Most people cranking out content feel like they’re on a hamster wheel, and this one is Jay Schwedelson basically turning his own burnout into a live strategy session with Caleb Ralston. They get into why copying 400-post-a-week creators is wrecking your brain, how to reverse engineer a cadence that actually fits your life, and what it really means for a personal brand to “work.” If you care more about leads, trust, and reputation than vanity metrics, this convo will mess with how you think about content in a good way.

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Check out Caleb’s free 6-hour-and-22-minute YouTube course on how to build your personal brand, grab the companion workbook by dropping your email, and use it to level up before you ever think about hiring a media team.

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Best Moments:

(00:16) Jay admits he “got the guy” behind some of the biggest personality-led brands because he wants to reverse engineer what actually works for personal brands.

(03:00) Caleb explains why copying top creators’ insane content routines is like trying to train like the greatest athlete on day one and guarantees you will quit.

(04:15) The low-volume, high-effort strategy that grew Caleb’s YouTube to over 50,000 subscribers from just seven videos by focusing on depth over constant posting.

(08:58) Breaking down the Brand Journey Framework so you finally define why you are building a personal brand and what success is supposed to look like.

(13:23) A behind-the-scenes example of a video designed with one job only: get talented creatives to DM Caleb so he can place them on client media teams.

(16:01) Why views and followers are useful signals but become dangerous distractions when sales, conversions, and cost to acquire a customer are going the wrong way.

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Check out Jay’s YOUTUBE Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@schwedelson

Check out Jay’s TIKTOK: https://www.tiktok.com/@schwedelson

Check Out Jay's INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/jayschwedelson/

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for do this, not that podcast. And I'm fired up. Honestly, I'm fired up 'cause I wanna listen to this episode so I could learn because we got the guy. Uh, what do I mean? We got the guy. So first off, who's here? We have Caleb Ralston here.

Jay Schwedelson: Now Caleb is the founder of something called Ralston, which is this amazing. Company that helps entrepreneurs kind of scale their personal brands. But why do I wanna listen to this episode? I wanna listen to it because when I try to reverse engineer, and that's what everybody should do in marketing, right?

Jay Schwedelson: Reverse engineer, when I would try to reverse engineer what are the the best personality led brands doing? Uh, who am I looking at? I'm looking at Alex Ozzi, Layla Mozzi, Gary V I'm looking at these types of people and say, how did they do it? And when I looked under the hood on all of those people, there was one constant of who helped those people scale their brands, scale their content, take advantage of their content.

Jay Schwedelson: It is Caleb. So I said we're getting that guy in the show 'cause I wanna break it all down. So thanks for being here, man.

Caleb Ralston: Thank you, Jay. I appreciate the opportunity, man.

Jay Schwedelson: All right, so what did I get wrong? What do you actually do? What's your story? Before we get into the tips and tricks and life hacks.

Caleb Ralston: Uh, I don't think you got really anything wrong. Uh, the thing that I always want to clarify is that I joined Team Gary three years after Team Gary was even a thing. And so I wasn't in the foundation of building the Gary V brand. Obviously Gary V built his brand right. Um, but I had the fortune to join the team.

Caleb Ralston: We had some really incredible growth on TikTok. We did some really cool stuff with trash talk. Um, as far as my story, I'm the typical kid who started off with a camera, grabbed my mom's camera when I was, I don't know, like six or seven years old, and my sister and I would make fun little skits in the backyard and stuff like that.

Caleb Ralston: And I came across, uh, Gary's book, crush It. I was gifted it actually in high school, and it was the only book that I read. Front to back in high school. And I remember reading it and Gary was talking about people are gonna make money talking about the Smurfs. And I was like, cool, I don't care about the Smurfs, but I love power lifting and maybe I can build something around that.

Caleb Ralston: And that started the journey of doing video online.

Jay Schwedelson: So, all right, let, I love that because, um, you started doing it yourself, which I think is the best way to figure, figure it all out. And I'm on this content journey. I. It to your frameworks and all this stuff. But I have a real question. I'm on this content journey. When I say content journey, I put out podcasts, I put out newsletters, I put out content for my company.

Jay Schwedelson: I think a lot of people listening are in that as well. They're just a content machine of some kind that they're responsible for and, and sometimes I feel like I can't take it anymore. I feel like I'm gonna hamster wheel. I don't like using the word burnt out, but I feel sometimes I got my burning out. So how do you scale content without losing your mind?

