Hello World</div>;
  }
});

You would have something like this:

var style = {
  color: 'red',
  paddingLeft: '10px',
};

var App = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    return <div style={style} >Hello World</div>;
  }
});

The one big problem here is code duplication. Imagine having a different part inside another component and wanting to keep the same styling. That means you need to duplicate your code to make it red and to add the padding.

This is when you need to change your approach of styling a React application. As Pete Hunt said:

Stylesheets shouldn’t be used for reuse; instead the ideal API is to build inline styles w/ JavaScript, using components for reuse, and the power of JS expressions to compute styles (and share constants) where needed.

Instead of sharing the CSS with different components, share the component with all its styling.

There are still a lot of disadvantages with inline styling — maybe even more than direct CSS at this point. You can’t do :hover/:focus/:active with inline styles, you can’t specify media queries, and the only way to overwrite styles for an existing component is to use !important which may be gross if used too often.

Fortunately, there are now a lot of libraries to solve these problems for us, and this finally allows inline styling to compete with CSS. Here’s a list of some of the most prominent libraries: look for the library that works for your case.

2a. Radium

Radium is a set of tools to manage inline styles in React elements. It gives you powerful styling capabilities without direct CSS.

Basic features:

• Conceptually simple extension of normal inline styles
• Browser state styles to support :hover, :focus, and :active
• Media queries
• Automatic vendor prefixing
• Keyframes animation helper
• ES6 class and createClass support

The good thing about this library is that it supports all CSS features you need to use it on production. You can do pseudo styles ( :hover / :active / :focus ), media queries, animations, and on top of that you can use ES6 classes by keeping the CSS syntax.

With other 6000 stars on Github at this point, this may be the most popular library to help you styling your React application.

More about radium

2b. React Style

React Style is an approach for styling React components. It uses the same syntax as StyleSheet.create from React Native. It has syntax helpers for writing styles and support for media queries.

A cool feature of this library is that you can use the full power of JavaScript to define your styles:

var StyleSheet = require('react-style')

var styles = StyleSheet.create({
  foo: {
    color: 'red',
    backgroundColor: 'white'
  }
})

One thing that differentiates this library is that it extracts styles into a CSS file at build time. You still end up having a CSS file, but you write it using inline styles and leave the hard work to the React Style Webpack plugin, which extends Webpack with the ability to extract styles from your app.

It has over 1,600 stars on Github, but unfortunately still doesn’t support pseudo styles and animations.

More about React Style

2c. Jsxstyle

Written by Pete Hunt, Jsxstyle solves many problems with inline styling by combining it with stylesheets. Basically, you style your components using JavaScript and then extract all literal styling into a CSS file with automatically-generated class names. You end up with one unique class name corresponding to each component that does not rely on cascade, and you are free to run optimizations on the generated CSS. There are still some areas to work on, like media queries.

To be honest, we got really excited about this library, as it’s written by Pete Hunt, a big React contributor who has worked for Facebook and Instagram. He has largely figured out what is wrong with current styling practices and tried to build an ultimate solution.

“I never want to go back to the stylesheet programming model. I think this model is flexible enough that we can control the implementation tradeoffs”

We will keep an eye on it, but right now it’s not ready for production, as it does not support media queries and pseudo classes.

More about jsxstyle

2d. React JSS

React JSS wraps your React component and injects this.props.sheet, which is a JSS style sheet, as a prop into your component. This is a common pattern that is used for composition in React instead of mixins, and works equally well with old-style createClass classes, as well as the ES6 classes.

JSS class names are namespaced by default. You will need to reach into this.props.sheet.classes to get their real names. For example, if you define a button class in your JSS stylesheet, its real name will be available as this.props.sheet.classes.button.

React JSS is compatible with live reloading using React Hot Loader.

React JSS is not as popular as other libraries mentioned above, but it still has advantages. It supports all the features you need for production, but it does not have a CSS syntax, so you end up writing CSS as JS objects:

const styles = {
  button: {
    'background-color': 'yellow'
  },
  label: {
    'font-weight': 'bold'
  }
};

The benefit of using react-jss over using JSS directly is lazy evaluation and auto mount/unmount. It will compile your styles to CSS only when a component using them is mounted for the first time. Through ref counting, it will unmount styles when they are not in use by any of mounted component.

It has only about 260 stars on Github at this point, but we think it deserves a place in top 5 libraries you want to consider.

