Content Audit (Prada Spacesuits) -- 3 mistakes to avoid in your videos

Today’s Tip: I made these 3 mistakes in a video that should have gone viral — be sure to avoid them in yours.

I’ll be honest, I thought I had a banger with this one.

I was breaking down the newest US spacesuits, designed by Prada. They cost $230M and were the first time ever NASA contracted the spacesuit design to a third-party company. On the surface, this should have been a home run.

But it completely flopped. Let’s breakdown why…

Here’s the video if you want to watch it first: Video Link

These are the 3 biggest mistakes I made:

🎯 | Lack of Hook Clarity:

1. It’s super important to pick a single angle and set up the first 10-15 seconds of the video around it. This creates simplicity in the storytelling for the user

2. You want to intro the premise, give 1-2 supporting facts, and then head fake into something shocking/surprising…but it has to all be based around the same angle

3. In first 10 seconds of this video, I talked about how the spacesuits were “next generation,” “cost $230M,” “being worn on the moon in 2026,” and “designed by Prada.” This is a machine gun of facts that don’t go together, which signals I didn’t spend long enough thinking through the hook framing. Instead, I should have picked one angle, ideally the most shocking one that will resonate with the most people — either the cost or the Prada design

🤔 | Poor Premise Selection: 

1. Once you pick the angle for the video, you want to ensure that the rest of the video has enough meat to support that initial premise

2. When I first saw the story, I wanted to go for the Prada angle. But if you then watch the rest of the video, I don’t mention Prada again until the last line. This is because there really wasn’t anything else to mention…the source material didn’t dive into Prada at all

3. Because of this, I should have made the video about the cost (why do these cost so much // where does all the money go // how much have they cost in the past). The story here was the cost and I completely missed it

🤦🏻‍♂️ | Go/NoGo Discipline:

1. The truth is, I shouldn’t have made this video at all. And the reason is that the best premise (these suits cost too much) just isn’t that interesting. Most people already know the government wastes money and that space travel is probably expensive…because of this, there wasn’t much shock value left

2. I got trapped into making this because it had a really strong key visual (Cleo Abram’s original video with lots of cool animation about the suit). The lesson though is that not every story deserves a video…you want to be disciplined in your idea selection when you have limited time and resources

Hopefully this was helpful to get a look into how I retroactively analyze my poor performing videos.

Keep crushing!

PS - If you want more help improving your short-form videos, you can check out my full breakdown on how my Ironman video got 46M views and drove 29K new followers in 8 days.