Jay Schwedelson: 'cause I'm losing my mind.

Caleb Ralston: Yeah. Well the first thing, uh, it's funny, based on how you framed the, the opening here, my, my response might be interesting to you, but, um. Don't try to copy the top dogs that are putting out 350, 400 pieces of content a week. It's, it's the strategy that a lot of people are trying right now. Uh, there's tons of videos, you know, breaking down the strategy behind so and so, and.

Caleb Ralston: I think that like this is some logic that we apply in athletics and a lot of other areas in life, but we don't apply it to content for some reason, which is like if you're gonna get into sprinting or you're gonna get into basketball or into power lifting, you're not going to take on the routine of the world's greatest athlete on day one.

Caleb Ralston: Right. If you do, you're going to quit on day one. Right? It's not sustainable. And so I think everyone needs to, I mean, some of the best advice I ever got from Gary was don't build what I built. Build something that reverse engineers, whoever you work with or yourself individually, and for me. When I started making content, our first video that we posted was in March on YouTube, and I had determined that I wanted to set a very realistic cadence.

Caleb Ralston: 'cause my belief is we get more returns the longer we stick with it, not from a quick sprint. So I put out one YouTube video a month. That's it. I do one Instagram post a week and one LinkedIn post a week, and that's it. That's all I'm doing. And we've grown to over 50,000 subscribers off of seven videos with that approach, because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to put more effort into each piece rather than high volume, because I'm reverse engineering myself.

Caleb Ralston: I know how I roll, and I'm gonna be more proud of a two hour in-depth video on how to lead a media team. Then five, you know, 20 minute videos or whatever that, that are just barely scratching the surface. And so what I would encourage everybody to do is look at yourself and how you operate and build your cadence and strategy around that, not what you see all these gurus online talking about.

Caleb Ralston: Like my whole mission is to try to help people realize that 99% of the content strategy advice out there. And it's dog because it doesn't take into account the of.

Jay Schwedelson: Okay. Uh, I, well, I really like. At, because then I don't have to put out all this garbage that I keep pumping out there because I was of the belief, and you're gonna tell me I'm wrong, which I cannot wait to hear that. Uh, the algorithm to feed the beast, the algorithm. I have to play the frequency game. How do I, how do you get people to consume your two hour of a bob when you're not showing up that much?

Jay Schwedelson: Like, what am I doing wrong?

Caleb Ralston: Yeah, I, I think volume is important. I, I don't wanna let that be misunderstood. I believe volume is very important, but usually for different reasons than most people articulate. So what we're talking about here is like volume to show up everywhere and be in front of people's faces. I use volume for a different function.

Caleb Ralston: I use it to acquire data on what our audience wants more. So I, I believe that you could take an entire month to find out what your audience likes, or you could take what you would normally post in a month and do in a week, and find that information out a lot quicker. Volume, I, I call it the accordion method.

Caleb Ralston: You expand the accordion to start to capture this data of what your audience is resonating with topics, uh, formats, things like that, right? And then as you get that information. Then you want to contract the accordion, in my opinion. And that's where you do what I'm doing right now, which is you take the same amount of effort for that high volume, same amount of effort, but you put it into less pieces.

Caleb Ralston: Now, for me, and, and one thing I want to give a caveat to is, you know, I, I just hit 17 years of doing this, right? I, I started with an unfair advantage that most people don't have. I'm very clear on what the problems are that my ideal customer is facing. I've met with thousands of business owners. I know what they need.

Caleb Ralston: And so I didn't have to do as much of that like discovery phase with my content. I went into it knowing what they needed, right? And so that, that's kind of the difference. But what I would say for you is like, you know, Gary's been preaching this since day one. He has the, uh, content pyramid, I believe is what he calls it.

Caleb Ralston: And like, it's just redistributing content. It's taking the pillar content, your podcast, and then clipping it and stuff like that. And that's how you can get away with it, uh, for higher volume. The problem is, to your point earlier, a lot of times people do that just to check a box, and it is my belief that if you, if you use my definition of branding and brand, I think branding is just simply.

