James Dooley: The dollar a day strategy. Today I'm joined with Dennis Yu who speaks quite a lot about this, about the small compounding wins on social media with a dollar a day strategy start to help you win long term. Dennis, it's absolutely a pleasure to have you on. For anyone who's watching this, can you just give a simplistic overview of what the dollar a day strategy is?

Dennis Yu: It's a testing methodology. It has nothing to do with Facebook or YouTube or TikTok or any channel. If you put multiple pieces of content out there according to an objective, leads, views, form fills, appointments, then you're letting the system be able to optimize for you. So, one of the companies that we do this for is HVAC quote. They're a SaaS software, and we took a bunch of videos of showing how the software works, interviewing customers, talking about why it's important to show online quotes, and Google shows that in maps, all different angles. And the ones that did the best, let's just say for example on YouTube, we put $10 a day, $20 a day, but we started at just a dollar a day, which is $7 for a week.

Dennis Yu: So we started with Marco Sipolo. We started HVAC quote.ai and we put I think I had maybe 15 or 20 initial videos and most of the ones that I thought were the best, James, actually did terrible, as in we kept maybe 30% of people past the first 15 seconds. The minute long videos maybe retained 10% of people. But then the ones that were just kind of fun that we would never have expected would have done well got a 95% playthrough rate for a minute long video. Some of them were just kind of off-the-cuff walk and talk videos interviewing the top people in the world of HVAC.

Dennis Yu: If we're selling software to HVAC people, then why not show the top people in HVAC, why not show other HVAC companies, why not interview other people that may seem to be competitors? By putting those out there on Facebook and YouTube and other channels, we drove 100 SaaS customers paying $350 a month in the first 100 days. It wasn't because we're really good at talking or because we had fancy editing. It was simply putting multiple moments out there and looking at the watch times both on Facebook and YouTube to see what resonated and then put $20 a day, $50 a day, $100 a day against the winners. It's literally just cycling through testing. It's not a magic strategy. It's not a hack. It's not some black hat kind of thing.

James Dooley: I love it that you said that sometimes the ones that you think were going to perform best don't end up performing the best and the ones that you think you're not really certain about might end up being the one that gets the 95% retention time. We found exactly the same thing when we was running PPC or Facebook ads. There's certain ads that we think this is going to crush it and it just doesn't at all. And then there's other ones that you don't think will do that well and they end up being our best winners.

James Dooley: So obviously you're talking about retention time on YouTube. You go and get a new YouTube video, you go and do the promotion and if it's getting a 95% retention time, then you'll start upping the bid because obviously people are enjoying it. But with regards to Facebook or Instagram or maybe Twitter, is it all video format? Are you doing video on that as well?

Dennis Yu: It's still mainly video because you can take a podcast like a 45 minute podcast and chop it into one minute clips, put that on Facebook, X which was Twitter, and YouTube and find who actually stays. So the first filter which dollar a day is great for is to see who actually stays and watches. The second pass is you're optimizing to leads, to your cost per lead, to conversion rate, those other kinds of metrics.

Dennis Yu: Video is so important because images and copy and all that, I feel like AI does all of that. But when you show two people that are actually meeting, that's real. My best performing video for HVAC quote was actually just Marco and I having steak. It was noisy. We were just literally having a meal and I pointed my phone at him and he said some stuff and I said some stuff and that was the one that did the best. Completely unprofessional. We put that on Facebook, put it on X, put it on YouTube, resonated with different audiences and it's literally just lots of short video, not professional looking. I think when people see professional looking video, they think that's AI or they think it's an ad.

James Dooley: With regards to whiteboard videos, I've been watching pretty much every whiteboard video you've done. You're speaking about Groipedia, knowledge panels, KGM IDs and all these different things. Are you creating lots of these and then checking to see which one performs best? Would you create multiple ones on knowledge panels and see which one performs best?

James Dooley: You can go into YouTube and see where people rewind. When you see a spike, that usually means someone is rewinding that 15 seconds. That tells you that could be a hook. My buddy Tom Breeze, who you may know, is the number one performance advertiser on YouTube according to YouTube. He was showing me the data for Alex Hormozi and Mr Beast and looking at the top videos, how many of them were able to get to 35% completion after 8 minutes, which is the magic mark we're looking for.

James Dooley: We looked at some of Alex Hormozi's videos and found these different blips and then put those at the beginning of a clip and he was running dollar a day. It was funny because we were on a Zoom call sharing notes and he said, "Dennis, I want to show you what's working for dollar a day on YouTube." I said, "Tom, I'd be honored." And he said he learned it from me.

Dennis Yu: The reason why it works is because when Hormozi or Mr Beast or whoever puts out videos and they are able to get that super high retention, that works well in ads. It started in long form organic and then it turns into ads. As an ad guy, I try to work with people who are already doing a good job, who are great communicators, who have driven a result, who are well-connected, who are respected. Anything that they make, you don't even have to be good at advertising or SEO because people already know who they are. It's going to convert better.

Dennis Yu: We spent a million dollars for the Golden State Warriors in the first year and drove $38 million in Ticketmaster sales. People said it's easy when you have the NBA champions. It's the same principle here. We didn't have fancy videos. We had young adults in the stadium collecting cell phone videos from the stands, before, during, and after the games. That drove more sales because fans felt closer to the action.

Dennis Yu: We asked Steph Curry what his favorite flavor of buffalo wing was and we had a chicken wing sponsor that did way better than the commercials they gave us. We applied dollar a day to Uber, to United Airlines, to Nike and Adidas because they were winning brands. There was already that trust. It wasn't very hard to get to the attention threshold we were looking for and then run those as conversion ads. It has nothing to do with Facebook or TikTok or YouTube.

James Dooley: I like the idea of using the spike as the hook. We do similar as well but sometimes split it into a YouTube Short and then say come and check out the long form video. Shorts seem to be pushed more by Google than long form and then lead onto the longer form.

James Dooley: Anyone who's watching this with regards to the dollar a day strategy with Dennis Yu, it got me hooked. I initially found one of Dennis's videos and now I'm obsessed with watching all the videos he's putting out with regards to personal branding. Make sure you check out the links in the description. There are follow on videos where me and Dennis have spoken about personal branding not being ego, it's risk management. Also one about knowledge panels, getting that KGM ID and using this methodology to amplify everything you do with the dollar a day strategy. Dennis, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Dennis Yu: Thank you, James.