Which two social media platforms are essential to build your personal brand?

Feeling invisible despite your expertise? Struggling to stand out in a crowded digital landscape? With over 130 million YouTube views, Finn McKenty reveals why you don't need astronomical numbers to build a thriving business through content marketing. Drawing from his experience working with giants like Nike and Nintendo, McKenty shares a refreshingly practical approach to social media strategy.

He demonstrates why entrepreneurs should focus on either LinkedIn (for B2B with high-intent audiences) or YouTube (for B2C mass reach) rather than spreading themselves thin across multiple platforms. McKenty breaks down his three-step narrative framework for creating compelling content: establish a differentiated point of view, trigger a mindset shift, and enable a capability shift. Most importantly, he explains why taking a clear stance, though seemingly limiting, actually opens more doors than it closes.

Whether you're selling professional services or consumer products, McKenty's strategic approach cuts through the social media noise with remarkable clarity.

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Chapters

• 14:00 [Ad] Rumi.ai
• 14:49 (Cont.) Which two social media platforms should you be on to build your personal brand?

Transcript

Jim James (00:01)
My guest today has over 130 million views on YouTube. And he's going to talk to us about whether YouTube is right for you. And how do you possibly tell your story to help you grow your business? I'm joined by Finn McKenty, who is based in Seattle, Washington. Finn, welcome to the show.

Finn Mckenty (00:21)
Thank you so much for having me.

Jim James (00:23)
It's my pleasure because I've been obviously looking at you on YouTube, seeing you on LinkedIn. You've been a master at building a brand for yourself.

Finn Mckenty (00:34)
I would say slightly above average. Master is a little bit of an overstatement, but thank you.

Jim James (00:38)
Well, a hundred and thirty million puts you certainly in the top leagues of content creators and

Finn Mckenty (00:45)
would say it puts me at the bottom end of good. And that's not false modesty. The point I want to make there is you don't actually have to be anywhere near the best to have a great business.

Jim James (00:49)
Ha

Well, and that's why I was so delighted when you accepted my request to come on because, you know, most of us are nowhere near tens of thousands, let alone millions. And that's wonderful. That's so reassuring, Finn. So let's talk about you first and then have you help us to understand what do we need to do as entrepreneurs to use social media to drive our business. So Finn, first of all,

Finn Mckenty (01:05)
You don't need to be.

Jim James (01:24)
Tell us a little bit about you so that everyone can understand who you are, what you've been doing, where you come from.

Finn Mckenty (01:30)
Well, I'll give you my life story in the very shortest amount of time possible. Most people know me from YouTube because that's the most sort of, you know, high visibility thing I've ever done. But before that, I didn't start until I was 38. So that's sort of another thing to consider is, know, if you're telling yourself that you're too old, because, you know, this stuff is only for young people, that's definitely not true. There's tons and tons of people now in their forties, fifties, sixties that are doing great on all kinds of social channels. I thought I was too old when I started, which, you know, in hindsight was

was a silly thing to think. In any case, before that, I've done product design and marketing for about 25 years, worked with lots of on the agency side, worked with lots of brands like Nike, Nintendo, Red Bull, did a lot of stuff for Procter and Gamble, like Febreze, Swiffer, Bounce, a lot of stuff that they've made, which is I would say where I really kind of cut my teeth as a as a marketer and product designer is, you know, understand, like they literally invented brand marketing as we know it, like 100 years ago.

And so that's really, think where I cut my teeth after that was a designer and marketer for Abercrombie and Fitch about 15 years ago when they were opening a lot of international stores, you know, really expanding in Europe and Asia a lot. And I was part of that worked at a startup after that called creative live that as far as I'm aware, it was like the first, company to do like live streaming education for creative people did that for awhile and then I started YouTube and I'm a partner in another education company called the URM Academy now that does education for

music producers. I would think of myself as someone who, you know, answers the question of what product do we need to make? Who do we make it for? And how do we sell it to them? I started YouTube because because of the exact thing that your your show has identified, which is, I felt like I was pretty good at my job. And I had done a lot of things that I was proud of, but nobody really cared. I felt like very invisible.

My network was not good when I applied for jobs, I would get nowhere. And I'm like, what am I doing wrong? Like I'm good at what I do. And just like, I feel so invisible and ignored and overlooked. And I had helped other people build their personal brands for years, like the CEO of creative live. I was on his content team and we worked with all the people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tim Ferriss and blah, blah, those kinds of people.

So I'd seen that work for other people. And I said, well, I should probably do this for myself. And I did, and it worked, and here I am.

Jim James (04:05)
You know, that's a wonderful, wonderful story. Think what you've also highlighted is just what I'm trying to do with this show. There are so many amazing people that have got great stories to tell, but they don't know how to tell them and they're getting overlooked. So lots of great services are not being found just because there's a marketing bottleneck. So, Finn, that's why you're here because you've cracked that by getting that many views. But as you say, you don't need that many views. So perhaps what you can do is

Finn Mckenty (04:18)
Yep.

Jim James (04:35)
take us through the process because now you're also giving guidance, I think, to entrepreneurs on how to get noticed using not just video, other platforms as well, aren't you? So why don't take us through the process that you use with your clients? It'd be wonderful.

