You Can't Polish a Turd, and 3 Other Brand Truths

For six years I helped build YouTube channels for people you might recognise, and nobody ever knew it was me.

That vantage gives you a strange kind of x-ray vision or feeling like Neo seeing through The Matrix.

The clearest thing it showed me is that the lessons that matter most arrive embarrassingly late, usually a year after they'd have been useful.

Better late than never, so let me share three of them with you, plus the one that sits underneath all three. Welcome aboard, lovely chums.

1. Originality is the reward, not the starting line

For the love of God, if I hear "I want to be original and authentic" one more f**king time…

Nearly everyone gets the sequence wrong.

They want to feel different on day one because they think they're special, when difference is the thing you earn after you've become fluent, not the thing you lead with.

The creators dominating your niche didn't conjure their style out of nowhere. They swallowed everything that was working before them and bent it into their own shape.

I remember a great U2 documentary about how Bono built his character The Fly for Achtung Baby. To reinvent himself he borrowed from Lou Reed, Elvis and Jim Morrison, and the result was something genuinely his own.

So here's the unglamorous fix, which is why hardly anyone bothers.

Take three or four channels currently beating you and pull them apart properly. Not the topics they cover, the construction underneath. The reasons a title makes your hand move toward the click. The moment a video either holds your attention or quietly leaks it.

Once you can see the wiring and succulent underbelly, you've earned the right to build your own version with your fingerprints on it.

2. You stop growing the moment you start broadcasting

There's a blindspot swap that happens when you start posting, and almost nobody clocks it.

You go from student to broadcaster overnight, suddenly convinced you've scaled Everest and earned the right to shout down to the peasants about how great you are.

The "guru" days are dead.

People don't want know-it-alls anymore. They want students, people who are already good at something yet still on a quest to keep growing and experimenting.

You've got nothing fresh to teach once you've stopped learning the thing itself.

It's why I still take on client channels when my calendar would rather I didn't. The day I step out of the work is the day I run out of anything worth saying.

If you know me personally, you'll know I spend 8 to 10 hours a day studying brand and YouTube like it's a religious text. The day I stop learning is the day I die.

If you can't name one real thing you've worked out about your craft this year, that flat subscriber count isn't a mystery.

3. A perfect hook on a dead topic still dies

The feed is wall to wall with people flogging hook formulas, as though the right opening line were a siren that could summon an audience out of thin air.

Spoiler alert, it can't.

How many times have you seen some young girl or guy holding a fuzzy mic, telling you how to make 50 hooks a week with their proven formula by finding outliers or some other b**lshit…

It gets boring. When everyone's looking left, you go right.

The appetite has to already exist out in the audience. Where it doesn't, no amount of clever wrapping is going to save you. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi “you can’t polish a turd” (don’t know if i attributed that correctly, i may be wrong…)

I had a client recently do a video on a topic I knew would tank, though they were adamant we ran it.

I shook my head and said okay.

We packaged it insanely well, and it still wasn't enough to fool the audience or the YouTube gods. The video fell like a flan in a cupboard.

So work the topic before you ever touch the hook.

Pick subjects people are already hunting for, then package them with some teeth.

When you write the opener, lead with something the viewer is already living through rather than something flattering about yourself. The line that's secretly about how clever you are gets scrolled past. The one that names their pain stops them dead.

Audience empathy is a superpower.

The one that takes longest

This is the lesson that arrives latest, assuming it turns up at all.

None of the tactics above run on a number.

"A hundred thousand subscribers" or "ten clients a month" is a fine destination, it just won't get you behind the camera on the flat grey morning you'd rather do anything else.

The brands and creators that go the distance get built by people who'd still make the work if the graph went sideways for a year. They're mission based, not vanity based.

So find the part of this you'd do anyway, audience or no audience, and build outward from there.

That's the order most people learn it in, back to front and far too late.

See you next week.

Me

PS. I'm launching something very soon with one of the other best YouTube strategists in the world. It's going to be epic, and I'll share more details once we're finished crafting it.