Making $10M/Year Using Shorts The Smart Way (Noelle Ireland)

**Richard** (0:00)
Minikatana grew from 1000 subscribers to 15 million in around 2 years, generating over 10 million dollars per year. Their creative director at the time reveals the exact blueprint she used to blow up that channel.

**Noelle Ireland** (0:11)
And then secondly, if you can even push that concept closer to 50, 60 seconds and hold some views retention through that entire piece of media, that's when you really start to see virality.

**Richard** (0:23)
And how she did it again for a brand new channel hitting 50 million views per month in just 3 months.

**Noelle Ireland** (0:29)
It still took us 30 days of posting consistently for us to get that massive boost.

**Richard** (0:35)
How do you guys go from 10k to 100k, 100k to a million, and then a million to 15 mil?

**Noelle Ireland** (0:40)
Yeah, I mean, ultimately it is all about processes and being really good at short form media and trialing and airing. It's really all about experimenting. So when I first joined, it was Isaac Medeiros, who's the amazing, amazing founder and CEO of Mini Katana. Everyone should go check out his Twitter because he's awesome. I joined when it was just him and I making TikToks in the warehouse.

**Richard** (1:02)
So initially it was just both of you on the short form.

**Noelle Ireland** (1:06)
On the marketing side of things. It was him and I making TikToks on the warehouse. I actually moved out from Colorado all the way to Los Angeles to work for this Katana business that had maybe less than a million followers on TikTok at the time. My parents thought I was absolutely crazy. And it started off with Isaac and I making TikToks in the warehouse and him teaching me all of the best retention and attention practices that come with short form. We'd seen a lot of success on TikTok and meta, but plot twist, you can't run paid on meta ads. So we were never able to scale because you can't run weapons as a meta ad. So we had to double down on organic social media. That was one of the main reasons we got as good as we did at it. It was the only choice. There were no other options in order to scale this brand. So I first joined, Isaac and I were making TikToks in the warehouse. We discovered very quickly that that was not going to be a long-term effective use of our time. There's just not enough hours in the day. And so I had just launched our influencer program, affiliate program, Minik Tana. And this amazing creator, I sent him a sword and he sent us back this video that just Isaac and I went, holy moly, we need to get this guy to start creating content immediately for us. And so that for us was kind of our big step one, hiring a full time content creator that we put on to salary 40 hours a week after seeing one single video, because it was that awesome. And so that was the beginning of us scaling to a 15 person organic content team with four content creators, a couple editors, another strategist, community managers, that whole shtick, in addition to translating all of our content. So the beginning really started with hiring that first amazing creative that could take our vision and execute better on content than Isaac and I ever could.

**Richard** (2:53)
Why not go with 100 UGC creator out there?

**Noelle Ireland** (2:56)
Ultimately, because UGC is something that everyone is doing. Social media nowadays is a place where people come to follow a story. It's all about storytelling, brand building. People want to follow aspiration. They don't want to follow a product. People want to follow founders. Again, not products. And so one thing that just using UGC primarily does, it's an awesome use of customer testimonials. However, it makes you look like a brand. There's no consistency. There's no personality. There's no one core persona that you can point to and go, I want to be like Kelly from Mini Katana. And so by hiring a single content creator, you have a lot more control over the narrative and the storytelling that you're building. And it makes it a lot stronger because you have one persona that your audience can consistently relate back to.

**Richard** (3:47)
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And how do you find that in-house creator?

**Noelle Ireland** (3:51)
Right, this is the million dollar question that I'm still working on solving. Full transparency, my go-to with any brand that I work with is, if you use Archive, this is a plug for them, I'm not sponsored. But if you use any sort of UGC collector of media, go through that and see what is your top performing organically, and how many followers do those creators have. If you have somebody that's already bought into the brand and loves the mission and loves the product and is creating decent content, hire them. Hire them on a retainer. Ask them to create 20 videos for you and your brand and trial them. Start there because someone who's already invested and loves what you're doing, that will resonate and come off authentically in content. Start with your customer basis. Start small and then put up an Indeed LinkedIn posting.