Finn Mckenty (04:51)
Yeah, so for the part I sort of left out is the thing I focus on now is I help entrepreneurs grow using LinkedIn and or YouTube to grow their business. So the first thing to ask yourself is what are your goals in in specific in terms of specific business objectives? So to simply say, I want more people to know who I am. I want to be more important in my industry. That's that's not specific enough. So set a goal in terms of

actual business objectives, meaning that could be, you know, if you're a whatever, an agency or something like that, X number of clients per month, you know, in the following kind of engagement worth this much money, or if you sell a product, like, let's say you sell t shirts, you want to sell 500 t-shirts a month, whatever it is. And the reason why that's important is because the business objective is basically going to determine the scope

of the creative work that we have to do, which could take you in very different directions. In other words, let's say that you are an agency that does the sort of like very niche work with, you know, a very high average contract value, or maybe you have a B2B SaaS product that you only need three deals a year to come through to have a great year. That's going to take us in one direction. Whereas if I need to sell 5000 units a month of these t-shirts,

that's going to take us in a different direction. Both of those things are totally possible, but they're going to take us in very different directions. So that's why it's so important to do that work and be very, very, very specific with yourself. Goal, and by the way, the goal that you set is almost definitely not going to end up being right. know, six months or a year from now, you're going to realize you set the wrong goal, but it will at least scope the work. And that's the important decision to make here.

Jim James (06:37)
And think, Finn, what you're really illustrating is your product background, right? They say the learnings that you got from some of those FMCG brands is coming through. I don't mind to tell you that what I saw from you on YouTube, for example, is very focused and very clear. And now I'm understanding the strategy behind that, right? And I think maybe that's one of the key points to call out is that it's not a coincidence when someone is successful.

Right? It's not a random act of luck.

Finn Mckenty (07:08)
Well, like, I mean, it can be. It can be. There are people that I know a lot of them, you know, so I have a lot of sort of background in the music world and the number of those people like they're not calculated people for the most part. Some of them are. But most of them are just like naturally talented people who. It happened for them, you know, and there are other people who do all the same things and it doesn't work for them. And, you know, a lot of it is just luck.

However, I wouldn't use that as a reference. I wouldn't leave it up to luck.

Jim James (07:45)
And I think most of us need to think about strategy, right? And there isn't going to be enough luck in the world. And some, as you say, have got a natural talent and get found, but most of us have to go looking for the business. Finn, let's then talk about this sort of creative strategy first, because you've mentioned you can go in different ways. So maybe what we do is let's touch on sort of case A, case B, where you might go in the fork in the road. And then after that, let's look at

Finn Mckenty (07:57)
Exactly.

Jim James (08:14)
if you like channel selection, because I think for most of us, it's really bewildering, right? And we're getting confused by the number of channels and the number of automations and the content creation with AI. It's really overwhelming. So I'm really looking forward to hearing your view there.

Finn Mckenty (08:30)
It is, yeah. But it doesn't have to be. It's like anything else in business. Like once you understand it, you realize that 90% of this is just noise and you can just ignore it. And you know, the core levers that actually drive results are very simple. For entrepreneurs, it's not 100% true. But broadly speaking, I think YouTube

and LinkedIn are the two best channels for any sort of entrepreneur who especially wants to build a personal brand or a thought leadership brand. I think those are the two best channels and I'll explain why and sort of how you can make that decision. So broadly speaking, you could think of, know, if you if you go to your one of your two by two matrixes, you know, that you might see from, you know, any sort of consulting group or something.

Think of it as two axes. On one side, you have audience size from small to large. On the other one, you have audience intent from low to high. And so if you combine those, there's basically two viable strategies. There is a large audience with low intent and there is small audience with high intent. There are a handful of people who have a large audience with high intent, but

those are like freak out liars. And I would encourage like, don't, if you want to go there, go for it. But I would say maybe set your sights a little bit lower first before you try to do that. But so those are you sort of, and you're the nature of your business and the goals that you set will tell you which one of those strategies is viable for you. So for example, if you are, if you do professional services, you know, let's say you're an attorney or

Jim James (09:57)
Hey

Finn Mckenty (10:18)
you know, a graphic designer or something like that. There's a limit to the to your capacity. And so sort of by by the nature of your business, you you you only want a small, highly qualified audience. There's always exceptions to these, but this sort of for the most part, that's true. So in that case, I would say LinkedIn is usually the better option because especially if it's B2B, LinkedIn is the place

where you're going to find the B2B audience. And you can have a great business there with no more than a couple thousand people in your network, which is totally attainable for anybody entirely possible. Like, again, let's say you, let's say that you're a consultant of some kind and you have 2000 people in your network. How many clients do you really need a year to have a good business for most people? Probably 10 or something like that. So can you find 10 people out of the thousands in your network? For sure.

Absolutely. And now, as soon as I say that, I hope that there's people listening to this to sort of breathe a sigh of relief. I'm like, yeah, if I had like 1800 people on my network, can I peel off 10 of those a year for my company? Yeah, I could do that. Right.

