Why the Yap on Camera Challenge Is Everywhere

Andréa Jones: So there's currently this challenge on the internet where people are paying hundreds of dollars to basically just talk on camera every single day, which I find fascinating because talking is free. But this challenge has reportedly generated millions of dollars. It's attracted thousands of participants and it's helped turn creators into one of the fastest growing voices in the content creation space. It's called the app challenge, or officially the app on camera. And as someone who teaches marketing that fits into your real life, I have a lot of thought. And gonna share them in this episode. I want to talk about why it's working, what the deeper conversation is here, help you decide if you should make 40 videos, and why at its core are so many smart, wonderful, beautiful, capable business owners making it so dang hard to speak clearly about what they do. And then why do we need to pay to finally speak clearly about what we do? So I'm covering All the details on the Yapp Challenge in this video, and I do have lots of notes. So if you see me looking at my screen, that's why. Before we get into this, I haven't personally taken the app challenge. I just want to be clear. I want to be clear. This is not a review. Okay. I just looked at things like the sales pages, some of the reporting. I've been on threads and Instagram looking at what people are saying. I saw some Facebook posts about it. Basically, I want to use this podcast to analyze the strategy, why the offer is connecting, but I can't tell you if you should buy this program or not. I can't tell you if it's groundbreaking. I can't tell you if it's gonna change your life. Okay. With that being said, what is the app challenge? The app challenge was created by Jesse Jean with a very simple promise. Over six weeks, you'll create and publish 40 direct to camera videos. I call these talking head videos. The program starts with some foundational days and then after that participants receive daily prompts and challenges designed to help them get more comfy speaking, telling stories, sharing opinions, and just communicating their message. Okay. Right now the price, as I saw it online, was 297 and you could do two payments of 167. Also, it seems very platform agnostic. So people are deciding if they want to do this on Reels or TikTok or YouTube Shorts or Facebook Reels. And I do like that on the sales page they say this is not about going viral or gaining followers or really even you aren't guaranteed you're gonna make millions. The outcome is the practice. So from that perspective, all right, Jesse Jean, I see you. Now at the time recording this video, the the official program play ⁓ page has closed. There were two launches. And the most recent one ended on I wanna say, ⁓ it ended on June 30th, 2026. So just for context, there's only this is such a short period of time. So I want to talk about why people care about this. Why is this even a big deal? Well, Jesse Jean, the person who started this, started a new social media account November twenty twenty five, y'all. So what is that? Like seven months ago? She focused heavily on direct-to-camera videos where she talked about lots of things. She talked about money, she talked about her career changes, she talked about social media, her experience busy building a business. But there was a specific video that went viral. It's a video that she said how she yaps on camera. Okay. And that one went viral. And even the phrase yap on camera, people really connected to that. That's the name of her program now. And people wanted to know: how are you so natural about this? And how can I do the same thing? So instead of forcing ⁓ people into a broader kind of program she already had. She created a very specific offer around the question she was getting yapping on camera. And that first round reportedly got over $1.2 million in revenue with over 4,000 customers. She's been interviewed by a ton of people since then, most notably Inc. reported that the second launch generated another $1.2 million just in the first day. That's bananas, those numbers. Are obviously a huge part why people are paying attention. Even on Facebook, I saw people saying, I just joined to see what this is all about. And so it almost has this like snowball effect. But the revenue isn't the interesting part to me because anyone can inflate numbers. I've seen it happen. I'm not like super excited about that. I will say the buzz is there. The revenue part, not interesting to me. But what's interesting is how specific this offer became. Because as a marketer looking at it, I'm like, this existed before, ain't doing nothing new. But she got super specific with her brand, her personality. She wasn't promising to teach you everything, understand about every single platform, about every single funnel, about every possible like how to create a hook or 17 ways to like tell stories. Like she wasn't doing all of that. She had a very clear premise. I want to help you speak on camera and feel comfortable doing it. That's it. And so I love the specificity in the offer. And that specificity is actually doing a lot of selling for her, which is why in the mindful marketing playground, I talk a lot about your marketing, starting with your offer. Because if your offer isn't like