Caleb Ralston: Pairing two things together consistently. And if you do that consistently enough, that creates the byproduct of brand. When the audience inherently associates the two things, if all you post is content to check a box that isn't actually that valuable, that becomes your brand. And so I would argue lower volume content that is more valuable and useful for your audience is going to build a stronger brand than high volume content that isn't actually that useful.

Jay Schwedelson: It is like a negative signal by putting out garbage essentially.

Caleb Ralston: Yeah,

Jay Schwedelson: So,

Caleb Ralston: I would never call it garbage Jay, but

Jay Schwedelson: well, you, you haven't consumed enough of my content then. Um, so when, when you, I've seen you talk a lot about this brand journey framework. Is that all part of this? Like what is the brand journey framework?

Caleb Ralston: Yeah. The, the big reason for it, Jay, is I, I started feeling like this immense level of pain when I would talk to entrepreneurs that have been making content for sometimes two, three years. And I'd ask 'em, Hey, how's, how's the content going? And they'd be like, you know what, Caleb, I actually don't really know.

Caleb Ralston: I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it's working or not. And that is like. My like alarms go off when I hear that that's atrocious, right? Like we're investing time, money, relational capital, all these different things into making this content. And if you've not defined what working. Success looks like, well then it's fucking pointless in my opinion.

Caleb Ralston: You're, you're, you're doing something that, you're getting way more negatives than positives, in my opinion. So the brand journey framework helps people figure out why the fuck are you doing this, and what would you have to do in order to accomplish that goal? So the first question that I always ask people is, what's your desired outcome?

Caleb Ralston: Why are you building your personal brand? And if you can't answer that question clearly, I would argue maybe you shouldn't build a personal brand. There's a lot of downsides to it, right? Like you sacrifice privacy, right? Like you're putting your opinions out there for the world to critique. Like there's, there's great things about it, but it's not, it's not the easiest thing in the world.

Caleb Ralston: So if you don't know why you're doing it, fuck that. The second question after what is your desired outcome is, what would I have to be known for? Or what would you have to be known for in order to accomplish that? I believe a lot of things come to us in our life based on our reputation and what we're known for.

Caleb Ralston: The next question is, what would I have to do in order to be known for the thing to get the outcome I want? We get known for things by the actions that we take, not just the words that we say, right? And so it's like, what do I have to do? What are the actions? The fourth question brings us to today, which is, what would I have to learn in order to do the things to be known for the thing to get my desired outcome?

Caleb Ralston: The example I like to use is if you're a woman who wants to inspire other women to build their business. And you wanna speak on stages to do that inspiration, to inspire women, well then you probably need to be known as a woman who has built a successful business and helped other women do the same thing.

Caleb Ralston: And how do you get known for that? You build a successful business and help other women do that. Now, what would you have to learn? Well, you know, Jay, there's millions of different skills in building a business. There's departments, and within each department, there are thousands of little skills that you have to learn.

Caleb Ralston: And so this gives you the roadmap of how to go from today to your desired outcome.

Jay Schwedelson: So, okay, so let me ask you this loaded question. Now I'm, this is literally like a consulting session here for me, so. Whenever we put out content, and this probably applies to everybody else out, there's listening, we don't necessarily have a direct attribution like, oh, we posted this, this video and we got seven more customers or whatever.

Jay Schwedelson: There is this surround sound of marketing. That is our view that we put out all this stuff, this thought leadership, whatever. And then we do get a lot of this inbound where people have, you know, seven different times and all these different capacities, and the opportunities are really good. But it's not where we assign necessarily value to one motion that we did.

Jay Schwedelson: So when you talk about, do you have a reason that you're doing it, is it at a molecular level of each piece of content or is it more of, okay, holistically, why are you doing it?

Caleb Ralston: Uh, for this I typically advise to start with holistically, why are you doing the entire personal brand? But I do love defining what success looks like for each piece. Like, for example, uh. It's 9:17 AM on Friday, October 24th. We just dropped 17 minutes ago, my eighth YouTube video. Okay. And it's only seven minutes long and it is career advice for creatives.

Caleb Ralston: It's not the typical video that we've put out on my channel. It's not for what everyone knows as my ideal customer profile, right? My ICP, but I have defined what my goal is. We help a lot of our clients build out media teams, and how do you build media teams? You need creatives. And so I want to build relationship and equity, relational equity with these creatives.