More about React JSS

Other libraries

Obviously, there are more libraries for styling React and you might find a better one for your use case than libraries mentioned above. We’re still experimenting with different libraries and looking for one that will suit us the best, and if we find one, expect another article where we’ll describe everything about it and how we migrated to this new awesome library. But for now we’ll leave you here with this list of top Comparison of CSS in JS Libraries for React put together by Radium (Yes, Radium is a competitor, but they were pretty objective).

Conclusion

I hope that all React developers will be able to have a clear idea of what the different ways are to style React-based applications and why it is different than the traditional CSS approach. It’s simple to try out these different methods, and I suggest that you do that. You will need to experiment yourself to make a sensible decision based on your own use case.

Know an awesome way of styling React? Let us know in the comments section.

How should you style your React app? was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For almost a year, Jumpcut has been utilizing React and Flux for frontend development. Our experience with a ‘vanilla’ Flux implementation has fluctuated between frustration and excitement — it’s taken us a while to form a healthy relationship with this new data pattern from Facebook. Throughout our time with Flux, we always knew that we were missing something — we knew we could be building things faster, more easily, and with less friction.

It finally clicked when we started reading about Redux several months ago. The Redux framework was still early stage, which made it difficult for us to completely commit, but, despite being in its infancy, it already had more popularity than similar frameworks. We decided to wait to see how things would progress; soon, we were amazed by how quickly the community grew, and by how rich and expansive the ecosystem became.

Given our rapidly growing user base, we didn’t want to jump on the hype-train and change our entire front-end framework without preparation. So we decided to make a list with everything we were missing in Flux, and how Redux could help.

Let’s start with the biggest problem we had:

Server Side Rendering

For the frontend of Jumpcut Academy, we were using a ‘vanilla’ flux implementation with singleton stores. The practical problem here, though, was of separating data for different requests. The only way to accomplish some sort of server rendering was to use a library just for hydrating the data from stores, and to later rehydrate it on the client. That wasn’t easy, and after we researched and experimented, our solution was unnecessarily complicated boilerplate code. This wasn’t a good experience. We needed a more isomorphic friendly solution.

If you are unfamiliar with Redux, it promotes the use of one store for the application (that’s another benefit I’ll talk about later), and by default, each request gets a separate instance of the store. You can create a fresh store instance on each request and pass the state to the client — it’s really simple and easy. On top of that, Redux provides you a detailed documentation on how to do so.

One Store / Multiple Reducers

With a Flux application, you have a store for each classification of your data (page, model, etc). With the Jumpcut Academy frontend, we had over 10 stores when we decided to migrate to Redux. This wasn’t a problem at first, and it actually did help us keep code organized, but we started feeling the pain when we tried to reuse functionality across stores. Flux doesn’t make it easy for you to reuse functionality you need to inherit from a different store (not good) or to use some utility function to pass the store state to that function (it’s ugly).

Redux fixes that with reducers and one store. Yes, just one store that you don’t even write. The biggest advantage is that the reducers you create to manage your state can be nested (not flat like stores in flux), so you can combine reducers to build complex state structure from simple reducer functions. Also, that allows you to separate your state mutation logic while still keeping a single state object.

One thing to remember about Redux is that immutability is enforced, you’re not allowed to mutate the application state. This allow to do shallow comparison of data, avoiding unnecessary updates of components. Also, keeping original state each time allows us to implement undo/redo functionality very easily.

Documentation

This is a big thing for us. Every time we bring a new member on to the team and help him or her to learn Flux, documentation is a concern. We’ve observed how frustrating and confusing learning Flux can be if you don’t have previous experience with frontend frameworks and similar data patterns. The Facebook documentation on Flux is horrible! You have a simple diagram and a very short description of every part of flow. You can argue that the simplicity and freedom are great, but isn’t appropriate for rapidly creating an app for production where you need to discern the current best practices.

On the other side, you have the accessibility of Redux, which has great documentation and a large community. Dan Abramov, the author of Redux, has also published 30 free video lessons covering everything you need to know. Being Jumpcut engineers, we appreciated the quality educational video content.

It’s worth stating that Redux is very simple. The entire framework is just 100 lines of code (after removing the developer warnings, comments, and sanity checks).

Easy to Migrate

We wrote thousands of lines of code in Flux and a multitude of stores and action creators. To migrate the entire app to Redux seemed like a huge process..

But it wasn’t!

