how I built a $2.7M brand using a.i (my actual product, website, ads, viral videos)

0:00 In this video, I'm going to be showing you how I built a $3 million brand in just 30 days in a niche I knew absolutely nothing about, all through an AI strategy that allowed me to not just uncover an untapped product, but create a brand that resonated with hundreds of thousands of girls. You're going to see me dig into their lives, find out what they're looking to buy, and branding the product seamlessly using their identities. You'll see how I created my website, how I created my viral videos, and how I launched a milliondoll advertising campaign. I'm literally going to be showing you everything. So, let's just dive straight into it. So, this is my product. They're called Pilates Grip Socks. These little grips at the bottom of the sock are what prevent girls from slipping whilst they're doing Pilates. Now, although the store generated over 100,000 orders and

0:47 won a Shopify award, I didn't know anything about Pilates before I found this product. But it's through this AI strategy that I'm about to show you where I was able to find this untapped product, but then more than that, find exactly who I was selling to so that I could use their identities to create my brand. So, the first thing that you want to be doing is getting into a growing market. You don't want to be getting into a stagnating or declining market because there's no opportunity there. Now, I went into the Pilates market because it was growing yearbyear on Google Trends, but it also had an 11.5% kagger. This basically tells us how much this market is expected to grow in the next 5 to 10 years. So after I had my market, I jump over to YouTube. This is where the opportunity lies. I'm going to write day in the life of Pilates. But this depends on the niche market that

1:33 you have entered into. Your keyword might be routine. It might be podcast. It might be vlog. Basically, what are the titles of the YouTube videos of the micro influencers of your niche? Use that in the search term. Next, I open up as many of these long- form videos as I can. jump into their YouTube transcript, copy all of it, paste it into chatbt and say list all of the products that are mentioned within this video that are early adopter products. And so that's how I encountered Pilates grip socks, which when throwing it into Google Trends, we can see has just recently emerged and is growing exponentially. Okay, so I'm pretty sure you realize how effective this market research strategy is. It's actually the sourcing strategy behind not just one of my products, but

2:18 almost six of them. But it isn't just that you find emerging products before your competition. That's one part of it. The best part of this market research strategy is now you know exactly who you're going to be selling to. Let's listen to what these girls were saying about Pilates grip socks. Like I need some grippy socks or something like that. And then I'm going to have to buy like some of the grip socks that they have. I forgot my socks. So, I had to buy socks at the steep price of $18. I need some grippy socks. I need to buy those grip socks. The language they were using told us that they knew about the product. They wanted the product, but they weren't calling it Aloe Grip socks or Lululemon grip socks or Nike grip socks. They were calling it those grippy socks. They're product, but not yet brand aware. And that's exactly where you want the market of a product to be. Product validation without brand

3:05 saturation. But now, how was I going to create a brand that was perfectly made for these girls so that they wanted to buy my version of the Grip Socks? Well, it all begins with going into the profiles of these girls and identifying their identity. Going into the YouTube videos that they were creating, I noticed that they all had that girl written in their titles. That girl morning routine, be that girl. So, who was that girl? That girl was an aesthetic. It was a movement. It was an identity. And identities are your ticket to branding the product. You can attribute this to literally any niche market you can think of. There's a cross-cultural movement that that occurs that creates almost this tribal essence. And if you can take that essence and put it into your brand, that's where you get the resonance. That's where you start speaking to your audience. That's when they look at your website and think this

3:52 is the product for me, not the gimmicky drop shipping products. And here's how you put that into action. I write what are the brands that best fulfill upon that girl identity. And so the first output was Glossier. Glossier was this big skincare brand and all I had to do to create my brand was emulate the essence of their brand. They're not a competitor, but they're targeting the exact target avatar that I am targeting. What I noticed within the photo shoots that Glossier was taking, they always incorporated this dreamy like cloudy sky background with these blue pastels in their images. And so this started to become the inspiration for the photo shoot that I was about to do. But before I could do that, I needed to come up with a name for my brand. Glossier isn't describing the product, but it's describing the aspirational quality of