Jim James (11:34)
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think, Finn, you know, that what we're trying to do on this show is to give people reassurance and to cut through that clutter. And to have someone as successful as you giving really very practical advice is fantastic because there are so many gurus that are trying to turbocharge by selling you software or whatever, right?

Finn Mckenty (11:40)
Yep. Yep.

I mean, I should probably do that. Unfortunately, I'm too honest.

Jim James (11:57)
Well, those do burn out because eventually people realize that they don't work. So that's fantastic. As you say, to be rational about the number of clients that you really need and that you can get them from within LinkedIn, you're going to need a content strategy, I think probably. And that's where we move on.

Finn Mckenty (12:02)
Yeah.

Yes. Now, so let's, so let's talk about the other strategy, which is the large audience, low intent one. So that's generally going to be more applicable to people who have a B2C business. For example, let's say you sell t-shirts or, you know, any other kind of like consumer item like that, or maybe you have like a consumer SaaS app or something like that. Could you, and so you need thousands of users,

you know, of active users, paying users to have a good business. Can you find thousands of consumer users for a B2C app on LinkedIn? Maybe. But you you can just sort of intuitively realize it's not really the best channel fit. Or if you want to sell books or anything where there's like high volume, YouTube is generally going to be the better option because YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users. Literally, everybody is on there.

However, it's not a great fit for B2B, which is this is a sort of a misunderstanding that a lot of people run into. Generally not a good fit for B2B because YouTube is a consumer entertainment app. At the end of the day, people go on there and now they have 2.7 billion users. So literally everybody has a YouTube account, including, let's say, the people who hire you are CMOs or something like that. Does the CMO of whatever Unilever have a YouTube account?

For sure, but she's probably watching something about gardening or formula one or whatever she's into when she's on YouTube, just like you are not necessarily going on there to research like whatever  enterprise cloud vendors. Right. So it, there are always exceptions to these things, but generally speaking, that's how I would think about this.

Jim James (14:00)
Okay. And can I just dive in there quickly? You haven't mentioned Facebook. You haven't mentioned Instagram, Pinterest. I'm interested in that because, for example, people selling courses, there's this view that you need to be in Facebook and trying to gather by posting into groups and trying to connect with people and so on. It's very labor intensive, to be honest.

Finn Mckenty (14:24)
Yep. Well, I've been selling courses since 2013 and probably sold about $15 million of them. So I know a thing or two about that.

Jim James (14:32)
Yeah. so, I mean, I don't want to necessarily down a rabbit hole of courses only, but what's your view on Facebook then?

Finn Mckenty (14:38)
I think. If you have the resources to be everywhere on every channel, you should do it. It is better to be on every channel if you can. However, very few people are in that position because now you have to have a team. You got to hire people and to, know, to have like again, I'm speaking in broad terms here, but I'm speaking like, for example, the CEO of Creative Live, there were four of us on his content team.

And we posted everywhere we optimized for, would say like YouTube was probably the thing we opt on and Instagram. But we were everywhere and there were four of us all making six figures that's expensive. Plus there's, know, the costs of travel and stuff like that. So probably spent a million dollars a year on that. I would, I would roughly estimate, and if you have a million dollars a year and you want to invest in that, I think that's actually a great, I think that's a very good investment, but

Jim James (15:25)
Wow. Okay.

Finn Mckenty (15:34)
most people listening to this probably don't have that kind of resources. Therefore you got to pick your battles. And the reason that I would optimize for YouTube, in that scenario, in which, you want to build a really large audience is specifically because it has the best recommendation engine, of any app. Like when you go to the homepage, you know, we've all seen that, like think about how people use YouTube. You're making lunch or folding laundry or something like that. You know, like, okay, I got 15 minutes

to kill to have something on the background. You open up your phone or the TV, scroll through it and find something you're, okay, cool. I'll put that on and listen to it in background. That is how people, that's how you get discovered. And my channel, you know, gets two or 3 million views a month. 80% of those come from the homepage. And it doesn't take, I don't have to do all that stuff of posting in groups and rah rah rah and all that sort of like growth hacky kind of stuff. YouTube does the work for you.

Now, TikTok and Instagram will also do that because they have very good recommendation engines. However, short form video is not a high quality format on any on any platform, whether that's shorts, TikTok, Reels, LinkedIn is doing it now. It is not a high quality platform. And I'll explain why. Number one, it doesn't make any money, which for, you know, entrepreneurs, maybe you don't care. But I mean, I made two hundred fifty thousand dollars last year from YouTube AdSense, so it can be a

meaningful amount of money. And shorts don't monetize like that. So I have shorts with say 400,000 views and I make like literally $20 from them. Now, maybe you don't care about that, like, but I don't care. I just want to build my personal brand and drive people to my offer. Well, there's a problem there too. Short form video is inherently like a passive, like entertainment format where you just sit there and doom scroll and swipe through stuff, right? Like, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope. That's how we use it. So

the consequences of that are number one, people don't even know what they're watching. They might watch like they don't like ask somebody who likes TikTok, who are your favorite creators? They won't even know the name. They'll be like, that girl that chops vegetables. Yeah. Yeah. And if you just want to be famous, great.

