Glossary
The words, as Tom uses them
20 terms from the playbooks, each one line.
- Authority
- A personal brand that has already done the thing and teaches from it.
- Builder
- A personal brand in the trenches, documenting the journey while it happens.
- Clip bank
- One long recording turned into a bank of short clips, each one idea at 40 to 75 seconds, mapped beat by beat and handed to an editor as a ticket.
- Creator audit
- Scrape the last 30 posts, find the median, the ratio and the outliers, bucket the formats, then say what to make next.
- Creator Hotline
- A format where a creator sends a voice note with a question and Tom answers it properly, lit and on proper cameras, as a real service.
- Creator Therapy
- The hero long form format: a real creator brings a real problem and it gets taken apart properly, problem, diagnosis and fix.
- Fake pod
- A podcast built for the clip: real answers to questions written in advance, recorded in one sitting in a studio, with a guest who is there to ask.
- Formats over ideas
- A repeatable format beats a one-off story, because the audience can guess what comes next. Repeat it until it becomes a show.
- Mission and enemy
- What a brand is for, and what it is against. The enemy is the shortcut to the mission.
- One person, one problem
- The five beats of a top of funnel video: one person, one problem, authority, one solution, then follow.
- Outlier
- A post past three times the median views of the last 30. The outlier is the brief for what to make next.
- Overwhelm the algorithm
- Volume first, refine second. Every post is a shot on goal, and 80% of the way five times a day out-learns 100% three times a week.
- Recording day
- One booked studio, one person asking and a bank of questions written in advance, turned into clips and tickets.
- Retainer kickoff
- The plan written the night a client signs: one goal for 90 days, a baseline for every number and a name against every step.
- Selfie video
- Phone, front camera, one argument. The top of funnel format and the spine of the content engine, also called a yap video.
- The eight things
- Six to eight messages a person says over and over, a hundred different ways, until people know what they stand for.
- The messy middle
- The ground between builder and authority, where a personal brand says both things at once and stalls.
- Top, middle and bottom of funnel
- The job a format does. The top brings people in, the middle keeps them, the bottom sells.
- Trial reels
- Instagram's test posts, run two a day on top of three feed posts to test hooks, with the winners moved to the feed.
- Views per follow
- Views divided by follows for each post, the metric Tom uses most. A follow is the biggest signal short of a sale.