Hire five to eight editors at once, grade them like a bake-off, and give the survivors full autonomy.
How Carter builds a creative bench in a week, what a media buyer's job actually is, and why the speed of your life tracks the hard conversations you're willing to have.
arrow keys, swipe, or the tray below to move between boards
Stop guessing. Run the bake-off.
One Slack channel. One task. Seven candidates who don't know each other. Whoever performs best in a real ad account keeps the job. The ugly video wins if it makes more money.
The eight-step loop.
Credited to Carter's operational business partner. Run it end to end every time the creative pipeline runs dry.
Full autonomy, or it doesn't scale.
Editors find winning angles themselves, not just cut what a strategist hands them.
Scripts mostly written with AI; voiceover from an AI voice tool, not a studio booking.
Pulled straight from YouTube. No separate footage team to wait on.
A set number of videos, a quality bar, a set number of distinct angles: the ground rules for a loose leash.
I don't care if the video looks like shit if those ones are making more money than the other people like that's the guy I'm gonna hire
it actually costs you more to pay people less in the long run
Carter
No media buyers on the team
Editors make the creatives. A bot or a VA uploads them to campaigns. Someone spends about 20 minutes a day cutting losers and scaling winners.
Jason
A media buyer is a creative strategist
Adjusting budgets is only 10 to 20% of the job. The rest is looking at data, building creative, and working landing pages.
Hire in groups. Meet twice a week.
A group that already knows each other outperforms a solo hire dropped into an existing team. Put commitments in front of peers and you stop having to police them.
meetings are the most important thing you can do
Every stagnant part of my life traces back to one avoided conversation.
Carter's audit: business or personal, the pattern was the same, a 30-minute conversation he didn't want to have. He stayed in a partnership longer than he should have because he didn't want to raise it.
If you blow up at someone who screwed up, they resent you and hide problems next time.
Curious and tenacious. It's a muscle.
The two traits Jason sees in a great entrepreneur. Have the hard conversation early and often, before it festers. When something stings, sit with it: "so could i just understand some more before we move forward"
the speed at which you progress in life is directly correlated with the number of difficult conversations you're willing to have
if you attack back you will lose
see it, feel it, process it, decide, move on.