Redux provides a very easy and painless way of migrating gradually from Flux, they even have a whole article dedicated on how to migrate from Flux to Redux.

Developer Friendly

Almost a year ago, Redux DevTools was started — a live-editing time travel environment for Redux. This amazing package has some helpful features:-

• Inspect every state and action payload
• Go back in time by “cancelling” actions
• If you change the reducer code, each “staged” action will be re-evaluated
• If the reducers throw an error, you will see during which action this happened, and additional information
• With the persistState() store enhancer, you can persist debug sessions across page reloads

The developer experience is all too easily forgotten, but these tools are testament to the great community forming around Redux and the greater React ecosystem.

Why Redux? Why Now? was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s one question everybody always asks us at Jumpcut:

“How do you do it?”

By it, they’re referring to our statistics on social media. We have half a billion organic video views; 4.4 million subscribers; and dozens of viral videos that have been shared across the web. (And this is just Youtube — not to mention Facebook, Snapchat, Vine, etc.)

Everyone — millennials, SMBs, Fortune 1000 businesses — always asks how we consistently make shareable content.

This outpouring of interest is why Jumpcut’s first vertical is social media education. We offer cinematic courses, taught by the world’s top influencers, that help you “shortcut” your way to social media success.

How much demand is there around social media education, though? This is what we’re going to answer today: What is the market size for people who want to learn how to succeed on social media?

(Hint: the answer is $4B.)

*

Part 1: Consumers

1.

There are 2.31 billion social media users online . Over 50% of teenagers feel as if they can become the next big YouTube star. Thousands of models are using Instagram to kickstart their careers. The millennial cohort realize how easy the rise of internet fame can be — and with it, a way to attract the attention of agencies, talent scouts, big businesses, potential customers. Social media, at its purest, allows anybody, regardless of pedigree, to “make it.” It is the ultimate tool for meritocracy.

2.

The numbers prove out the demand. Here’s an interesting table:

These Social Blade numbers, give you a good sense of YouTube’s scale: there are currently over 1 million channels that have over 1,000 subscribers.

Getting that many subscribers is hard work — people don’t import contacts on YouTube like they do Instagram or Twitter — meaning you can’t just start a channel and expect to hit 1K subs. In fact, you can’t even expect to even hit 100.

Extrapolating from this data, there are 10 million YouTube channels that have over 100 subscribers, which is our conservative minimum threshold for an “active” channel.

(Keep in mind that many, many people 100 subscribers are actively dedicating themselves to YouTube — in our current private beta, 33% of all users are in this cohort — but we’ve excluded them for ease of calculation.)

Here’s a sanity check on that number: apply the 1% rule to the 1 billion monthly active users on YouTube, and you get 10 million. Sounds about right.

3.

So we know YouTube. What about other platforms?

If we apply the 1% rule to all these other platforms, we get 38.6 million influencers across all platforms.

But wait. Influencers don’t focus on one platform — in fact, almost all of them try to go live on multiple mediums. Everyone has a “main” platform that they’re best at, but their other platforms are also active, and are usually between 10% to 50% as large as their main platform.

The difficult question here is this: how much overlap is there between platforms? Instagram models, for example, might not all have YouTube accounts. Pinterest stars are probably not on Vine. Every influencer probably has a public Facebook page, but how active are they, really?

There’s no public data on this, unfortunately, other than anecdotal evidence. That leaves us with a few options:

1. Assume that every influencer, regardless of main platform, has an active Facebook presence, which means Facebook’s 16.5M influencers encompasses all active influencers.
2. Estimate an “overlap percentage” for each platform: 20% of Snapchat influencers only use Snapchat; 40% of Pinterest influencers only use Pinterest, and so on.
3. Ignore platform overlap and count each influencer on each platform separately. This means Influencer A on Pinterest and Influencer A on Vine count as 2 influencers. Then exclude the Facebook influencer number completely, given the fact that every influencer has one (and probably doesn’t really care about it).

The first method is too blunt, and the second method rests on too many assumptions. We’ll go with the third option. While you might argue that it overestimates the total number of influencers, there’s a real difference between Jusreign on Snapchat, Jusreign on Vine, and Jusreign on YouTube. The formats, audiences, video lengths, and type of content are all unique, and require distinctive strategies for each one. Moreover, because of the culture of the different platforms (given demographics, content type, etc.), the growth strategies can be significantly different. That’s why we’re comfortable adding up all influencers on each platform.

Given this, the total number of influencers on social media is 22.1 million.