juicy, clear, specific that someone wants, the marketing of the offer becomes a lot harder. Ask me how I know. All right, so let's talk about why people are actually buying this because at a glance, when I first saw this, I was like, who cares? Like this has been done a million times over and over again. It's not anything new. They're playing for like prompts. Like, I mean, do we even need these prompts? You can literally just ask Chat GPT for some prompts if that's what you wanted. You could there's so many little packages you could buy for much less that just have prompts, right? You can even just scroll through social media and just get inspired and use those as prompts. So the prompts aren't the value, the the value's in the structure. She's teaching people how to stop overthinking and record something. And it has a defined starting point and end point with the natural progression of a challenge. In 40 days, you'll become a person who speaks on camera. Boom. Okay. I love that. Now, what I also love about the positioning of this offer is like she didn't say be visible. There's a lot of visibility challenges. There's a lot of like get attention challenges. And yes, that is a result of this challenge. Yes, that's something that she does kind of allude to. But the big result is get comfy speaking on camera. And I think that distinction really matters, especially those of us in marketing. Sometimes we Aren't specific enough with the result and were like, this offer will help you make money. And like, okay, yes. But with hers, her offer helps people not become visible, not create content, but get comfortable speaking on camera. That's very specific. It has the videos, it has the stories, it has a PDF. I'm sure that there's some sort of gear list on like how to get a ring. Like again, I didn't join it for this program, but like if I were to create it, that's what it would be. But I I love that this challenge is focused on implementation. And I think that's why people bought it as well. Now I want to talk about why this is so hard and why people buy this. Because talking on camera is one of those things where we want to do it. We feel like we want to do it. And in theory, it seems great. But then when you start to do it, you're like, what are words? We've all had those bullets. What do I even think? I've been recording videos online since 2007, y'all. 2007! Two decades. 20 years I've been recording videos on these internet streets. And I still get nervous. I still don't know what to say. I still stutter over my words. I still do all the things, right? So I think this is a very human and real experience that we go through. And she simplified that in her program. I assume she covers things like how do I look at the camera and not at my reflection. Am I rambling? Is this actually useful? Do I put text on the screen? Where do my hands go? What does my business even do? You know, all of those things that we think about, I'm sure she covers in that program. I know I do in my programs. I think that the beauty of this, especially with when it's called yap on camera, it's not like sound professional, polish button up. It's like, let's actually get you talking. The other thing, the other thing she could have done with positioning that I see a lot of like buzzwords around right now. I'm just gonna read you this sentence that I have in my notes because this is how sometimes we talk about our offers. Hers is called yap on camera, right? But it could be like, I empower visionary entrepreneurs to unlock their fullest potential. And it's like, all right, come on now. And she's like, let's get comfy talking on camera for 40 days, right? And so I think the gap that she filled is this desire for people to be human and not sound like some sort of robot. Hello, AI, you have made that worse for us. Okay. So what I also think this gap identifies is it's really confronting. So for those of us, me included, who sometimes talking on camera is not our first choice or second, especially given life circumstances. So I'll say right now, I have very different energy than I did like five years ago. Okay. So I've been in my business for over 12 years now. Most of it I'm like, yeah, sure. Get on camera, talk, blah, blah, blah. And even the first year or two that I had my kids, great. But now they're four and two, that all of my energy goes to them. And then when I don't have them or I don't have the energy, I definitely don't want to be recording video. So I usually try to record in times where I don't have to energetically like put a lot of energy into my kids. Which means my time is limited on recording. And I kind of like love a good B-roll moment or carousel post because of that, right? But I think the beauty of this challenge is it's confronting that. It's like you can't be B-roll. You can't always have the carousel. People want to see you. They want to hear you. They want this to be like a FaceTime chat, right? And those are the videos that are working really well. That being said, I do love creating those kinds of videos. And so that's also the thing that fascinated me about this particular challenge. So why then? Is this format working right now? Why are we experiencing this sort of fatigue on polished content? Because for years, especially in the entry point, the the birthing place of Instagram, we