It's Braden (again)
We have a client selling clothing software to fashion brands doing $5M+.
If one of his videos does 10,000 views, that's a banger.
Because a banger has nothing to do with the view count. It's about how much of your TAM you took.
Yet most people get OBSESSED over views
So I wanna go over:
Why a banger is a percentage of your TAM, not a view count
The two places every good idea actually comes from
The recency rule that kills most ideas before they get made
And if you want us to build this into your content strategy, book a call here →
The Actionable Takeaway
Run your next idea through three questions before you make it.
Does this widen or narrow my TAM?
If it narrows it, you'd better have a good reason.
Do I have my own data on this, or only the market's?
Your own data wins every time, and I'll explain why in a second.
How recent is the hypothesis?
If your proof is more than three months old, it needs a lot more validation to survive.
Fail all three and don't make the video.
A Banger Is a TAM Number
Back to that client selling software to fashion brands.
His TAM is probably closer to 100,000 people on YouTube (Large enterprise ecommerce brands).
So if a video does 10,000 views, he just took a tenth of his entire market.
I'll take that every single time.
For context, TAM means Total Addressable Market.
It's the total number of people you could ever possibly work with, not the qualified ones, just everybody you could start a conversation with.
Now, here's the trade nobody talks about.
The idea itself is the filter for how many people get reached.
A video about e-commerce can reach everybody in e-commerce.
A video about landing pages only reaches everybody in landing pages.
That's the trade you're making every time you pick a topic.
Where Banger Ideas Actually Come From
Now, to come up with bangers, or what we are referring to in this newsletter as a TAM maximizer (meaning that it maximizes the total number of people you could potentially reach and target for your service), is simple.
One, be on the platform as much as humanly possible.
99% of the time I'm on a call with a founder, I'll come up with ideas fresh off the top of my head.
Or I'll look at something they already posted and go, "you got that idea from this guy."
I can hear the response before they say it. How did you know that?
The answer is boring. I spend all day on YouTube.
That's it.
The easiest way to come up with great ideas is to live on the platform.
Two, data.
I'm a big data guy.
I keep a checklist for every single video idea, and at the same time I'm tracking what's working for us.
The three things I look at:
Views. Views tell me everything, because the only real job of a title and thumbnail is to get as many views as possible.
Click-through rate, when it's our own channel and I have it.
Average view duration.
Honestly, views carry most of the weight for me.
If I'm judging packaging, I'm judging views.
And your own data beats market data every time.
When somebody else does something well, you don't know why they did it.
When you do it, you know the exact hypothesis behind every decision.
The Recency Rule
Last filter, and it kills more ideas than the other two combined.
How recent is your hypothesis?
If you saw it work on a video, how long ago was that? Past week? Past month? More than three months?
If it's older than three months, we usually don't touch it unless the validation points are really strong.
Same goes for news angles, headlines, topics, title structures, thumbnail concepts. All of it.
YouTube moves fast enough that a six month old hypothesis is just a guess wearing a costume.
How We Can Help You
→ Book a free strategy call here» and we'll map out your content system
→ Watch me turn three services into 75 validated video ideas here»
→ Access a 50+ page guide on how to find YouTube ideas that actually generate leads here»
Appreciate you stopping by,
Braden