4.

The last, and tastiest question, is this: of those 22.1 million influencers, how much are they willing to pay for content that will teach them how to be more successful on social media?

There’s two ways to approach this.

Years of purchasing behavior from Udemy has indicated that people are willing to pay between $20 to $50 for an online course. Let’s be conservative and take the low end of the range for ourselves, and assume that somebody will pay $20 for a social media course.

Method 1: If each course only covers one platform, as is often the case, we get 22.1 million * $20 per course = $442 million dollars.

Keep in mind that this is a lowball estimate. At the very high end, we can throw the Facebook influencer numbers back in (which is defensible, especially since we spend 50 minutes per day on the site) and increase course cost to $50 (not unreasonable, seeing as how Masterclass charges $90 per course…and ours are more cinematic). Now that number — 38.6 million * $50 — is $1.93 billion dollars.

Method 2: The second way to approach this is with actual data. In our private beta for Jumpcut Academy, the LTV of one paying user, based on our cohort data, is $68. While our product isn’t mature yet — we only have 4 courses online — we can use this as a minimum baseline for what LTV can be for a product of this nature.

With 22.1 million active influencers at $68, we get $1.50 billion dollars. And, hey, it’s within the range calculated with method 1!

So there you have it. We don’t quite believe the high end of the market, but we’re also not enamored with the low end, either — internally, we split the difference and refer to the consumer social media e-learning market as a cool $1 billion dollars.

Part 2: Businesses

5.

Businesses love social media spending. It’s a $24B dollar market that’s going to increase to an astounding $36B in 2017. Digital marketing spend, now only at 10% of marketing budgets, will grow to 25% within 5 years.

That’s a lot of dough. It’s the reason why Hootsuite raised over $165 million. Why Buddy Media sold to Salesforce for $745 million. Why the latest earnings results for Facebook showed revenue up 52% YoY. Why Buzzfeed is getting millions of dollars per campaign for content advertising. People are spending an average of 15 hours a week on social media, and businesses want the mind share.

But there’s a big hole in the social media landscape. Right now, startups cover social media analytics, management, scheduling, and optimization, but nobody is tackling the most crucial piece of the puzzle: actually creating great content that people want to share. No scalable content platform currently exists to do this.

6.

Given this paucity of tools teaching businesses how to create great content, it naturally begs the question: where do they go now to learn how to do social media right?

Free tier: If businesses want to create social media content, but don’t want to pay, they do it themselves. What they soon realize, though, is that there’s weak, disjointed free content: Google searches for “how to do content marketing,” undermanned Reddit forums, think pieces on new media business sites, shallow listicles from marketing automation companies, and one-off YouTube channels and videos that teach you how to succeed. We’ve been here before. You can spend hours opening up tab after tab, descending into the hinterlands of the internet, and come out of the noise equally clueless about what to do.

Paid tier: On Udemy, Skillshare, and Creative Live, there are thin, unappealing courses on how to succeed on social media, taught by agencies and individuals that don’t have any real credentials (seriously — check any of them out), filmed lecture-style direct-to-camera, with tips for the lowest common denominator. You’ll learn how to get 10,000 “real” Instagram followers by someone who only has slightly more than that himself. (Compare this to Jumpcut, where our instructors have, at the very minimum, 500,000 followers for the courses they teach.) Oh, yeah — for most of these courses, only 15% of people who buy these courses finish them. (That’s a completely separate issue we cover here.)

Please-do-it-for-me tier: And then there are the companies that just throw up their hands in the air and say, “Someone do this for me.” Per Linkedin, there are over 29,000 social media agencies in the world, all of which offer to take the dirty work off your hands. If you’re in the Fortune 1000, you have even more agency for your marketing. Multi-channel networks will set up packages worth $30,000 for a 30 second shout out at the end of a YouTuber’s video. The Buzzfeed and Vice’s of the world will gladly help you get worldwide press coverage. While you might traditionally think of these companies as advertising companies, and not in the business of helping you with social media marketing, we’re all playing with the same end goal: to help a company boost its outreach online. The ones with the big bucks can just afford to outsource it 100%.

Bonus — Intern tier: And, at the end of the day, if you don’t find any good online resources to learn from, both free or paid; if you can’t afford a Buzzfeed or even a Chameleon.la to do your campaigns for you; if you have other things to focus on and would rather offload it to a millennial who knows what they’re doing…you hire a social media intern.

