The A/B Test Quest

Happy Thursday!

Before we begin, I just revamped my referral program! So if you know people that might like this awesome, free, ad-free newsletter full of business ideas and growth advice, please forward it along using the tool at the bottom of this email, and you’ll get:

1. 3 referrals - my 4,000+ word cold emailing tactical guide

2. 6 referrals - 15 min one on one Zoom with me. Ask me anything!

3. 10 referrals - 30 min one on one Zoom with me.

Ok, let’s get straight to it!

I got a lot of great feedback about my email from last week, and a few of you even started that business already! That’s awesome!

I’ve got another agency idea today that is very fresh on my mind. Here’s why this idea is viable:

Podcasts are notoriously hard to grow. Podcasts don’t go viral, and they don’t lend well to paid ads. So you really, really need external traffic if you want them to grow. Short form video is great for this, which is why I just started with short form this year, to promote the podcast!

BUT, there’s no way of know what parts of any given podcast episode are the most interesting. I can guess, and sometimes I’m right, but usually I’m not.

Yesterday I recorded an episode where we spoke about 5 business ideas:

1. Bulk grill cleaning

2. A private gym only for personal trainers

3. An all-natural packet of honey and salt for endurance athletes

4. This idea I’m talking about in this email

5. Re-selling home service leads that you source from where and why contractors are pulling permits.

Which one of these ideas draws the clicks? Because I can’t title the podcast “Grill cleaning, WeWork for gyms, honey packets, podcast idea and home service leads.”

A: That title is way too busy.
B: You can’t explain why an idea is brilliant in 3 words.

In my opinion, ideas become brilliant when you tie a brilliant distribution (AKA sales) strategy to them.

That’s a framework of mine: I lead with a distribution strategy, and the idea follows. And I think that’s one reason why my podcast and newsletter are different, because I actually tie the idea to a way to execute it and be successful at it.

That can’t happen in a 60 character podcast or YouTube title.

So I need to test. But I haven’t been testing! I just guess which one is coolest and lead with that. But if you don’t find that 1 idea interesting, but 1 of the other 4 ARE interesting, you’ll never know, because you didn’t click.

And no, this isn’t only the case with podcasts that talk about business ideas, but any podcast or YouTube video. Episodes have thousands or 10s of thousands of words. Which ones resonate?

You need to test.

Ok, I’ve explained the problem, here’s the solution, and then the distribution strategy.

There needs to be an agency that does bulk A/B tests of podcast clips on separate social accounts.

Podcast agencies are a thing
A/B testing agencies are a thing

No one is putting them together…but they should.

A couple days ago I created a new IG, TT and YT Shorts channel. The sole purpose of these channels is to A/B test promotional ideas for my podcast.

When I record an episode, I have a full 1-3 weeks to test concepts before it goes live. Making a separate channel for clips of a podcast is not new, but doing this for the sole purpose of testing to a cold audience is new, what what I’ve researched.

I won’t try to grow these channels, they are only to be used as a testing playground, to see what the algorithm does and how strangers react to what I’m saying.

So I can do 1 of 2 things:

1. Use AI software to autogenerate clips from my podcast and post those

2. Hit record on my phone for 20 seconds and quickly record me talking about the business idea we covered in the episode. I would have to do this 4-7 times per episode to cover all of the ideas.

Regardless of which route I go, I post all 4-7 videos to all 3 platforms at the same time with the same

• Auto captions added to my speaking

• Exact same video caption, describing the content (right now I’m testing “Free business idea. Like this you like it and block me if you hate it.”

• No hashtags, nothing. I just rawdog post them all at the same time

• I wait a few days

At the end of the few days I learn

• Average watch time

• Average percentage viewed

• Average swipe though rate

• Likes per impression per video

• Total impressions per video

• Percentage of people commenting “i love it” or “i hate it.”

To be clear, these videos may likely only get 200-800 views, but that’s ok. That’s enough data for me.

The videos that win are the ones that decide how I promote that episode when it goes live. Make sense?

That’s an A/B test, if you didn’t know.

Here is the new YT Shorts channel so you can see what I’m doing for yourself. No need to subscribe, I’m just testing!

Pretty cool, right?

Once I learn which idea or topic resonates the most, I’ll make a proper short talking about it and post it to all 3 platforms, hoping it will perform really well.

I’ll use the same topic for the title, thumbnail, and promotional angle on Twitter.

Now, is this a viable business?

Yes. By my best guess, there are 5,000 - 15,000 podcasts that would afford to be able to pay $2,000 - $5,000 per month for a service like that.

That’s only 1-3% of all podcasts, because the vast majority of podcasts are small and don’t make any money, therefore, they aren’t likely to invest at a loss to grow.

You can find email lists of these podcasters on Upwork, or you can pay a VA to scrape them fresh.

Podcasters HAVE to list their email address with their distribution partner. (Buzzsprout, in my case). This is why I get so many cold emails from podcast agencies wanting to place other (boring) people on my podcast.

So this is a cold email play. You can also do it with YouTubers too, though. That is a much, much bigger market. The offer you give them is this:

1. I create separate clips channels for you

2. You provide me your raw video as soon as its recorded

3. I use AI to auto-generate clips and all b-roll, jump cuts and zooms.

4. I upload all those clips to these new channels.

5. I measure all of the metrics and report back to you what I learn.

If either:

1. The promotions of those episodes

2. The actual episodes themselves

Don’t perform above average over the first 90 days, then I give you all your money back. If this doesn’t actually work then you don’t actually have a business.

But it’ll work, and this costs basically nothing to launch.

You’ll need to use something like this or this to autogenerate the clips for very, very cheaply.

But I wouldn’t start a short form video editing agency with those tools above. I feel like you will be swimming upstream in that industry. Every 19 year old on the planet is in my DMs offering that right now, and it’s directly tied to revenue even less than this idea.

Then you can use the cold emailing guide you get when you refer 3 people to this newsletter (bottom of this email) to start promoting yourself, and use Carrd to make a website.

Good luck!

There are my top tweets from last week.

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Thanks for reading!

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner