Excited to announce, the Sandcastles newsletter is now called Content Alpha. Here’s our new site and post library. If you love the newsletter, share it with your friends in the content trenches.
— — — — — — —
If you got dropped into the middle of graphic design Instagram with no context, you'd assume the biggest accounts belong to famous designers showing off their stacked portfolios.
Allan Peters built one of the biggest design accounts on the planet doing the opposite: fixing everyone else's work.
Allan is a former creative director who wrote the book on logo design…literally. His account runs on six words: "Let's fix three major brands."
He picks a famous logo, pulls out paper and markers, and repairs it in front of you, live on Instagram.
The account is at 1.3M followers and 6 of his top 7 posts are from the last 3 months because he found a topic, hook, and format that works…and he’s running it on repeat.
And the play he’s running is one everyone should pay attention to if you want to win the content game in 2026.
Why Application Content Is Winning Over Entertainment
From 2021 to 2024, social media roughly split into two camps:
Entertainment content — Think: MrBeast where the video exists to make you laugh or be otherwise entertained.
Education content — Think: Ali Abdaal where the video exists to teach you something you didn't know.
You could make almost any video in either category, and it would work in basically every niche.
In 2024 we got a third type that started winning:
Storytelling content – Entertaining stories wrapped around educational takeaways.
Problem is: Storytelling is amazing for building authority, but it's brutally hard to scale, so most personal brands defaulted back to education.
Then AI happened.
By 2026, AI content and copy-cat culture have completely taken over the feed, so education content split again into 3 very different categories:
Edu Slop – Junk food content where a creator just says words about a topic. This has mostly stopped working. AI made generic information free, which made repeating it worthless.
Tactical Education – Content showing how to do something in a breakdown or tutorial. Still effective, but the topic has to be novel or it won't break through.
Application Content – The new category where the creator demonstrates their expertise inside the video itself.
Application content wins in a post-AI feed because anyone can claim expertise, and AI can fake the words, but nobody can fake competence performed live in front of you in real time. Application content is the Omakase experience of content and it (so far) is unfalsifiable.
And Allan Peters might be the purest application content machine on the internet.
How Application Content Grew An Account To 1.3M
When you look at Allan's data through the application content lens, the whole account snaps into focus.
First, Sandcastles split his 98 analyzed Reels into application content and storytelling content. Application wins, and it isn't close.
When we look at his top 10 Reels, 8 of them are application-focused:
Disney+, 47 Brand, Kind — the recap of voted winners — 24.2× Outlier, 7.80M Views
U-Haul, Switch 2, Amazon — 12.1× Outlier, 2.58M Views
UPS, Starling Automotive, his niece's softball team — 11.3× Outlier, 2.66M Views
Chris Do and Will Paterson praised him on YouTube — 9.4× Outlier, 1.52M Views
"Let's fix a few famous logos" — 8.8× Outlier, 1.43M Views
Fixing the Spotify logo — 8.4× Outlier, 1.52M Views
Fixing the America 250 logo — 7.3× Outlier, 1.17M Views
Memphis Zoo — which of 4 options? — 6.5× Outlier, 2.84M Views
"Do the brands you make reels about ever hire you?" — 6.4× Outlier, 1.20M Views
Fixing the Disney+ logo — 5.8× Outlier, 975K Views
He's essentially running a TV network with one hit show that makes up 42% of this content, plus a handful of supporting programs.
The hit show is the Logo-Fix Reel where he takes a famous logo and redesigns it live on paper. But the fix Reel comes in two versions:
The multi-logo version which wins on reach with 633K median views (against 391K for the single-logo fix) because it creates multiple points of interest for viewers.
The single-logo version which pulls almost double the comments because it starts an argument about whether he should've touched that logo at all.
And because Allan runs on application content, his hooks get to break every rule.
Most creators write hooks that carry enormous weight to entertain, but Allan's hooks are an announcement of what he’s about to do, across 3 categories:
He doesn't have to entertain you into staying, because the premise carries the intrigue on its own…you want to know if this designer can really make the world's most famous logos, better.
And it's still printing views without being high octane entertainment. The exact same six words are running an average 1.09M average views. More than double everything else he makes.
How To Find Non-Obvious Insights From Application Content In Your Niche
These screenshots I’ve got above are all part of a much longer visual HTML report generated by the Sandcastles MCP.
Every niche has an application format, but they’re all going to be 1% different so here's how to run this on any account in your niche so you can build your own application content strategy…
Step 01 — Bulk analyze in Sandcastles
In the web app, select the creator's channel, filter above 2% engagement to filter out brand deals and narrow the search to the last 12 months. Then, bulk analyze their last 100 videos.
The analysis has to be done in Sandcastles first so the MCP can pull from this data.
Step 02 — Prompt Claude via the MCP
Make sure the Sandcastles MCP is connected in Claude, then give it a prompt like:
Pull in the last 100 videos posted in the last 12 months from the XYZ Channel. They should all be deep analyzed already. If any aren’t deep analyze them. I want you to build a super visual report, breaking down the best performing:
• Topic buckets
• Hooks
• Formats
• Scriptwriting tactics
• Non-obvious patterns
Give me the full breakdown of the 100 analyzed videos, and use the insights to help me best understand how to improve my next batch of videos. Build in dynamic HTML.
The key phrase is "dynamic HTML" because that's what produces the visual, chart-heavy report you're seeing in the screenshots. It one-shots the charts, the stat cards, the topic and hook rankings, all of it.
It even pulled a list of 6 non-obvious insights around his style of application content:
Step 03 — Have a conversation with the data
The report is the starting point, but if you keep asking follow-ups, you’re going to be in an even better place. I’ll ask stuff like:
Why is this person growing so fast?
What am I missing?
What are they doing that I'm not seeing?
What are non-obvious insights I might be missing?
That back-and-forth feels like having a social media sparring partner in your business and uncovers even better ideas.
In this case, if you’re a designer entering the design space, and you want to start with the benefit of learning from Allan’s winners, this data conversation will be invaluable for you.
You'll need the Sandcastles MCP and bulk-analyzed videos to run the full report. Start your risk-free trial here and go find the hidden patterns in your niche.
PS - If you want to watch me walkthrough my 5 favorite Sandcastles <> Claude workflows (that allow me to make better content faster), click here.