have Instaperfect as a word for a reason. People, even as as soon as like three, four, five years ago, would say you need to have the cameras, you need to have the lights, you need to have the editing, you have to have a photo shoot, you have to have intentional branding. And all of those things work, right? They can improve your credibility and your content. But I think generative AI and images and videos have made polished content kind of easy to make, right? It you can you can make it sound like a robot fairly easily. You can create graphics that look a little too perfect, you can have video. edited together. You can create can' campaigns pretty quickly. They even have ⁓ so I use Riverside to record my podcast. You can put upload a script and it'll like learn your your voice and then read the script as if it were you to create a podcast episode. How freaky deaky is that? I personally do not like that. And if you ever hear me talking a little too polished, it's not me as a robot. I won't do that y'all to you though. I I I wouldn't punish you in that way. Because I honestly think part of the charm, part of the Genesis Qua of this podcast is that I can be myself, give you the goods, right? I'm still talking about this, but sometimes I interrupt myself. Sometimes I stutter, sometimes I talk over my words. I'm gonna tell a silly story that just popped into my head because that's human. And I think that is at its core what this yap challenge is all about. It's like in the opposite of the robots. And I predicted this past two years on my yearly predictions episode. When I talk about social media and marketing prediction predictions, it's like people don't want polished and perfect. They want perfectly imperfect. They want your opinions to sound like you actually lived them. They want advice to feel like it's coming from a real person. They want timing and phrasing and joking and humor and stuttering and all of the things. They want like real facial expressions and they want things that are basically hard for AI to duplicate. I'll give an example of this with my writing. Sometimes when I write, I use AI to edit. Okay, I'm not I'm not ashamed of that. And I use a lot of voice attacks, honestly. So I usually for my email newsletters will voice attacks like talk it through. And then ChatGPT will like basically become a dictator, dictator, dictation assistant. And like whatever I dictated, it'll it'll write it for me. Ask me why it always edits out things when I'm like, that was way, way, way, way too much information. It'll be like, that was way too much information. Hello, Chatty. ⁓ I had all those ways in there for a reason. Do not edit the mouse. I edit them shits back in. Okay. And I think that that is the thing that we crave as humans. We want to be human about this. So this kind of low barrier to production actually allows more people to say yes to this la yap on camera challenge because we don't need a fancy studio. We don't need the complicated editing. We don't need to spend 10 hours trying to figure out how to do an outfit transition on a reel. Okay. And I can tell you right now, every time I do a day in life video, y'all. I crash and burn. I can film like a couple clips early in the day and then I totally forget about it. I just forget, I move on with my day. And then I'll look at my camera later and be like, I recorded like 10 things and I supposed to record 50. Right. So I think the simplicity of this like direct to camera content style is very attractive for people. And then the 40-day commitment is just doable. Okay. And I think people are craving that. They're craving something clearer. They're craving something that they can actually do. And I think that this offer again is positioned about it. Now let's talk about online sentiment because I have been reading a lot of things, threads, Facebook, Instagram, a lot of kind of breakdowns, takedowns, some people really admiring Jesse Jean, some people not so much. I think overall the response is fairly positive. People are happily sharing their videos. There's a couple of people in my network who I noticed during the challenge just because now that I know what I'm looking for, I can kind of see that they're doing it. Suddenly they're doing these talking heads videos and I'm cheering for them. I love that there's a prompt to go with these videos. I love that people are seeing other people kind of show up and show up imperfectly and cheering them on. And I love that it's a visibility moment. I think the nature of this challenge is that it's visible from a marketing perspective too. The challenge itself is marketing itself. Because people are saying I'm doing the Yab on camera challenge, right? And then in the comments, people are cheering them on. And so then people get naturally curious about it. But a warning that I wanna kind of put right here is that marketers marketing marketing is always kind of pyramid scheme. Like I gotta call it out, right? It's like I went viral on Instagram. You're an Instagram coach. And it's like Instagram coaches go viral on Instagram because you're talking about Instagram on Instagram. And like your mom and pop yarn store down the street can do the exact same thing and they're probably not gonna get the same results, right? And so I just gotta highlight that for a sec. But outside of