How we got 2,318.37% increase in views and 154.65% in watch time in 7 days.

Every once in a while the stars align just right and things move pretty fast.

This is one of those times.

My new client Daniel Marcos, founder of the Growth Institute and an amazing man in his own right, decided that it's time to build his own personal brand and set himself an amazing goal: 1 million subscribers on YouTube within the next 3 years.

Daniel is an expert in scaling businesses and supporting CEOs through the journeys of growing their businesses. From operations, to mindset to team building and culture - he's done it all.

He's also currently working with billion-dollar companies, helping them navigate the challenges that come with being a billion dollar company.

He runs in-person workshops, leads online communities and flies around the world to meet with his clients and mentors regularly.

Add to that a wife and kids, the guy doesn't have time for "more content", and definitely zero minutes to sit down in front of a motionless camera blabbing about the latest themes.

Enter: Expert Gene Activation

The challenge we have with building Daniel's English YouTube channel and growing it to a million subscribers (real ones, not the fakes you can easily buy) is that most of Daniel's brand has been built in Spanish.

He's a big deal in Latin America, and the best-kept secret in the US.

What will the US market be into?

What will resonate with them?

We had to figure that out first.

The methodology:

Being in the marketing business for over 11 years I know one thing for sure - there's no magic pill.

There's no secret formula to building thought leadership online.

It's all a matter of trial and error - you put quality content out there, independent of what you think should work, and you let the data tell you what to toss and what to double down on.

With that in mind, we found some time in Daniel's busy calendar for an Activation Session: being that we're in the same city, this one will take place in person.

I will act as a human prompter, bringing out all the golden nuggets hiding in Daniel's mind.. we'll talk about his vast experience, what CEOs need to know to avoid the drama of a CEO life as much as possible and discuss his framework and current trends.

An hour of his time will create a month full of content that will allow us to start the awareness process to getting his name on the US map.

 But then I had a brilliant idea

Why not use AI to help us test the water.. see if we get any interest on specific topics and get the needle moving before we start.

That way, we maximize Daniel's time and stretch it even more.

Enter Munch

Munch is an Israeli Startup that I've been working with for the past 6 months or so.

Their sole purpose is to use data to help you create short engaging videos.

Daniel has a great interview in English that's not doing as well as he wanted. Why not take that interview and let Munch do its magic... and just test?

I pitched the idea to Daniel and luckily, he was game.

And so we fed it into Munch.

We took our opinions out of the way

If you know me, I'm extremely picky about design, look and feel and everything we put out there.

In other words, I have opinions about what's good and what isn't. I'm sure you do too.

But I also know that this is a game of speed. We don't have to create the Mona Lisa with every piece we put out there. We need to share a lot of value, as fast as we can, and then see what works.

Because this is a new YouTube channel, with not a lot of subscribers and views, we agreed to refrain from judgment, put ALL the Shorts Munch created and just see what happened.

Worst-case scenario - nothing happens and we're back to where we started.

Best case scenario - we learned something about Daniel's audience and we can continue down that line.