And that’s just what companies are doing. On Linkedin, job postings for social media interns have increased 174x over the past 5 years. Legitimate colleges are offering a smattering of social media marketing courses, in both undergraduate and MBA curriculums, and students are gobbling them up, in preparation for all their new jobs. They’re ready to work for you, and most of the time, they’ll be better than you…but still won’t really know what they’re doing.

7.

While the high end of the market — the ones that can afford Buzzfeed — are fending fine for themselves, it’s clear that SMBs are being increasingly left out of this new marketing world order. 87 percent of them use social media as a marketing tool, but only 12% say they actually use it effectively. That means 76.6% of businesses need help with social media. Remember this number.

These are the underserved: these businesses hiring interns, putting toget ad-hoc marketing departments, hiring a small-time agency from the first search link on Google. They have all the tools in the world to help them schedule, manage, and automate their posts — but they still don’t know what to post in the first place.

8.

That’s our market, then, for Jumpcut. The SMBs of the world. And while it can be argued that there can’t be just one product to serve both the needs of SMBs and consumers, we believe that the content in Jumpcut Academy is applicable to anyone who wants to grow their social media following.

So what’s the market size?

Let’s start big. There are 400 million entrepreneurs in the world. In the US, there are 28 million small businesses. Those 28 million break down into two segments: 22 million single-person entrepreneurs (with average revenue of $44K), and 6 million businesses that have at least one employee. In terms of new businesses, over 400,000 being born annually. (In the UK, that number is a surprising 600,000.) For what it’s worth, Facebook says they have over 40 million active small business pages.

Just to be safe, let’s talk only about US businesses, and go with 28 million.

For pricing, the two closest comps to Jumpcut are 1) social media tools, and 2) content platforms. The leaders in both spaces currently are Hootsuite and Lynda. Hootsuite’s basic pricing is $120 a year. Lynda’s is $250 a year.

We strongly believe that, for a small business, we’re more valuable than Hootsuite — we help with the actual content creation — and, as a result, businesses would pay more for us. (Another way to think about it is this: how much would you spend on training for your social media intern to learn how to make compelling, shareable organic content for your small business, instead of maintenance posts that get no reach?)

We also believe that Lynda, given its mature content library (despite not having much social media training on there), is a more developed product than we are. (We’ll get there, though!)

Splitting the difference again, we estimate that businesses would pay $150 a year for a Netflix style content library that teaches you best practices for social media content creation.

Taking the 76.6% of businesses number, applying it to 28 million businesses, and multiplying it by $150, we get $3.2 billion dollars of market value. While we can’t assume that we’ll hit 100% market penetration, we can reasonably assume, because there’s no competition in this space, that we have the possibility of doing so.

Rounding down, we’ll assume $3B market size in the US for small and medium businesses that need a platform like this.

The $4 billion dollar market

So. $1 billion from the consumer market. $3 billion from the SMB market. Both conservative numbers, especially given the explosive continuing growth of social media. We add the two of them together to get $4 billion, and feel comfortable doing so specifically because there’s no overlap between the two — the consumer numbers exclude businesses.

$1B, or 25% — consumers who want to be active influencers on social media

$3B, or 75% — SMBs that need education on how to succeed on social media

A $4B market. Jumpcut’s ready. Are you?

Photos by Vivian Lau.

The $4 billion dollar market for social media education was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Jumpcut, we do team events — drinks, BBQs, movies — but what we really like doing is giving back to the community.

Last month, we organized a “Senior Prom” for the Culver City Senior Center.

The theme was Casino Night.

We wanted to give them an immersive experience — starting from the entrance.

We decked the hall out completely, and even brought in an old-school disco ball — you know, to get with the times.

When the music went on, people hit the floor.

Old mingled with young.

Red was the lucky color of the night.

When people were tired from dancing, there was craps, roulette, poker — the whole works. The team at Jumpcut dressed up and became the dealers. No card counting allowed. (Unless, of course, they were really sweet about it.)

It wasn’t all fun and games, though. Checks were presented — a donation from us.

Speeches were made.

And, of course, we had to take a family photo at the end.

Hosting senior proms aside, there’s a ton of good stuff happening here at Jumpcut — and we’re looking for talented people, like yourself, to be a part of the team.

Jumpcut Senior Prom was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the course of the last two years, our team has run over 1,500 interviews with potential candidates for Jumpcut. The best question we’ve ever received was this: “Explain what it means to be a culture fit at your company.”