that, very smart. It's like the participants of the challenge helps promote the challenge. The students then become the marketing engine. And this is why I love When I talk about marketing ecosystems, I love creating your own advocates. Cause when you have people, Pat Flynn calls these super fans, right? There's also this theory about your 100 fans, right? It's when you have these people who are eager to support you publicly, they become your marketing for you. I will say not all is great. Some people online are questioning the price of the program. A lot of people are saying, ⁓ this information is free. And they're not wrong. Like you could. probably do this without going through the challenge. This also has brought up the the broader conversation of the online course industry and the state of that, which is wonky. There's been a lot of conversations about people who are dealing the content or cre like going all in and like I have a login, you want to log in and see it. And so there's a lot of that happening, right? But I think there's curiosity. People are curious enough to want the product. The proof is in the pudding. Like enough people bought it where I go, okay, $297 for a 40-day yap challenge doesn't seem like absolutely ridiculous. And it's enough. Enough people have bought it where I go, well, there you go. There you have it. I also love that it's proving me wrong because I was saying, I think earlier this year in a podcast episode, how the course industry, like online courses sold individually, is shifting, shifting away from these like massive products into these very bite sized, like, experiences and use the word experience specifically because people don't want a course. They want to like they want something they can do. They want something that they they can ⁓ tackle very easily. And I think this speaks to that. But I also at that that same time was saying, I don't think courses sell like they do used to. Hello, prove me wrong. So what can we learn on this? Well, I think that there's a really, really good product development lesson here because Jesse Jean reportedly planned a launch to a very broader program, but the interest around the yap on camera concept was so much stronger that she did that. And then she did a wait list. And then her audience response showed her exactly what that is. So she just adjusted. And I I know this sounds simple, but I'm saying this to myself. I think that we sometimes decide what we want to sell instead of asking our people what they want to sell, right? What they want to buy. And I think the community becomes interested in different things, right? So instead of exploring that, sometimes we try to overexplain why the original thing is the original thing. We're like, ⁓ but this is why you need that. And they're like, I don't think I need it. And you're like, no, no, no, you need it. And they're like, I'd rather have this other thing. You're like, no, no, no, no, you need this thing, right? It's like we try to convince them to buy what we already have to offer we are or the idea we already have instead of doing the research and asking people or or doing p research and just figuring out what are people talking about. What are they repeating back to you? What are the ideas that get shared? What do people want me to teach next? You know, I started teaching more about podcasting and email marketing for that reason because I was a social media girl for 10 years. And then two years ago, I realized, no, girl, you're a marketing strategist. You do so much more and have better results actually outside of social media. Social media is like the assist. And my entire business was designed around the assist instead of the main event, the main course, right? The side dish became So much more important than the main dish. And then I realized what the main dish was, and now I've pivoted to that, right? And so I think that that that is something that we want to get curious about in our marketing. So then the question becomes should you post 40 videos in 40 days? Yes or no? Yes or no. Hmm. Should you post 40 videos in 40 days? I'm gonna go ahead and say, maybe. And I know that's not very satisfying. I hate like people love it when I do this or hate hate that I love this. I love saying a good maybe moment. I just think. It depends, right? It can be very useful for a short-term experiment. I talked probably like five or six episodes ago about I posted every day in April. I'm thinking about doing the same thing in August as a short-term experiment just to see what works. When you do these short experiments, you collect information a lot faster. You get to see what topics pop and rise at the top. You get to notice where the stories Come from when people are really excited about it. You get way faster at creating content because you're not so precious about it. You find a style that feels really natural to you, that can all be valuable. But I don't want you to confuse the challenge with like, I have to post talking head videos every day for the rest of my life. I think posting every day for 40 days can get you a lot of information. You can build a new skill, but I don't think that means you need to post daily in your business forever until the end of time. Amen. I think a short sprint can be very helpful for you. And then you can figure out your own