This creator changed one simple thing and his content exploded

There’s a creator I’ve been obsessed with lately.

Ryan To — he’s the gold standard in the Brand Marketing space.

His content consistently does huge numbers, so I had to go down the rabbit hole and figure out his secret sauce.

When I pulled up Ryan’s channel in Sandcastles, what I found was super interesting…

Studying Ryan’s outliers & finding the winning pattern

Whenever we’re looking to find nonobvious trends across a creator’s channel, we first use the Sandcastles Videos tab to sort their videos by Outlier Score over the last 12 months.

This helps us see the best performing videos, ranked in order. The winning patterns are so much easier to see this way.

Action in Sandcastles: Channel Filter: @itsryanto || Posted Date: Last 1 year || Outlier Score: 1x+ || Sort By: Outlier Score (Descending)

Immediately something popped out.

Of the 25 videos Ryan posted in the last year (that exceeded a 1x outlier score), 14 came in just the last 4 months. 

This suggests something significant changed in his content format 4 months ago.

Here’s where the story gets fun…

Exactly 4 months ago (right when his videos started going gangbusters), Ryan tried something different in his visual hooks.

He did it for the very first time in this video about Phoebe Gates (Bill Gates’ daughter).

If you look at the metrics, you can immediately see how big of a banger that video was – 930K+ views (a 15.4x outlier)!

So what did he change?

In this video, Ryan kept his classic spoken hook, the same case-study structure, and the same pacing…but he added one tiny twist in the visual hook.

Instead of delivering the video in his traditional greenscreen format, he breaks the fourth wall, leans back, and hands the mic to Phoebe in person!

This seems like a small thing, but it was an incredible visual hook idea that absolutely crushed because it was so unique.

That one move completely changes the viewer’s experience with the story:

• It upgrades Ryan’s credibility significantly (getting the in-person creator cosign)

• It introduces novelty inside a familiar format

And like a smart creator, he trusted the data and ran this playbook again and again and again.

Now pretty quickly, Ryan realized it wasn’t feasible for him to be in person with a high profile creator every time he made a video, so he adapted this mic handoff to a virtual introductory clip from each creator.

They’d send in a clip and he’d integrate it seamlessly into the edit.

And this instantly became his “Signature Visual Element.”

There are tons of people that make creator marketing breakdown videos. There are also tons of people that make greenscreen style videos.

But there is only one person that makes creator marketing greenscreen videos where the featured creator themselves introduces the video…and that’s Ryan To.

This is how Ryan iterated to find a signature hook format that acts as a visual moat in a saturated category.

And it works because the first-person POV clips from each creator act like a pseudo endorsement for Ryan and his channel.

How to find your own visual signature by using Sandcastles

If you want to build a visual moat and signature style like Ryan, here’s the formula…

1) Build a stable base format

• First, pick one core repeatable format (e.g., greenscreen case study explainer) and get that working first

• It’s much easier to develop a signature visual element once you have a baseline that’s effective so you don’t have to change too many things at once

2) Experiment to find a single, signature visual element

• Don’t reinvent your entire format—tweak one visual component: a handoff, a recurring prop, a moment you always break frame, a signature “viewer cameo,” an over-the-shoulder reveal

• The key is one visual wrinkle, repeated. By doing this, you create a much easier path for viewers to remember you. They might not know your name, but they can picture your visual signature

3) Use Sandcastles to find visual signature ideas & prove they work

• Discover: Add top creators in your niche to a Watchlist in Sandcastles and look at their top performing outliers. Study what they do. Don’t copy their visual signature, but use what catches your eye as inspiration for your own brainstorming

• Experiment: Once you come up with something, don’t be afraid to incorporate it into 5-10 videos as a trial

• Analyze: After you post those 5-10 videos, pull up your own channel in Sandcastles and study whether or not the metrics have responded positively. If so, you’ve got something to build on. If not, keep iterating

Try it out this week

1. In Sandcastles, pull up your channel and one adjacent creator you admire. You can do this individually or just build a watchlist of the two channels together

2. Set to Last 12 months → Sort by Outlier Score.

3. Analyze each video by clicking in, watching, and looking for patterns across topic, hook, style, and visual format

4. In Transcripts, extract the Hook pattern and any visual signature element you see

5. Brainstorm something similar to use in your own videos

6. Make your next 5-10 videos trying out your own visual signature

Let us know which creator or brand you’d like to see us analyze next week.

And if you liked this breakdown email format, please reply and let us know!

PS: If you’re ready to start growing faster on social media, you can sign up for Sandcastles here: sandcastles.ai
PSS: My private vault of Sandcastles tutorials and demos: Vault