4:37 the product. Girls will use the product and become glossier. And so to come up with a name, I thought about the aspirational quality of these grip socks. They help girls stay grounded, but being that girl is also about being grounded. So I called my brand grounded. And so now I was going to source a supplier that could manufacture these socks with the highest quality that I could possibly find to be able to charge premium prices. Resonating with your target audience and creating a strong brand is one thing, but then your product quality has to match as well. This way I'm completely separating myself from the drop shipping competitors who are probably going to sell some gimmicky variant of this product if they weren't already getting destroyed by the tariffs. That is I needed to charge premium prices and the product quality needs to match. And so here's how I do this on Alibaba. What I first do is create a manufacturing document like this. This is where I give

5:23 them the variants that I'm looking for, like these colors and the cherry color. I go into detail with the placement of my logo at the bottom of the sock. Even change the silicon grip pattern at the bottom. I give them my order quantity, the materials, the lead time. Basically, all of the information that you're going to give to your supplier goes into this document. Next, what I do is I search by supplier instead of product. Filter by trade assurance, verified pro supplier, and now I'm messaging 20 to 50 different suppliers. You won't have supplier problems if you reach out to a ton of suppliers because what you're going to do next is you're going to filter through all of them until you find the perfect supplier because you've messaged so many suppliers and you have so much data. You can use that data to now negotiate with every single one of them to bring down your price. Okay, so now it's time to do a professional photo shoot. One professional photo shoot solves almost all of your branding

6:08 problems on your website, your advertisements, even your organic content. To do this, I found a director of photography here in Berlin, one that specializes in fashion photography. I told him to source me that backdrop that the that girl brands like Glossier were using in their photo shoots. Next, I got sent a list of models to choose from. And what I'm doing here is I'm basically looking at which of these models looks the most like that that girl avatar on YouTube. So, what I do is I go on to YouTube and I just basically look at these authority figures within the niche, like this girl, and then I match their face to, for example, this girl, which looks quite similar. And that's when I scheduled the photo shoot here in a studio in Berlin. Now, I'm looking to take four different types of content. First is the full body lifestyle image that will go as the hero image of my website. Next, I'm getting product images taken for the featured product

6:55 section of my store. Then, I'm getting hero images taken for the meta ads and Tik Tok ads I was going to run. And finally, I'm getting these little video clips that I'm going to put into my website and incorporate into my organic content. So once I got the final images taken, I took the full body lifestyle image and I threw it as a hero image and put a little stay grounded overlay on the background. The hero image often times is lifestyle depictions of your product. And in my case, it has to be a girl with the socks. This is the first image they see. It's like the hook of your website. If it doesn't look good, if it doesn't look professional, bounce rates are going to be high and you're just not going to convert. I then put the product images in this minimalistic layout all with the same backdrop. This simple design was something that I was inspired by Brandy Melville. This was one of the brands I was also fulfilling upon that that girl aesthetic. They're

7:40 pulling in $200 million in revenue a month and they have a super simple layout. But to elevate the brand a little bit more, I put this little hover feature of the girl like doing a little twirl with the socks on for each of these product images. These little incorporations into your website can dramatically increase your conversion rate. And they're also doing the job of showing off the product and just making it look nice. So, now that I had sourced my product and I had set up my website, it was time to capture the attention of that girl. This video got 2.1 million views. I'm going to break down the whole strategy and structure behind it and then also show you how I've replicated this process with a bunch of other videos. Then my head hit the wall. Boom. Girl, you forgot your grip socks. These little grips at the bottom. Touchy touchy touchy. You put them on and bam. So, the video begins with a stitch. This was taken from a viral video within the

8:27 Pilates niche. I stitch it together to create a transition segment that sets up the context behind my product. Now, you've probably seen a lot of creators use this. For example, Alex Hermoszi uses stitches within many of his ads. You want to hear something insane, but it's very important for it to actually make sense because here the girl is falling off of a reformer's machine, which sets up the context behind my product, which is that grip socks stop you from falling over. That's why I specifically say, "Girl, you forgot your grip socks." But the single most important aspect of guaranteeing virality is the 1 to 3 second transition. The 1 to 3 second transition is the science of going viral. I would go as far as to say it's the secret of going viral. And what it basically means is on the 30 second mark of every video, you need to put a

9:13 re-engagement point. This re-engagement point is when you reveal the X factor of your entire content piece. Let me show you how this 1 to 3 second transition happens in almost every viral video. Let's first start with some videos that contain music because these videos really highlight that 1 to 3 second transition. Pay attention to the 30 secondond mark. 7.3 million views. Beat drops. Product function is shown. The X factor of the video is revealed at the third second mark. 6.4 million views. Same thing. Beat drops. Product function is shown. The X factor of the video is revealed. But this doesn't just happen with e-commerce videos. It happens with every video. 22 million views.