Jim James (17:36)
So.

you know, it's a blur, isn't it? It's a blizzard of content. Yeah, it's a blizzard of content, isn't it? Really, it's all just snow going across the screen.

Finn Mckenty (17:52)
Like if that's your goal is just to be like really well known to be famous. Cool. But I don't think that's the case with the people listening to this. So it's not going to build brand for you. And it's also not going to drive traffic off the app because users don't want to leave TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Like they don't want to, but they're not going to go click in your bio. Like, yes, I understand that some people make that work, but it's a very small number of people is hard. YouTube long form is a different matter because

we all know that pattern of like link and description or now you can put a QR code in the video. People know that they use it. It works. So you're able to peel people off and send them down your funnel. So imagine you're getting say 50 or a hundred thousand views a month, which is that is a lot, but that's not that hard to do. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's totally attainable. And all those are coming from the YouTube recommendation algorithm via the homepage.

It takes the same amount of money or same amount of effort to make a video that gets a hundred thousand views as one that gets a thousand views Right. So you're getting all this all the all this traffic or all these impressions from YouTube and then Whatever 1% of those people click through so you get a hundred thousand views a month. You're dropping a thousand people on the top of your funnel. Would that change your business? I bet it would.

Jim James (19:13)
Absolutely, I think that's fantastic. So A, that's also reassuring because we're talking about reduction in number of channels and also by, to some degree, discounting shorts as something to spend your time making, right? That's one less thing to worry about. But Finn, we then maybe want to look at, you've got your LinkedIn platform and you've got your YouTube platform. Do you want to just take us through

maybe the different content strategies, because as you say, you've got those in the right, which is a smaller number, high intent, probably higher purchase value as well in LinkedIn, right? And the higher volume, lower intent, probably lower purchase value in YouTube. So could you maybe take us through the two different content strategies?

Finn Mckenty (19:48)
Yep. Yep.

So the most important part of this, this again, if anybody's ever worked sort of in the branding world or worked on product, this will probably sound familiar to you. The first step that I work with people on is to create their personal narrative. And this is true whether it's YouTube or LinkedIn, it doesn't matter. So I think of it as a three-step narrative at the end of which if we've convinced somebody that all three of these things are true, then they're ready to do business with us. Meaning buy the product, book a discovery call, whatever it is.

So the first part of it is what I call a differentiated point of view, which is you say like an undeniable truth about the world and like specifically my industry is blank. So for me, it would be that opportunity goes to people who are visible, not necessarily people who deserve it. And their reaction to that is going to be like, damn, that's true, isn't it? Like you just can't. It's true. You might not like it, but it's not true. There's or some people don't want to hear it and they're going to.

Jim James (20:48)
Yep, it is true.

Finn Mckenty (20:55)
Kick and scream and say, no, no, no, you're wrong. You're crazy. I don't like you. Fine. That's, that's okay. We've we're, filtering them in or out. And once they've accepted this sort of worldview, then they're ready for the next thing. Like, damn, that's true. You're right. Like visibility is that's the thing I need. Isn't it? Like, yes. so like, okay, well how then the next step is the mindset shift, which is here's like the mental switch you need to flip in order to be successful. Given the thing that I just told you.

So for me, that's the importance of building a personal brand. So if visibility is the oxygen for opportunity, that means you need to build a personal brand for yourself. And this is true whether you're a full-time employee, consultant, entrepreneur, it doesn't matter because as we all know, job security, like let's say, I know people listening to this are entrepreneurs, but I bet a lot of them also have day jobs too. And as we all know, like job security does not exist. You are a row on a spreadsheet. The moment that the company decides,

you were no longer like value positive there for them, you're right or wrong, this how it is. So you need to build a personal brand for yourself. That's the mindset shift. And they okay. And you know, my con and your content will reinforce all these things. So my content on LinkedIn will persuade them that this is true. Like, okay, cool. Like, you're right. I need to do this. How? And then that tees up the last part of it, which is the capability shift, which is now that you've decided

that you need to build a personal brand for yourself. How do you do that? For me, it is that I believe LinkedIn and YouTube are the best places to do that for all the reasons that we just discussed. And once I persuade them that that's true, then they're like, okay, I this needs to rise to the top of my priority stack. Let's do this. Can we get on a call and talk about like, tell me how you do this. And by the time they get on that call, they're halfway closed.

Jim James (22:43)
I love that.

Yeah, and I think that what's really interesting as you say is you're helping them to clarify what they want to do with some key questions as opposed to trying to saddle soak them with no like trust, which is okay, but actually you're getting them to take distinct decisions about where they are, which is much more concrete than the no like and trust is a little bit ephemeral really, isn't it?

Finn Mckenty (23:07)
Right, right.

Jim James (23:14)
And you are getting them to make decisions. yes, I mean, I'm a binary yes, no. And then if I'm a yes, I'm the next one. Yes. And yes. Right.

