A hundred thousand views in a town of 35,000

A reel with a hundred thousand views feels like winning. Then you look at the town. Long Beach has 35,000 people. Millennials are 7,000 of them. And not everybody in that 7,000 wants to work out, and the ones who do are split between the gym, Pilates, yoga, functional training, running and sports. The number keeps getting smaller.

So the reel did well. The bookings did not move. That gap is what this episode is about, along with the systems I use so the work still gets done while I am walking the beach.

The workshop offer, and why it is free

Bridge Works is the community space. Remote workers, solo freelancers, small teams. Wellness Connect is the other brand, a directory of wellness and fitness businesses. Think of Classpass, except instead of searching for a class you are searching for offers. Five facials instead of one. A gym membership. Whatever the business is putting out there.

To bring users to the platform, we run events. You get the space. You get the parking. You pay nothing. You decide what to charge. We build the flyer, build the landing page, run the ads, handle the registrations, and film the whole thing so you walk away with photos and clips you can use later.

3:56

“We're gonna promote the event for you. You just do the event.”

Then your event sits on our site, people book through us, they follow us on Instagram, and the brand gets exposed. More users means more businesses want their offers listed. That is the whole strategy. I find business owners in my network and ask them if they want to run a workshop.

A chatbot answers. An agent works.

Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude are chatbots. You talk to them, you get an answer, and it forgets. That is fine for what is the weather, or how should I reply to my friend. It is not a system.

25:56

“Think of that as employees.”

Mine is video editing. That is the bottleneck of my business. With ten clients there is only so much time I can give each one. Double that and the business breaks, because the editing doubles with it. But the editing barely changes. A reel is a reel. A podcast is a podcast.

26:46

“The bottleneck of my business is the video editing.”

So I built Sophia. After a podcast I drop the footage from both cameras into a folder. Sophia sees two new files and sends me a notification on Telegram asking if I want the multicam edited. I say yes and go live my life. A couple of hours later it is done and waiting for review. I approve it, or I tell her to cut a section and she edits again. Then she asks if I want the reels, finds seven she thinks are worth posting, cuts them, adds the captions, and posts to YouTube and Instagram on the schedule I set. Reels Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7pm. YouTube every Monday at 7pm.

Scout calls, Tessa texts

The same idea runs the front of the business. Scout finds businesses that fit the client I want. I give it a category and a zip code and a radius, and it comes back with a list. Google Maps works for that. Apify gives you more curated data if you want it.

Then there is a voice agent that calls the list and asks for the owner. Hi, my name is Sophia, I am an AI assistant, do you have thirty seconds. Tessa sends the text messages. You are texting without consent, so you change how you write it: this is an automated text asking if you are interested in content creation, reply stop to opt out. Another one sends the Instagram DMs. Doctors offices already text you for a review with a link after your appointment. This is the same thing, pointed at your pipeline.

One more thing about working with these tools. I get upset at them. I yell. When I asked Claude to tell my guest about it, it said there is no record of me being abusive, which is a lie. They are trained to agree with you. Say you must stop, or you made a mistake, and they change course and apologise. What actually annoys me is repeating myself, the same way it annoys me when a creative team comes back twice with work for the wrong campaign.

Views are the wrong number for a local business

Views are a metric Instagram uses to measure how long you stay on the platform. They want you on the platform. That is not the same as your goal.

44:58

“From the 35,000 people, millennials are just 7,000.”

If I open a gym and I am a millennial owner posting millennial content, the only people who really get me are that 7,000, minus everyone who is not interested in training, minus everyone already committed somewhere else. A hundred thousand views feels like crushing it. It is not booked work.

47:47

“You shouldn't be thinking about views at all, at all.”

Breakout, saves and shares

One of my clients, Gabby, has her own set of agents. They publish the podcast to YouTube, Spotify and Apple, write the newsletter from the blog post, send it to the subscribers and report back on how it did. Then they give her a content report, and there are no views in it at all.

What is in it is breakout: how often a topic reached more accounts than she has followers. Plus saves and shares. Breakout, the way I see it, matters more than views, and Instagram analytics will not tell you that by topic. Meta tells you which post did well. This tells you which subject did well across everything you posted.

For Gabby, running and training reaches people who do not follow her. Eating disorders does the same. Body image and diet culture after that. ADHD and hormones do not, at least not for followers. Her goal is followers, so those are the three topics to spend time on.

Your goal decides your content

If the goal is followers, the analytics mean one thing. If the goal is bookings, they mean something else. Same numbers, different read. This is what I do with clients. I show them the report and say, you told me you want more bookings, so here are the three topics, we are going in that direction. You are your own CEO, you take the direction you want. My job is to tell you what the content strategy should be.

And there is a reason the honest content is harder. In fitness the principles never change. Train consistently, stick to the routine. It is boring, it does not get views, so people start posting the one specific move for your biceps because that travels. In real life everything is a grey area and everything depends, and that is not the answer that gets shares.