Caleb Ralston: So they look to me. As somebody that can help them get a role, and then I can connect them with some of our clients a lot easier, right? We have defined what good looks like for this video. I told Trevor, my content director, I'm not looking for a shit load of views. That's not the goal. With this video, what I'm looking for is people reaching out to me via dms or email trying to work for us or one of our clients, and if we get enough of those.

Caleb Ralston: Success. So defining what to your point. I love that you brought it up. We define what success looks like for each long form video that we do, and we measure against that because if you are trying to make a deep video that is really in depth for your ICP. It's probably not gonna get a ton of views. And if you measure against views, then you're gonna be discouraged and not continue doing the thing that actually brings you business.

Caleb Ralston: Now, to your point about attribution, at a high level, there's a lot of nuance to this, and all orgs are different, but at a high level, what I like to look at is, is my cost to acquire a customer going down. If it is, then my personal brand is working. There was a, a big launch that I did for somebody that I was working with a couple years ago where we, we did like an affiliate program and for the affiliates, we filmed ads with this person for the launch that they could then run on their channel.

Caleb Ralston: And we had built such a strong personal brand that all of the affiliates came back to us and they're like, oh my God. Not only did I promote your event. I got customers at a lower cost than I've ever gotten before because your face was in the ad, and that to me is a signal that we're building a personal brand that is actually having true impact on the business.

Jay Schwedelson: So the thing that I love about what you just broke down is I think within a lot of companies, consumer B2B, now, I don't care what the market is, they're sitting there looking at their, you know, Q4 or Q1, whatever, KPIs, and they're looking at our, our views going up, do we have more followers, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Jay Schwedelson: When you kind of start to work with. A company, a brand, a person, whatever, and they show you their dashboard. Look, this is our growth. We got these follows, whatever. Do you, is that an immediate like, Hey listen, that's horse crap. Uh, uh, those are meaningless vanity metrics, or is there still some sort of value there, uh, to those type of metrics?

Caleb Ralston: Huge value. Uh, the thing is, is you need to make sure that you have the sequence that you're prioritizing. Correct. So like, I prioritize if I see views going up, but sales going down unless I'm misunderstanding what the objective is. We're failing. That's not that, if anything, and I've been a part of this before in the past where this literally happened, uh, I was working in an organization.

Caleb Ralston: We started hanging out with a lot of entertainment YouTubers, not educational YouTubers, and they were giving lots of advice on going wide and, and making content that was way outside of serving the ideal customer. And views were going through the roof, subscribers through the roof, but sales on everything.

Caleb Ralston: We're going down and that delta is terrifying because what ends up happening is a lot of people end up following what they think is signal. The platform is saying the views are going up, keep making more of this content, but it's just noise because it's not content that's actually driving business for you.

Caleb Ralston: So if I were to walk into an organization and what you just described happened, I'd say, cool. Amazing. Love this. Let's go back a little bit further. How have sales been? Are sales going up? Are we getting conversions faster? Are we hiring talent? If we're an organization that hires a lot of people, are we getting talent quicker and better?

Caleb Ralston: Access to talent? Those are the things that I'm looking for. You have to pay attention to views, likes, like average view, duration because those are signals of performance on the platform, but they need to be weighted with are we actually getting conversions or am I just getting an audience that's here to lurk and that's all they're gonna do.

Jay Schwedelson: All right. This is awesome. And that's super helpful. 'cause when people say, oh, they're vanity metrics, to your point. They're valuable as long as you're also looking at the other important metrics. But here's what is important. Everyone's gotta go and follow Caleb. So Caleb, where should everyone consume yourself?

Jay Schwedelson: We're gonna put your Instagram, your LinkedIn, everything in the thing, and and the link to Ralston. How does everyone get involved with your world?

Caleb Ralston: The best thing to do is to consume the free six hour and 22 minute course that I put out on YouTube. Uh, it's how to build your personal brand. It's free six hours and 22 minutes. It's a behemoth. Uh, there's a workbook that goes along with it that's also free. You just have to enter your email and we'll send it to you.

Caleb Ralston: Um, and yeah, that's where I would recommend people go completely free.

Jay Schwedelson: I'm in six hours, 22 minutes I'm in. This is awesome. I really appreciate it man. Thanks for being here.

Caleb Ralston: Thank you, Jay. I appreciate the opportunity, man.