This is our take on it: if your work comprises the individual notes of a song, then culture is the melody — complete with flats and sharps, tones and chords, harmony and dissonance.

To create culture, though, you need a foundation. And that’s what company values are for. Just like how a key signature (e.g. C Major, or D Minor) gives “shape” to a piece of music, values give shape to culture.

At Jumpcut, we’ve been refining our values from Day 1. Our goal? Creating mantras we can repeat to ourselves every day. Thoughts so deeply ingrained that anyone can spot a piece of work and immediately say, “That doesn’t align with our values.”

We have five of them. Inspiration for their creation goes to RapGenius, Facebook, and Tough Mudder.

SIGN YOUR NAME ON IT

“Your work should be like a work of art — so masterful that you’d sign your name on it.”

Whatever it is that you’re working on, it should be the highest quality. Everything we create should reflect an extraordinary amount of effort, passion, and thought.

We don’t just create a generic onboarding process for new hires…we walk every person through the history, vision, and goals for our organization.

We don’t just have a private forum for education platform — we host live streams, train community leaders, and update our forums based on feedback weekly.

Most of these things will never be seen by the public. But that’s the point. We’re building this company for the next 100 years — everything we do now lays the groundwork for our success to come.

RUN INTO THE WALL

“Aim for the difficult first, instead of avoiding it.”

Let’s be honest: it is so damn easy to start the day by doing the easy things. Checking your email. Going downstairs for some Starbucks. Completing all the 5 and 10 minute tasks you have — all in the name of getting “warmed up” for the day. But too often, minutes bleed into hours, and soon it’s already the afternoon. The actual value you’ve added? Insignificant.

That’s why we’ll always push you to do the hard things first. Take a look at your current list of tasks. I know for a fact that there’s one you’re avoiding right now — the one you keep pushing back. Do that one first.

There’s a reason why you’re avoiding that Task: it’s the one with the most obstacles, the one where your convictions go against the general flow, the one where you have to take off your headphones and actually focus. It’s the one where you have to run into — and then through — a wall.

It’s going to hurt. But that’s why you need to do it. Tackle the hard, ugly problems as soon as you can, and the company will push forward faster for it.

At the beginning of every day, Kong, our CEO, always asks himself, “What thing do I want to do the least today?” And then he does it.

BAD IDEAS WELCOME

“You’ve got to wade through the shit to find the golden nugget.”

We brainstorm ideas all the time. Informally, engineering hollering across the room at operations; formally, as topics of conversation during our team lunches; on weekends, through group chats on Slack. Our success as a company depends on idea generation, and we do everything we can to let that flourish. Almost every desk in our office can be written on. Our walls are slathered with whiteboard paint. There’s this long, long product backlog, accessible to any employee, with feature ideas we all contribute to and prioritize every two weeks.

We encourage both good and bad ideas — even the no-good, horrible, disgusting, will-never-work ideas. Given our roots in production, we believe in something counterintuitive: good ideas come only from the accumulation of bad ones. The bad ideas spur more bad ideas, which spur slightly better ideas, and from there, sometimes…poof!

That’s why we encourage the free-est of speeches. Throw out your ideas, any time they come up. You never know what will happen as a result.

BE A BARREL

“Don’t complain — solve.”

The term “barrel” comes from Keith Rabois, who argued that there are two types of people: bullets and barrels. The ammunition is important, but what’s more important are the people who can aim them correctly.

This isn’t just a fancy metaphor for a manager. Barrels describe people who create scalable processes for solving problems, rather than brute-forcing their way to temporary solutions. They see something that is broken and, instead of passing it on to somebody else, roll up their sleeves, find the right tools (and people), and fix it themselves.

They broaden and build on initiatives, instead of simply attacking specific portions of it.

Be a barrel.

HELP PEOPLE GROW

“Help others get a little better, every single day.”

Our last but not the least value. Our most overarching value. It’s more fundamental than the four above, because it encompasses them.

There’s only two ways to grow: you either get better at the skills that you already have, or you gain new skills. At Jumpcut, we prioritize both. If you are hired, there’s a reason for it: you’re probably a bomb video editor or a Javascript genius. But the best people are constantly looking to reach outside their domain expertise — they’re looking for ways not only to sharpen their skill set, but broaden it as well.

Our #1 goal is to make sure that the work you do, every single day, helps you improve not only your current skill set, but your future ones as well.

