In this 38-minute long video, Jay Clouse interviews Jenny Hoyos (who at the age of 18 already has more than 1.8 million subscribers on Youtube!) on her secrets of making viral shorts.
The video has 4 main discussion points:
- How to make anything go viral;
- How to create the perfect Short;
- Differences in Short form platforms;
- Hot takes on shareability and retention.
1. How to make anything go viral
Jenny’s formula for viral videos: Virality = Story + Twise (1:18)
Favorite way to make people invested? How to make a story that people care about?
- Making the video personal. (1:44)
- Example: Jenny cooked for strangers to make money. –> Why should people care? –> Her kitchen was broken so that she had to raise money for it.
- Your “why” or “irony” gets viewers invested. (2:09)
What is a good Short? (2:20)
- Strong hook
- Can be used as title or thumbnail for Long Form.
- Can be understood without audio.
- Very easy to comprehend.
- Compelling, rewatchable story.
When you start a new video, how do you think about generating hooks? (3:09)
- View Shorts the same as longform.
- Keep drawing, imagining, and sketching until something clicks.
- Think visual first.
- Make sure the content is understandable to at least 5th grader or under.
- Have analyzed thousands of Shorts (talk about her due diligence!). Find this is common among the popular ones.
- Mr.Beast‘s videos are at the level of 1st grader.
- Use a readability checker to measure understandability.
- Tool: Readability Formulas🔍
- Trick: getting the transcripts of Youtube Shorts (5:30)
- Spoiler: changing the url.
- Make sure the content is understandable to at least 5th grader or under.
Learn a lot from deeply analyzing her own videos. (6:30)
- Everyone has different audiences. What works for Mr.Beast might not work for me.
- Quantity makes quality.
- Analyze retention graph as she keeps uploading Shorts.
- Example: One Short does not perform well. Find retention drops a lot (25%!) in the last second. (7:07)
- Every second counts for Shorts. 1 second of a 30-second Short accounts for 3%.
Make people rewatch your Shorts. (8:25)
- Shoot for 90% retention.
First frame is important! (9:50)
- A consistent 1st frame helps bingeability. Her audiences know it’s her video when they see the framing in the beginning.
- Example: Renamking fast food for 1$. (10:00)
How did you learn the hooks and framing? Trial and error? Or learn it others? (10:50)
- At first, learn or “steal” from others.
- You steal like an artist. (Jenny could be alluding to this book: Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative 📘)
- Then trial and error.
- Start by copying others’ hooks, see which would work best, and make her own twist.
- What would it sound like if ___ made this video?
- Start by copying others’ hooks, see which would work best, and make her own twist.
2. How to create the perfect Short
What is proportion of your video ideas to videos actually being made? (12:54)
- Has a Google Doc to keep her ideas.
- Currently has a list of one thousand ideas and gets 10 out of them.
How do you generate ideas? (13:23)
- Watch others for inspiration.
- What video do you want to watch?
- AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) help generate ideas.
- Use your lived experiences (Jenny’s best ideas come from here)
- Example: One of Jenny’s most popular videos, which has 30 million views, is her making a garden. She was eating ratatouille one day, one of her favorite foods, and thought “can’t I just make a garden and have unlimited ratatouille”? (13:54)
- This 39-second Short (Infinite Ratotuille Glitch 🎞️) got more than 20 million views.
- Example: Her grandpa got free laundry detergent by calling the company to complain. Which gave her another great video idea. (14:37)
- She makes a long form video based on this idea: I Asked Companies for FREE Stuff 🎞️.
- Example: One of Jenny’s most popular videos, which has 30 million views, is her making a garden. She was eating ratatouille one day, one of her favorite foods, and thought “can’t I just make a garden and have unlimited ratatouille”? (13:54)
How do you find your best ideas from the many ideas? What is the deciding factor? (15:05)
- Suppose we start with 100 ideas. First narrow it down to 50 based on:
- Do I want to make this?
- Is this logistically possible?
- Is the hook good?
- Is the mechanism good?
- Are people gonna rewatch it?
- Then narrow it down to 25:
- Where is the virality in this?
- Finally narrow it down to 10:
- Get outside perspective (e.g., her video editor).