Finn Mckenty (23:20)
Right, Yep. And if you answered yes to all these three things, then it's just obvious what the next step is. And so, you and this is true for anybody. Like if, let's say you have a fitness app, there's a guy on YouTube that people may know, Dr. Mike Isretel from Renaissance Periodization. Like his thing, I would say like his differentiated point of view is that, that like evidence-based training

is, or the evidence based paradigm is the way to approach fitness rather than just asking the biggest guy at the gym, Hey, what do you do? He would say no. He has PhD in like exercise science. He would say, no, look at what the science says. You go, okay, that's true. Yeah. Cause like what were the biggest guy at the gym? Like maybe he just has good genetics. That wouldn't work for me. Like, okay. And then so like the mindset shift then for him would be something like

you know, rather than just sort of showing up and doing the same routine every day, you need to constantly be like evaluating your progress and asking yourself if you're doing the right thing. And you go, okay, that sounds right. How do I do that? And he would say, well, you need to have like a tracking system. And that happens to be what his app does. And so he's, he's led you down this journey at the end of which it's like, well, I guess I should try his app.

Jim James (24:27)
Right, and I think they're also

And I think also what you're saying, which is also one of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to do, is that you do need to take a stand, right? Well, and you need to take a position because I was just having a conversation with a client today, I'm doing some coaching myself. And he said, but if I do this, then I don't, I'm not relevant to this customer. So I'm keeping everything open. And actually, of course, by doing that, they're closed to everybody, right? And so.

Finn Mckenty (24:39)
Focus. Yep. Yep.

Yep.

Yeah, it's also untrue, many cases in which you think that by focusing that you were closing doors, it's actually untrue. For example, there's a design agency that I've been a fan of for a long time called Invisible Creature that they sort of, in the beginning of their career, they did a lot of music stuff. So, and now they're doing stuff for Target and Microsoft and Amazon and all these like, you know, Fortune 500 companies. Now you might think, well, by doing

posters for all these tiny rock bands, we've closed yourself off to working with Microsoft and Amazon and Target, right? But it's actually not true because the way that it works sort of in the design world is that the market, the CMO or the design manager, whoever at Target is like, I don't want somebody, I don't want another agency that does what like our normal corporate shit. I want somebody that's going to do something cool. Like those rock posters that you guys do, like do that for our Halloween campaign.

Jim James (25:57)
Yeah, exactly. So this idea of taking a stand on something, whatever it is, is the starting point. Thank you for that, Finn, because

Finn Mckenty (26:03)
Yes, it opens it opens way more doors. It will close some doors, but it opens way more doors and it closes.

Jim James (26:09)
and it closes the doors to the rooms that you don't really want to go into, right? Because otherwise you're out with a client that isn't really aligned with your vision and your capabilities, right? Can we move then to the next thing, which is about the content itself? So we've made that decision and you are straddling YouTube and LinkedIn. You're successful in both. Can you maybe give us some insight into your approach for

Finn Mckenty (26:12)
Exactly, exactly.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jim James (26:35)
for YouTube and LinkedIn because they are different beasts as you rightly identify.

Finn Mckenty (26:38)
Totally different. They're totally different. for entrepreneurs, the thing to understand is that people on YouTube are trying to think of the charitable way to put it is a very unsophisticated audience. And that's not a judgment. They just it just is what it is. So on LinkedIn, you could use a term like conversion or or like, you know, AOV or something like that. And people would understand that.

Nobody on YouTube knows what conversion is. And it's very easy, like for people on LinkedIn and people in sort of, like, it's very easy for all of us get trapped in our own little bubble and think that everyone knows what we know. They don't. The vast majority of people do not have white collar jobs where, you know, there's this, you know, if you work at a fortune 500 company and it's like, okay, you come in as an associate, then you're, you know, a manager, then you're a senior manager, then you're a director or VP, blah, blah. Like,

Everyone who has worked in that world knows that. But that's actually a tiny number of population. Like people don't know that stuff. People don't even know that you can negotiate a contract. People think that they slide a contract across to you and you're like, okay, I guess I have to sign this. They don't know that. No, no, no. Like getting the first contract is only the beginning. That doesn't really mean anything. You got to negotiate. And like, it doesn't count until the money hits your, to the wires in your bank account. So if you want to do YouTube, you have to

go much more broad and more basic and understand that they don't know anything that you know as an entrepreneur, which again, that's not a criticism of them. It's just, yeah, exactly.

Jim James (28:17)
It's an observation, though. You're absolutely right. And Chip and, you know Chip and Dan Heath, the brothers that wrote A Made to Stick, which is a great book. They talk about the curse of knowledge. Right?

Finn Mckenty (28:23)
Yep.

Exactly. Exactly. So you will be like on YouTube, you'll be shocked at the things people don't know. But again, that's because of the curse of knowledge. It's not the people using like they're not stupid. They're just not you.

Jim James (28:41)
Yeah, and I think that's a really good point to not be condescending and patronizing, but to be audience sensitive, right? And there are groups of people that, yeah, education, background, whatever, but we can still serve them, right? Because in fact, if you've got an offer that can serve those people, it's about meeting them where they are with the language and the visual content. And I noticed that with thumbnails, for example, now really it's just one or two words actually.

Finn Mckenty (28:49)
Exactly.

Exactly.

Yep. Yep.

