How We Grew Simon Squibb From Zero To 200 Million Views A Month
Full Case Study
Hey team,
Callum here.
I’m always interested when a Creator blows up out of nowhere.
One recent example is Simon Squibb.
This guy is all over my feed.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube.
Everywhere I look?
He’s crushing it.
So I checked the stats and it shocked me.
Simon is generating 200 million views per month across Social.
Pure organic.
No paid spend.
I had to track down the team behind his growth and break down their strategy.
Meet Callum Church and Jack Whettingsteel:
They’ve built Simon’s personal brand from zero to a viral sensation:
What’s the driving that growth?
It’s built on 7 principles:
1/ Start with Purpose
Before you start making any content, you need to nail your why.
Sounds a bit hippy right?
But too many of us overlook it.
Step number one for everyone should be figuring out:
What’s my purpose?
What’s my message?
What do I want to be known for?
For Simon and his company HelpBnk they’re on a mission to build a 10 Million strong community of like minded folks who believe every dream is possible.
They want to fix the education system and create more entrepreneurs.
This underpins all their content.
Simon’s signature question is asking the public “What’s their dream?”
Here’s an example:
Audiences love this purpose driven content.
Brands want to be a part of it.
It’s a powerful question - do you have purpose in your content?
2/ Finding your Short Form format
The team didn’t land on this signature hook ‘What’s your dream?’ on day 1.
Simon was hustling on his own for 2 years before he met Callum and Jack.
He was recording to camera at home.
Making typical business owner talking head content.
It was boring.
Then he met Callum and Jack.
They switched things up.
Encouraged Simon to try everything.
See what lands.
It was during this testing phase that Simon approached a stranger in public and asked them, “Do you want to start a business?”
They told Simon all about their dream business idea – and a promising content format was born.
That video got 50,000 views.
Beating the channel average of 8,000.
It was time to double down.
There was something there.
If you’ve broken through yet…
Ask yourself:
How many formats are you currently testing?
Where is there still room to experiment?
What are you learning along the way?
Where do you really see potential?
Did you already have a hit you need to double down on?
3/ Broadening the Hook
They knew they had something with ‘Do you want to start a business of your own?’
The Reels were getting 50 - 100k views.
But they realised it alienated people.
Instant scrolls at the sight of the word ‘business’.
Viewers thinking ‘this is not for me’.
It was too specific.
Not everyone wants to start a business.
How could they open it up?
Their goal was to reach 10 million people.
That didn’t seem possible with the current format.
Simon worked on it:
Eventually they landed on something different.
“What’s your dream?”
Suddenly average views took the next jump.
The audience were still learning how to to start a business, how to sell an idea, how to quit a 9-5 job.
But they were by hooked by the stranger’s story.
Hearing about their dream.
Callum and Jack told me:
“It wasn’t until we realised we had to entertain people first that we really grasped the content.”
“If you think about the typical TikTok user, they’re probably slouched on the sofa. Doom scrolling. Waiting for that dopamine hit.”
Are they looking to be educated?
No.
They just want to be entertained.
So ask yourself: is your own content packaged to reach as wide a pool of people as possible?
How can you hook them with what ‘looks like entertainment’ before educating?
Jack and Callum call this ‘Edutainment’.
4/ Short Form Mastery
We’ve talked a lot about hooks.
But having one strong hook isn’t good enough anymore.
Simon’s team deliver 3 hooks at the start of each video.
You don’t want to miss a trick with your hooks.
Give the video every chance.
Another piece of advice?
Rather than baking the social caption into the video edit they prioritise adding it on each social platform.
It’s just a hunch.
But their feeling is that the platforms love this:
It means they can post the exact same piece of short form content across 5 different platforms.
As long as they add native platform captions.
They see no difference in performance.
So you CAN post the same Reel across multiple platforms.
5/ Don’t miss a trick
Callum and Jack’s team produce a lot of content.
They post 2-3 times a day.
Across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn and X.
How many of you are just posting to one platform?
Don’t miss a trick.
Post everywhere.
Some of the platforms you thought were dead?
They’re growing huge audiences on them.
But they don’t do this through any automations or social publishing tools.
Post everything manually in the app.
With a real person generating authentic conversations in the comments.
It helps them get across social 200 Million views every month.
Could it do the same for you?
6/ The Banger Bank
This is something Michael Corcoran from Ryanair also uses.
He calls it The Banger Bank.
If a clip goes viral?
Callum and Jack will bank it to post again 6 months down the line.
You can simply re-post clips here.
Or…
You can Re-edit.
In one such example Callum was able to re-edit a clip to 50x performance.
The first post did approx. 1 million views.
After the re-edit?
50 million views.
The same clip.
Slightly different edit.
What could you re-edit?
7/ Long form is different
Callum and Jack admit that YouTube took them much longer to crack.
“You have to be a mastermind in copy writing, idea generation, PhotoShop and human psychology,” they explained.
But 2 million subscribers later they have worked it out.
What changed?
They started thinking of short form and longterm as completely separate things.
Different audiences.
Different formats.
Different funnels.
You can’t master one the same way as the other.
It wasn’t enough to post longer versions of the Shorts.
They realised they needed to:
Eventually they landed on a format that unlocks Simon’s unfair advantage:
Huge experience in entrepreneurship
What if we shared everything he knows in 1 video?
With a visual element (whiteboard)
Packaged to perfection (thumbnail offering transformation)
One viral video later they had found their format:
One of my favourite frameworks is ‘The DMs’.
It’s exactly how this video idea came up.
Simon was frustrated at having so many questions in his instagram DMs.
He wanted a piece of content that could answer all of those questions.
Something he could just send on mass.
The team collated the most frequently asked questions and created a monster video answering them all.
I see this time and time again.
If you’re struggling for content ideas - scroll through your DMs and comments.
What are you audience actually asking?
How can you answer them in your next video?
OK, that’s a wrap!
I missed out a few gems here.
You’ll have to catch the full episode with Callum and Jack to hear them:
Reply or drop me a comment if you found this useful?
I read every one.
What can I make content on that would help you?
Let me know and we’ll make it happen.
Hope you have a great week!
Callum
Maybe you need more than you get in these emails?
Here’s how I can help:
Reply to this email and I’ll answer your question
Create Social First Podcasts with my Agency 7xContent
Listen to my other Podcasts with Creators
Follow my socials for daily tips
Brilliant post! So much to digest here. You have certainly hit a winning formula with Simons brand.
It really helps that he has an interesting and very relevant, relatable backstory...a rags to riches tale that most people love.
Love the breakdown of your strategy.👍