9:59 Why do you talk so much? Everybody talks. The beat drops and the X factor of the video is revealed at the 30se secondond mark. [Music] Now that you start to see the pattern, let's move on to some videos where it's a little bit more difficult to pick up on, but it happens in every video. 34.4 million views. The X factor of the video is revealed at the 30 second mark. Excuse me, sir. Hey, what's up? Question for you. Is this your Rolls-Royce? 10.9 million views. You're cooking your chicken wrong. Here's how to do it right by crosscutting it. Cross cutting the chicken. X factor of the video. Third second. 10 million views. Let me show you what do Chinese people have for breakfast in the morning. Yala. Hello. My third second mark. Somalian man speaks Chinese. Xactor the video. 3

10:45 second. And so the reason that I'm able to go viral consistently isn't just luck. It's because I'm following the science of going viral. I do this with personal brand videos, masculine products, feminine products. Even at the beginning of this YouTube video, you would have seen a 1 to 3 second transition. Incorporate this into your next video, and I can almost guarantee you'll 10x or 100x your ability to capture attention. So, after I generated a few million views off of those viral videos, I then ran a retargeting advertising campaign. And these were the final static meta ads. I also ran a few video ads as well. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm showing these ads to the exact girls who viewed those viral videos. And so, imagining the girls who are one, Pilates girls because they're watching a Pilates video, two either knew about Grip Socks or just learned about Grip Socks through the video, and three have seen my version of the Grip

11:33 Socks. Having these images then pop up on their Instagram and their Tik Tok feeds is what results in very high conversions. And so, that's exactly what we got. I'm going to hit the refresh here just so you can see. 7.19% conversion rate comes from the fact that we're running a retargeting ad to a very warm audience cuz they had watched at least 50% of the video. And this spike over here from 7th of April and beyond was when we ran the retargeting advertising campaign. These sales beforehand were a little bit of ads but primarily organic traffic. Now you see the girls who mentioned this product to me weren't just ordinary girls. They were Pilates instructors. girls who call themselves pink Pilates princesses. These girls are called the early adopters. Now, what I'm about to explain is exactly the understanding

12:18 that some of the greatest billionaires of our generation have had. From the PayPal mafia that bred Elon Musk to Steve Jobs to basically all of the greatest minds of our generation understand this concept incredibly well. This graph explains to us how innovations spread. It is basically the science of how an idea gets adopted by the market. Understanding this allows you to spot supply demand discrepancies. Something that has very little supply, it's very new, but there's a lot of demand. You take advantage of that discrepancy, that is opportunity. The diffusions of innovation shows you how to find opportunity. It gives you the blueprint of finding it. And we've used this blueprint within this video. These five adopter categories all have different characteristics. Innovators are these incredibly passionate people

13:04 within a niche. The type of person to buy a Steam game with five reviews. The guy who goes and reads scientific publications of the latest testosterone supplement. The sustainable health freak who's bringing back ancient remedies and trying them out and doing DIYs. These are the innovators. They're so risk tolerant. They don't care if what they try fails because they just want to try it. But in entrepreneurship, we care about finding the early adopters. You've all been an early adopter of something. You've all identified an idea and validated and thought it was great, a product, an idea, anything. and then a year or two went by and you realize the entire mass market adopted it. This could have been a podcast that you used to watch. This could have been a perspective on life and of course extends to products. The early adopters are the conduit between an innovation being super super niche and then

13:51 becoming mainstream. They are the ones who validate a product before it becomes mainstream. Whereas the innovators are on the fringe and are very detached from the rest of the market. They're like the nerds. The early adopters are the influencers. They're usually the ones who share the product, leave reviews and tell everyone about it. And that is why for the past two decades, the richest people in the world, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, every one of them had their roots in software development. And billionaire software developers are the ones who coined the term product market fit. Product market fit is all about exactly what we just talked about. It is the first step to building a successful venture in which a company meets early adopters, gathers feedback, and gauges interest in its product. If you want to build a business, you must find the early adopters. When you want to find a

14:38 product, you don't look at trending product websites. You find the early adopters. When you're creating content, it's not guesswork. You find early adopters, content that has been validated by them, and then you take inspiration from it, and you copy it. Opportunity in business is when there is a supply and demand discrepancy. And the early adopters are the ones who reveal this discrepancy to