Jim James (29:10)
Often juxtaposed with a face or an image and bright colors. Whereas, yeah.

Finn Mckenty (29:14)
Yeah. So so let's talk about that, because this is the same on you. Like, I think YouTube and LinkedIn are the creative decisions you'll make are the same, just sort of the output is different. So like the thumbnail and title on YouTube are the same creative challenge as a hook on LinkedIn. And the goal of both of these is how do you stop the scroll? Right. So someone scrolling through the LinkedIn feed or their YouTube homepage, whatever it is like.

How do you get them to notice you stop, click on it and go into it? Because it doesn't matter how good your content is, if they don't click on it, they don't know. So in both of those situations, would think of it as imagine that you have a dial and on that dial, you're selecting the emotion that you want the audience to feel. Whether that is amusement or desire or fear or whatever it is, they're all potentially valid, but they got to feel something. If they don't feel anything, you're done

because humans work on emotion, right? So that's where on LinkedIn, it's that first line of your post, and then you can click see more like that's, that's where you're to do this work on YouTube. It's that title and thumbnail. And so on YouTube, in particular, the combination of thumbnail and title and having those work together is like a real art of sort of reinforcing those. So for example, you know, if you had a video,

about sort of the importance of like visibility for entrepreneurs. Maybe it would be called something like 95% of small businesses fail. This is why. And then in the thumbnail, it would say something like, you know, they're invisible or something like that.

Jim James (30:59)
Right. So interesting there, the interplay between the headline of the YouTube and the thumbnail, right? Then they work together, they complement each other as opposed to be two isolated creative moments, right?

Finn Mckenty (31:10)
Exactly, exactly. And that's like a whole crate of muscle to develop. it's, it's, it's a real art. And it takes time. So just like anything else, don't expect that you're going to be good at it on day one.

Jim James (31:23)
Very, very interesting that, the, on, on LinkedIn, we still need the, the, the first line that gets people hooked. And then maybe there's an image and there's some text, but again, maybe the, the reading level. And I know if you use Grammarly, for example, it says, you know, this is for a college grade person. And I sometimes read it and go, well, crikey if it's, you I can't make the words any shorter really, you know, but you know, you sort of think, okay, I better make it into sort of

Finn Mckenty (31:31)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Jim James (31:53)
or three syllables only, right? But as you rightly identify, you need to also have the emotional engagement that you want to activate, right? Whether it's fear, judgment, greed, anxiety, that we have to think through that rather than just, I've got something I want to say on LinkedIn, I'm just going to put it out there, right? Which

Finn Mckenty (31:54)
Right. Right.

Right, Yep, yep.

Yep. And I'll give you a specific framework for this. It's not the only one, but it's a good one. So you're going to start with the thing you want to talk about. So let's say you do tax preparation and you want to talk about the importance of whatever. In the US, do like quarterly, if you're an entrepreneur, you're to do like quarterly estimated payments. Let's say you want to tell your clients, hey, you need to be making quarterly estimated payments.

That's not a very inherently interesting, know, that there's no emotional engagement to the idea of doing quarterly payments to save yourself a little bit of interest. So you put that's the thing you want to talk about, because for whatever reason, you've decided that's important to your business. So what you need to do is figure out how do you wrap that in the context of something that is emotionally engaging? And so I would say

getting audited by the IRS is extremely terrifying. And everybody that makes a lot of money lives in fear of it, because the more money you make, the more likely it is that you're going to get audited. So I would you know, you could say something like that. You could say something like, you know, people who make over x dollars a year are y percent more likely to get audited by the IRS.

Jim James (33:18)
Yeah

Finn Mckenty (33:43)
And me as an entrepreneur that makes over that much amount of money, I'm going to really go, shit, really? That's not good. I'm going to click see more and they're going to say, so, you know, you should do the, there's a lot of things you should do to reduce your likelihood of audit. One of those is quarterly payments. Here's how you do it.

Jim James (34:01)
Nice, nice. So bedding that in an emotional anxiety in that particular case, but it could be about a love or whatever, but going to that stimulation and then actually your offer is downstream of the original hook, right? And I think most of us, me included, we get that wrong where we leave with the information and kind of almost completely forget the emotional side, especially in LinkedIn, you sometimes think, is it

Finn Mckenty (34:11)
Yeah, yeah, doesn't. Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

Yes. So, so what.

Jim James (34:31)
Is that appropriate in LinkedIn because it's a business platform? But what you're saying is in LinkedIn, need to do it as well.

Finn Mckenty (34:36)
people are people. Yeah, people humans are humans. Like they don't change. I mean, we've all anybody that's in B2B like the like, think about your buyers like are your buyers like perfectly rational robots? Of course not. Like they make decisions. Like for example, lots of people make purchasing decisions B2B because they don't want to look bad to their boss because they you know, like they don't want to pick the wrong thing and sign the company up to a shady contract and then they're like, Hey, Jim.

Why'd you sign us up for this piece of shit CRM that we're stuck with for the next three years?