The last piece is a feedback loop. All of us “hold mirrors” up for each other, so that we can both see and fix our flaws. Direct and honest feedback has no equal.

*

These are the five Jumpcut values we ascribe to. We repeat them every single day, and train everyone who comes on to think the same way. When an interviewee asks us, “What does it mean to be a culture fit here?” — we point them to the fantastic five above.

The Fantastic Five was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Is the dress blue and black, or white and gold?”

That simple question set off a debate more hotly contested than the last presidential election. Somehow, a small disagreement between friends became a global phenomenon.

Having created and produced videos that have led to tens of millions of views, we’ve decided to let you in on the five rules of viral video creation. But you already knew that. Because you read the title of this article. I like you already.

Rule 1: create the headline, then create the video.

The proliferation of videos thrown into mainstream consciousness is ignited by blogs and media alike. At Jumpcut, we often ask ourselves, “What’s the headline that could be written about a video we produce?”

A quick glance at the leading content curators and blogs help provide insight into what gets clicks.

Here, Fritz became an overnight sensation as soon as one blog picked up the video. All of these sites read each other and share content. It becomes an echo chamber for promotion.

If you can’t picture the headline about your video, it probably has little chance of succeeding. “Grandma Knits Blue Socks” is a headline that probably won’t get many clicks, but “Grandma Rap’s Nikki Minaj’s Anaconda” just may. You’re welcome for that one.

Rule 2: tell a story.

Everyone likes a story, and no matter the length of your video, there should be an inherent story built in.

Take the recent SAE video as an example. It’s not just a 7 second video of a racist fraternity chant. It runs deeper than that. It’s the story of an all-white, affluent midwestern fraternity with a dubious reputation. There’s an underlying history here that steeps these 7 seconds with so much more significance.

In this vein, of course, there’s a lot more inherent virality. In a country with a checkered past of race relations, these kind of headlines practically write themselves.

Click. Anger. Comment. Share. Repeat.

Granted, members of that fraternity didn’t want that video to go viral, but it’s helpful to deconstruct a video to see what factors are at play. In this case, the underlying story behind the video and the aftermath contributed to its rapid dissemination.

Rule 3: make videos people feel compelled to share.

How do you create compelling content? Simply put, you need to elicit a strong emotional reaction.

If you’re not creating content that is blowing someone’s mind, pissing them off, or making them piss themselves with laughter, you’re wasting your time. The worst thing you can do is create lukewarm content. Make the viewer feel something.

This video is a great example of something light-hearted and fun. When Kevin Garnett got traded back to Minnesota, the Timberwolves called on ‘Jiggly Boy’ to paint ‘Welcome Home KG’ on his chest as he had similarly done two decades prior. A feel good, goofy video that people had to share.

Interestingly, psychologists have found that positive emotional videos tend to perform better than every other variant. They’re also more family friendly, which allows everyone from Sally to Grandpa to share it on their social network.

Rule 4: put yourself in a position to succeed.

Identify influencers and get your video to them: bloggers, celebrities, content aggregators. Don’t just spam them with links. Narrow in on who is relevant and would be interested in your content. Stop motion animation of Breaking Bad? Better to tweet that at Aaron Paul than RuPaul.

With a site like Reddit, you can focus on subreddits closely relate to your subject. Find your niche and leverage it.

This is one of the highest voted submissions in r/GameOfThrones.

Not surprisingly, it began the spread of this video — and now it’s been viewed over 3 million times.

Rule 5: don’t jinx it.

Call me superstitious or perhaps, more apt, humble, but after creating videos that have been seen hundred of millions of times, sometimes things you think are going to be huge fizzle out.

Other times, a video we took a chance on went on to become a smash hit.

Jumpcut did a video on Tinder once — and it came right as Tinder was peaking on Google Trends, indicated here by “D.” At the time of release, the search term “Tinder” was the highest it had ever been searched.

So it’s appropriate that with Tinder in the title, our video caught fire and spread rapidly through the media. Major blogs, mainstream media outlets, and television shows picked it up.

There’s no way we could have predicted it would take off the way it did — all we did was set up the dominoes and hope that they tipped in the right direction.

Those are the five rules for making it into viral club. I’d say the first rule is not to talk about it, but then I wouldn’t be able to write this article. When you get your membership card, drinks are on me.

Cover Photo by Vivian Lau.

The Five Rules of Viral Club was originally published in Jumpcut Insights on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.