cadence. Because I think the biggest thing that people kind of enjoy about this challenge is that it addresses the capacity problem of posting every day. Because direct-to-camera videos are way, way quicker to make than like heavily edited content. And people like that, right? They don't want to have to go back through and like add in transitions and sounds and all these things. It's like, nope, you speak to the camera, what you speak is what you get, right? So it addresses that capacity problem, but creates a new capacity problem with the idea of posting. Every day. And I think that the main thing, again, I haven't taken the program, but the main thing I want you to know from this is that when you have a life, you have a job, you have kids, you have aging parents, you have health issues, you have generally just a human experience, all of that can feel very heavy. And you may need to treat your capacity as part of that strategy, right? Like you need to be strategic about how you create content and what capacity you can create content. Because posting daily, yes, great. But what if you pause? What if something happens? What if you don't like talking to the camera after 40 days of doing it? Right. Technically, you can make all of those decisions if you want. And the marketing police can go off on that, right? But one thing I want to highlight here as well is that posting every day isn't gonna automatically get you all of the views, right? It's not automatically gonna get you attention. It's not automatically gonna help people understand what you do. It's not automatically gonna have people saying, I wanna give you my money for this thing that you sell, right? It can help. And I think that's why these this challenge is amazing because it helps you develop those skills, but you kind have to go into it with that in mind, right? Okay. So back to the question should you do this challenge? If you know that you like video and you wanna do a 40 day video challenge, go for it, babe. If you have a lot of ideas and you're struggling to communicate them, just start, start talking about it. Yeah. Right. If you learn by doing, do the challenge. If you like a good deadline, ⁓ do the challenge. Me personally, I find it as soon as someone tells me like you have to do this in this way, I'm like, mm, how about no? If you like experimenting in your marketing, do that. Right. But if you feel overwhelmed with your current content schedule, please pass. If you are want to join this just to see what everybody else is seeing, I mean, I can't really recommend that, but it's your money. If you don't have a clear offer and you don't know what your business is selling, this could be a confusing challenge for you. If you have a community that doesn't even like consuming video content, this could be like a want want moment for you. If this challenge doesn't match your offer as well, it could be like let let's say you're selling a book. Sometimes all of the videos that lead to a book is not the great, greatest l path. You may find writing on threads to be better because your people are readers, right? All of those things to say, maybe, maybe But I'll give you a few more questions if you want to decide, if you want to create your own challenge, if you want to do something similar. We do stuff like this inside the mindful marketing lab all the time. So the question I want you to think about is what am I trying to practice here? Am I trying to get comfortable on camera? Am I trying to tell better stories? Am I trying to do things differently? And then what am I measuring? How do I know if this is working or not? What happens if I need to pause? And then what do I do after the challenges with all this information? So if you want to do this yourself. I actually think seven days is a great kind of short-term experiment for this. Record seven direct-to-camera videos, post daily for a week, or you can spread them out if you want for the whole month. For each video, I want you to think about what people are misunderstanding about your work, what advice you disagree with, what do your best clients do differently? What lesson did you learn recently? What are some of the decisions you're trying to make? What would someone do if they realize they need your help? Okay. And then After you do the seven videos, review which ones were easy to create, which ones sound like you, which one created conversation, which topic needs to be expanded into a larger topic. Because I think the popularity of this challenge works really well and it makes me want to bring my back my 100 follower challenge because it's basically the same thing, which is communicating your offer in a way that's new to you that helps you in a short term period of time figure out what's working. So if you find your marketing needs some help, needs some support. You can actually get my do less market better kit. No, I'm not gonna put you through forty days of marketing videos, but it'll help you build a marketing system that works for you. You can find it at online dreamslash kit. And if you're in the Yap on Camera Challenge, DM me on Instagram. I'd love to know. I'd love to talk about it. Continue the conversation. I'm at online Drea. That's online D R E A. Send me a message. And I'll see you in the next episode very soon. That's all for today. Bye for now.