Jim James (35:10)
Exactly. Everyone wants to avoid that. And as you say, there's peer pressure and all the politics around purchasing as well, right? it's still

Finn Mckenty (35:14)
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And like, if it's over this amount of money, I got to get it approved by a director and the director is a fucking dick and I don't want to talk to him. So, you know, all this kind of like very human stuff that has nothing to do with like the spec sheet and blah, blah, blah. They don't. Yes, they care about that stuff. But like they care way more about the fact that every time they talk to this director, he's a fucking asshole to him and they're afraid they're going to get fired. So if you can, if you're like

Jim James (35:28)
Yeah, so that's a

Yeah, and and.

Finn Mckenty (35:42)
Hey, well, actually, we can structure the agreement such that it's under that threshold where you need to get a director to approve it. And you're like, you can? OK, great. Let's do this.

Jim James (35:51)
That's right. We'll sell it to you quarterly instead of in one lump sum. Finn, that's wonderful. And then I do want to touch on the issue of how much this costs. We did talk about some of the people have got big teams and so on and they become really businesses in their own right. They're a personal brand with the business. Not to dwell too long, but you've obviously built a very large following on both platforms. You don't have to me how much you spend, but,

Finn Mckenty (35:55)
Yeah, exactly, Exactly.

Jim James (36:21)
I just want to also give people, okay, if you want just reassure people that this is affordable, you know, it's about creativity.

Finn Mckenty (36:22)
I'll tell you exactly how much I spent. Yeah.

Yeah. So this background right here is a piece of foam core that I paid about $4 for. The camera that I'm using right now is a Panasonic GH5 that I got in like 2019 or something like that. You'd probably get it used on eBay now for 400 bucks or something. This microphone is kind of expensive, but that's because it was a gift. You don't need this one. You can get a cheaper one. So I would say that I probably spent less than $2,000 in total on all the gear I use for YouTube. And that's, that's it. I

I don't want to say how much I pay my editors because that's sort of their business, but it's less than you would think. I will say that broadly speaking, you could expect to pay around 20 or 30 dollars per minute of finished video if you want to pay someone else to do it. So it can be a little bit expensive, but given the returns, I would say it's probably worth it. Or if you do it yourself, that's an option, too.

But you you think like so you could have a fully scale. Let's let's put it this way. My YouTube channel that gets two or three million views a month. I spend less than two thousand dollars a month on editing for that. Let's put it that way.

Jim James (37:39)
So the ROI on that is phenomenal. How often do you post to your YouTube weekly? One show, one piece of content per week. And we'll of course put a link to Finn's YouTube channel and his LinkedIn in there.

Finn Mckenty (37:43)
Weekly

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, but put like, like to my LinkedIn. Yeah, they don't they're not going to care about my YouTube channel. But and LinkedIn is like, it's free. Like you don't need anything other than, you know, your phone and some sort of cheap design software like Canva or figmas free, which is what I use. Canva probably has a free version. I don't know. That's all that's all you need.

Jim James (38:14)
Yeah, it does, yeah, and think that's really, really useful to hear that someone who is as successful as you, it is a function of your approach and getting people to make a decision, stand for something, you know, and then to agree with you about that. That's the bit that, and that's free to do, right? That's free to do, but it

Finn Mckenty (38:29)
Yep. That's the part that matters the most. Yep, that's free. Exactly. Exactly. Spending more money on production will not help is a complete waste. Like once you get past the point of like good enough, every dollar you spend after that is a waste.

Jim James (38:44)
Yeah, diminishing returns, right? So that's a really, really useful, Finn. let's just think as we move towards the end of our conversation, is there, if you like, one mistake that I don't like to embarrass anybody, but I like to sort of a learning. As entrepreneurs, it's as useful, right, to hear what someone's done that didn't work as what is working, because often many of us are doing the things that aren't working without knowing. So one sort of piece of advice or

Finn Mckenty (38:58)
I've embarrassed myself plenty.

Jim James (39:14)
mistake you made.

Finn Mckenty (39:15)
Yeah, so the very beginning of my YouTube channel was a totally different focus than what it has now. So like, if you look at it now, it's like basically music history, which is the thing I know a lot about. It's not necessarily my passion, but I know a lot about it. At the beginning, I was talking about entrepreneurship, but at the time, and I think my content was fine, but I did it for, I don't know, nine months or something like that. And nobody really cared.

And the reason why is because I did not have any credibility as an entrepreneur at that time. And why would anybody listen to me talk about this stuff rather than Gary Vaynerchuk or Alex Hormozi or, you know, pick the other person that has far more, like literally a million times more credibility than I, than I did, especially at that time as an entrepreneur, why would anybody listen to me about that? And it was a little bit of a blow to my ego to sort of admit that to myself. But there's a lot of,

a lot of times in business where you have two choices. You can do what works or you can do what's going to stroke your ego. You pick and you know, I'm happy to, I want to do what works. And if that means, you know, sort of eating a little bit of humble pie, then so be it. So I would say that's a mistake that I made that I see a lot of other people make too, is sort of like trying to force something on the audience. Like you don't get to decide what they want.

Jim James (40:21)
Yeah.

Finn Mckenty (40:41)
Like you can, you can sort of ride the wave, but it's same as like, you can't push against the river. You can ride it, but you can't change the way the river's flowing.

