Before Jessi Jean was known for the Yap Challenge, she was self-proclaimed career confused, flipping furniture from FB Marketplace, and it kinda was working out for her…
That’s because one of the fastest growing niches on social media right now is DIY content.
Thing is: most of us are never going to strip paint off a brick fireplace, install shiplap in our bathroom, or turn an abandoned cathedral into our dream home…but we watch this content anyways, we’re addicted to it.
The reason why is because 1) once your brain sees the “before” it has to also see the “after” and 2) on some level, you want to believe you’re the kind of person who could successfully operate a nail gun if you tried.
DadSocial built 6.3M followers by giving dads the belief that they could do anything.
He’s doing DIY projects every day, and casts you as the dad doing it so you’re an active participant.
80 of his last 100 Reels open on a literal "POV:" line, so for 60 seconds, you're not watching a guy build something cool for his kids…you ARE the dad who built it.
The numbers on this account are absurd: his last 100 Reels pulled 471M views, and 89% of them came from the POV Reels alone.
Most creators would kill for one format that hits like that. DadSocial found his, and then built an entire dad universe inside of it.
Let's get into how the machine works…
The Language Of The Dad
Every guru on Instagram tells you to niche down and find your people if you want to grow. It’s not bad advice.
What 99% skip is the harder part where once you decide who you’re speaking to, you have to learn a new language to figure out how to speak to them.
Most creators think that means picking topics their niche cares about. DadSocial's data says it's way more literal than that…maybe it’s because he’s speaking to dads, and they need you to be literal.
Either way, DadSocial speaks fluent dad.
He calls his viewer by name in the first second of every video.
80 of his last 100 Reels open with a "POV:" line that casts you as the person living the story:
"POV: You're a dad and this is all your daughter asked for for Christmas." — 35.0M views, 30.7×
"POV: The school just asked if you knew someone who could fix the basketball hoop…" — 31.0M views, 20.9×
"POV: You're a dad and your kids asked for McDonalds for breakfast." — 12.7M views, 10.3×
Those 80 reels carry 89% of all his views and 23 of his 25 biggest hits.
He’s rotating through a few main characters in these POV hooks (dads, husbands, etc.), but those personas are a distraction. The common denominator is something I only found when I dug deeper with the Sandcastles MCP…
The POV hooks work because someone asked him to help them, and he did.
That “someone asked” framing is only 20 of his 80 POV Reels, but it produces 9 of his 25 biggest hits:
"POV: You're a dad and this is all your daughter asked for for Christmas." — 35.0M views, 30.7×
"POV: The school just asked if you knew someone who could fix the basketball hoop…" — 31.0M views, 20.9×
"POV: You're a dad and your kids asked for McDonalds for breakfast." — 12.7M views, 10.3×
"POV: You're a dad and your kids asked if you could make it spookier." — 13.3M views, 9.1×
"POV: You're a dad and you asked your local high school how you could help…" — 6.5M views, 7.0×
"POV: You're a dad and this was your daughter's Christmas wish…" — 7.2M views, 6.3×
"POV: Your wife asked why you bought your daughter an old trailer." — 8.3M views, 6.2×
"POV: You're a dad who asked this Middle School how you could help…" — 5.5M views, 5.8×
The reason is mechanical. "Someone asked" does two jobs: it gives the build a reason to exist, and it pre-promises a reaction shot at the end. You know by second 2 that somebody is going to see this thing and lose it.
Then, you layer his topic buckets, and he’s essentially running 3 plays here:
Builds for his kids (backbone) — His biggest bucket and his steadiest numbers, but it plateaus around his median. Reliable, never nuclear.
Holiday spectacle (lottery ticket) — The Christmas parade train did 35M views, his biggest Reel of the year. He’s stacking something for his kids, the ask content, and Christmas…
School gift builds (sleeper winner) — He’s got a handful of videos where he’s helping schools do things like fixing a middle school's sport court or building a locker room. These videos are in his smallest bucket, but they have more than double the hit rate of the builds for his own kids, and all four cleared 5× outlier scores. Insane 4/4 hit rate.
But with all the DIY work he’s doing, he never teaches.
Sandcastles classified all 100 of his Reels as storytelling. Not one filed as educational. You can read it directly from the source:
This is a guy showing you how to build the cadillac of treehouses, and none of his content is a tutorial.
So many creators get stuck thinking they need to teach to grow. It's an understandable instinct…we've covered a lot of educators in this series.
But your niche decides whether teaching is the move. DadSocial's audience is watching to feel like the dad who theoretically could build an ice cream truck…even if they might never actually do it.
A tutorial serves the 1% who'll actually do the project, but story serves the 99% who are there for the identity.
Sandcastles can help you find the identity you’re speaking to, and make content they can’t help but binge.
How To Find & Speak To Your Niche Using Sandcastles
These screenshots I’ve got above are all part of a much longer HTML report generated by the Sandcastles MCP.
Every account we've broken down has secret language to speak to your niche like DadSocial's POV line. It's going to look 1% different in your niche, here's how to run this on any account so you can find yours:
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 should be done in Sandcastles first so the MCP can pull from this data faster.
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 built a dynamic table grouping his content performance by topic:
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.
Specifically if you're in an educational niche and you want to pivot to storytelling, this data conversation will be invaluable for you.
You'll need the Sandcastles MCP and bulk-analyzed videos to run this. Start your risk-free trial here and go find what your niche's feed won't tell you.
PS - If you want to watch me walkthrough my 5 favorite Sandcastles <> Claude workflows (that allow me to make better content faster), click here.
