Process

Develop an Idea Generation Process

In order to generate consistent income, you need to make regular videos. And to make regular videos, you
need a process for coming up with consistent ideas.

Here are some steps you can follow to develop an idea generation process that works for your videos.

Choose a recurring time to brainstorm ideas

The frequency of your brainstorm should reflect the amount of videos you make. If you create weekly videos, your
idea brainstorm should happen at least 1x per week. For us, we brainstorm each Monday for 1 hour.

First, add your recurring brainstorm time to your calendar.

For your brainstorm, feel free to use our idea bank template to keep track of your ideas.

Brainstorm within formats

It’s easier to brainstorm ideas when you have formats to put them into. A format is a repeatable storytelling formula
that has a consistent style of packaging, hook, and structure. To define a format, look at past videos you’ve made that
both you and your audience enjoyed.

List formats that you can brainstorm around:

Determine the type of ideation to use

By speaking to creators, we’ve discovered that there are 3 frameworks that creators use to generate ideas:

Reactive Ideation Active Ideation Iterative Ideation

Reactive ideas consistently
come from a similar source (i.e.
news sites, pop culture, etc.). You
use that source as the impetus
for your idea .
Active ideas come from Iterative ideas come from adding
experience or conversation. If your own layer to existing
you use active ideation, you have content formats (i.e. youtube
to prioritize having interesting videos, books, podcasts, movies,

experiences & conversations.

etc.).

For reactive ideation, build a For active ideation, keep a list of For iterative ideation, study work
database of sources that you ideas in your notes app or a that you enjoy. Don’t copy it,
consistently check for ideas. notebook of ideas that strike you. figure out what you like about it
and how you can transform it.
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Practice by brainstorming an idea for your channel using each of the idea generation techniques:

Your reactive ideation idea:

Your active ideation idea:

Your iterative ideation idea:

Develop an Idea Test

Once you’ve come up with a list of ideas, it’s important to put each one of this through a filter to determine which
ideas should actually go into production. We call this an idea test; it’s just a list of questions to find the viability of each
idea.

Your idea test can be unique to you, or feel free to use ours:

Does this idea provide value to the audience that we want to speak to? Yes No

Is this idea unique to our brand? If not, can we make it more unique? Yes No

Does this idea reinforce our mission statement? Yes No

Does this idea inspire our community to take an action? Yes No

Does this idea evoke emotion and spark conversation? Yes No

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Evaluate Your Idea: What is required to put this idea into production?
If your goal is consistency, you need to balance your lofty ideas with ones that are easier to make. The key for this
stage is understanding who owns the idea, what the necessary steps are to produce the idea, and how long it will
take to make. Once an idea is put through this step, your idea generation process is complete.
Who owns the idea?
Assigning responsibility to someone for executing the idea will increase the likelihood that it gets made.
Oftentimes as the head of your creator startup, this person will be you.

Idea Title Who owns this idea?

What are the steps required to produce this idea?

Since you might not know exactly what’s required for the video, these can be estimates. This will help you
understand what resources are required, so you know the feasibility of the production.

Production Step

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

How long will it take to make this idea?

Think about creating a time constraint for your ideas. Can this idea be created in 1 day? 1 week? Or is it more
intensive and needs 1 month + to make?

Time Required to Produce:

This is an exercise from our course, Creator Startup. Head to colinandsamir.com/creatorstartup for more info.