Jim James (40:47)
Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that, for their sharing that. And as you say, often as entrepreneurs, we get our ego involved and of course then we feel like it's perseverance and resilience is on display and sometimes it's obstinacy. Yeah. it's, there's a great book by Annie, somebody called Quit, isn't there? About knowing when, Annie Duke, her name is Quit. It's called Knowing When to Come Down from the Mountain.

Finn Mckenty (41:04)
Sometimes that's true. Yep.

Yeah. Right. Right.

Yeah, and Seth Godin has a book about that too called The Dip. I haven't read either one of them, but I know they're both popular.

Jim James (41:20)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, the Annie Duke book is really good. But Finn, Finn McKenty, this is fantastic. Is there's a number one tip that you would give to entrepreneurs that are not visible enough? You know, very few, you've mentioned a couple of them are visible enough, because business goes to them, right? But for most of us, we're, we're seekers. If there's a number one tip, what would it be?

Finn Mckenty (41:47)
I'm going to assume that this is a B2B sort of scenario. So if that's not true for you, then disregard this. But even then, still, the number one tip would be post on LinkedIn three times a week and do these three posts on Monday. Give your commentary on something that's happening in your industry. Like if some company just got acquired or, you know, a product just came out that everyone's talking about, say

Here's, you hey, you probably saw that company XYZ got acquired. Here's my two cents. Do that on Monday. On Wednesday, give them a how to tip on something that you know how to do. So again, if you say if you do tax prep, say, hey, you probably know that you should be making quarterly payments, but you might not be sure how to do it. Here's how. And then on Friday, do a personal story, do a story from your life or career.

that you learned some sort of business lesson from. Like the first time I got fired was, you know, when I was 22 years old, right out of college, here's what I did wrong. And ever since then I've told myself, I'm never going to make that mistake again. Do those three posts on LinkedIn and that will, move the needle a lot more than you think.

Jim James (43:06)
Thank you very much indeed. I must take that to heart because I've been doing two posts on a Tuesday and Thursday. So I'm going to have to look and see how I get it there.

Finn Mckenty (43:14)
See, if you do three posts a week now, you will be a billionaire by next week, I guarantee it.

Jim James (43:19)
I'm signing, I'm going to go back and do some retrospective posting. Finn, we did mention a couple of books, book or podcast that you would recommend or you found really useful?

Finn Mckenty (43:25)
That'll do the trick.

I, the podcast I would recommend is called Econ talk, which is about economics. It's like a, you know, sort of in between popular and academic podcast, I would say. So, you know, the host is getting Russ Roberts, who's like an income professor and he'll bring on a lot of academics, but talk about it in terms that are accessible to regular people. But I would say not. It was definitely not for economics. It's definitely not dumbed down. Like he would start the show being like,

Jim, welcome to the show. You've done some very interesting work operationalizing internal states, such as, you know, self-esteem and reported happiness. Can you give us a little bit of background on how you did that and what some of your most successful instruments are? And the reason I like this show is because at the end of the day, economics is about trade-offs and incentives. It's like, what are the trade-offs here to be made and how do we incentivize people to make the trade-off in the way that we believe is best,

which is like that's business. That's just life in general. And it's the study of trade-offs. And I think he has a lot of really, really great conversations there. So that's the one I would pick.

Jim James (44:43)
Thank you so much. And final question, how can people get hold of you?

Finn Mckenty (44:48)
You can search for my name, Finn McKenty. You can go to FinnMcKenty.com or you can look me up on LinkedIn, you pick.

Jim James (44:54)
Thank you.

Finn McKenty, thank you. I've been watching you on LinkedIn and also seeing on YouTube. a real pleasure to be able to have you on my microphone. And of course, it's my pleasure. I will be sharing this on LinkedIn and also on YouTube. Well, I'm very, very delighted to hear that. So thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

Finn Mckenty (45:05)
Thank you so much for having me.

So will I.

No problem. It's been a miserable experience.

Jim James (45:20)
Thank you. Well, I'll have you put that on YouTube as well. You heard it here. Being with me is a miserable express. I'm sure that my wife would agree with that. Finn, thank you for coming. And I think for those of listening, we've really been given a masterclass. We've been talking for 45 minutes and it hasn't felt like more than a few minutes. I think the key takeaway that I'd love you to have is that start with taking a position because everything downstream from that is reliant on Finn's first question.

Finn Mckenty (45:46)
Mm-hmm.

Jim James (45:50)
Take a position, make sure you can justify that position, of course, make it robust, and then live with that position.

Finn Mckenty (45:58)
you'll know that that's the right stance to take when you realize you have no choice but to take that stance. It's like, well, you believe water is wet, right? Like, well, yeah, I mean, it is.

Jim James (46:12)
And that's the first part of your funnel of moving your content and people to you. So as you know, this show is all about finding interesting and inspiring people. And I think you'll agree, we'd be very lucky to have Finn on the show today. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do share it with a fellow UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Leave a review. As you know, we don't leave anyone left unnoticed. And until we meet again, thank you for joining me, Jim James on the unnoticed entrepreneur.