Founder and Head of Growth, White Label Comedy
Building content on a guess is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. You can sink weeks or months into something based on what you assume your audience will love, only to watch it land with a thud, and sometimes cop a backlash for your trouble. Before you invest all that effort, find out what your audience actually wants. Do not guess it.
The eight-month flop
Years ago, long before any of this was my job, I decided to engineer a viral hit on my personal page. My theory was simple: combine two things everyone loved at the time and the likes would pour in. So I spent eight months, and an alarming amount of peanut butter, training my dog to "sing" along to a popular song.
I finally posted the video, held my breath, and got the grand total of seven likes. Worse, a few people were annoyed with me for it. Eight months of effort, aimed at a target I had invented in my own head, and the audience simply did not care. I had built the whole thing on an assumption and never once checked whether it was true.
Why guessing is so costly
The problem with guessing is not just that it might not work. It is that you find out only after you have already spent the time, money and energy. A wrong guess does not fail cheaply. It fails after you have committed everything to it, which is the worst possible moment to learn you were aiming at nothing.
And the downside is not always a quiet flop. Content built on a bad assumption can actively irritate people, because it shows you have misread them. So you pay twice: once for the wasted effort, and again for the goodwill it costs you. All to chase an idea of your audience that only ever existed in your imagination.
Find out, then create
The fix is not to work harder on your guesses. It is to stop guessing. Before you commit real resources to a piece of content, get a genuine read on what your audience actually responds to: what they care about, what they find funny, what they already believe. Let that guide what you make.
Content exists to please your audience, not to prove your hunch right. When you build on what they truly want instead of what you assume they want, you stop gambling months of work on a coin flip. You make things people were always going to enjoy, because you checked first.
Meet Brian
Working out what your audience actually wants, so you never have to guess again, is exactly what Brian is for. He is our AI-powered comedy marketing machine, built on what your audience genuinely responds to.
Take Brian for a spin and create from insight, not guesswork.
Adam Hunt
Founder and Head of Growth at White Label Comedy. He spends his days convincing serious brands that funny is the most profitable thing they're not doing.
Your marketing isn’t broken. It’s just boring.
It’s time you met the agency behind the internet’s most profitable funny brands.
Work with us