What is a good retention mechanism? (16:26)
- It’s something that encourages the audience to watch until the end.
- Example: Mr. Beast’s video: Last To Leave Circle Wins $500,000 🎞️.
- The mechanism here is that the circle was constantly closing, which drives viewers to watch till the end. If the circle was not closing, people might just skip to the end.
- Example: Mr. Beast’s video: Last To Leave Circle Wins $500,000 🎞️.
What are the mechanisms you have used? (16:50)
- An easy one anybody can apply, which includes 3 steps:
- Hook: the “why” question.
- Expectation: set viewer expectations.
- Close loop: follow expectations but add a twist.
- Example: $5 Mother’s Day Gift 🎞️(17:39)
- Hook: My mom never had a Mother’s Day gift. So I’m gonna change that.
- Expectation: Buy her the best present with $5.
- Close loop: Surprise her mom with the gift.
- The twist: Her mom dropped the gift which broke and said: you are the best daughter I’ve ever had. To which Jenny responded: I’m your only one!
How long on average are your Shorts? (18:36)
- 34 seconds.
- My most popular videos are exactly this length. Everyone is different though.
- The negative relationship between Short length and retention target (which is 90% for Jenny). (19:10)
- The shorter the Short is, the higher the retention it needs to achieve to take off.
- Try to strike a balance: tend to make the Short a bit longer, but not too long for her yound audience.
Foreshadow: very important, put immediately after the hook. (20:48)
- Purpose: set viewer expectation.
- Always do this in every video.
- Example: $5 Mother’s Day Gift 🎞️
- Hook: My mom’s never had a Mother’s Day gift. So I’m gonna change that.
- Foreshadowing: Buy her the best present with $5.
- Dedicate spoken time to foreshadowing.
Transition in the video: giving people time to breath. (22:02)
- Need a pacing break without the pacing actually breaking.
- Example: I Recreated Banned McDonalds Item 🎞️
- Hook: McDonald’s BANNED this item.
- Foreshadow: So I’m gonna make it at home to convince them to put it back on the menu.
- Transition: So I cooked ILLEGALLY.
- Instead of saying “Let’s get started.”
But/Therefore storytelling: introducing changes in the story and making it more intriguing. (23:08)
- Lots of change in the story. Use conflict, tension, and rising action to make the story more compelling.
- Example: Describing her caught in the rain.
The complete structure (in order) of Jenny’s Shorts (24:16):
- Pool of ideas;
- Choose 1 idea;
- Write the hook;
- Write the last line;
- Go back to write the foreshadow;
- Fill in the parts in between and complete the rough script/outline;
- Film;
- Rivist the script; revise, finalize, then edit.
- Very interesting! Jenny actually works on the last line right after the hook.
How to find your audience avatar? (26:39)
- Avatar is everything.
- How can you speak to your avatar?
- Example: Her nieces recently move to US and don’t understand English well yet. Jenny tries to make her videos sound interesting to them.
3. Differences in Short form platforms
Short form content is not the same across platforms.
- Jenny started out on TikTok and was also posting the same videos on Youtube and Instagram Reels. (29:16)
- At that time, she got almost all the views from TikTok (e.g., 1 million) but pretty much none (e.g., 1000) from the other two platforms.
- She then changed her strategy to focus on Youtube, and the opposite happened. 1 million views on Youtube and 1000 views on TikTok.
- Learning: different platforms have different audiences and prefer different content. (30:25)
- Youtube: more mature audience → slower pace + more story.
- TikTok: (younger audience) → shorter videos + dense with information.
- Reels: slightly more mature audience → more visual (due to the mute feature) + more shareable.
What’s your thoughts on Long Form now? (31:16)
- Plan to transition to Long Form.
- Approach Long Form the same way as I did to Shorts.
Why has Long Form become your priority? (31:58)
- Not too much growth for me in Shorts.
- Long Form provides more growth and fun (relationship with the viewers).
- Want to challenge myself.
- Money is not the reason.
- Though money was definitely the reason when I started Shorts.
4. Jenny’s final takes
At the end, Jenny shares two hunches that she believe are true but need more data and evidence to support:
- Shareability is more important than you think. (36:25)
- Will do more analyses to validate.
- Retention doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. (37:06)