DON'T JUST PUBLISH
THE PODCAST.
BUILD THE MACHINE
AROUND IT.
Behind The Lines already has the difficult part. The hosts. The chemistry. The opinions. The guests. The stories. And a new conversation every week.
The opportunity isn't simply to make more clips. It's to turn the show into a consistent, measurable content and audience-growth operation.
See more of Chesto's work
PACE
SHANE
GOSUTHE PODCAST IS ALREADY HAPPENING.
LET'S ACTUALLY USE ALL OF IT.
One Behind The Lines episode doesn't have to mean one YouTube upload.
Each conversation contains standalone arguments, entertaining disagreements, industry insights, stories, short-form moments and potentially evergreen material that can continue generating value long after the episode goes live.
Below is the interactive FUI operational pipeline designed to transform every weekly session into an always-on audience acquisition engine.
Hover or select any operational phase to reveal execution specifics
Custom hooks & graphics
Dynamic captions, custom high-CTR thumbnails and scroll-stopping opening hooks.
The podcast remains the source.
The retainer builds the distribution system around it.
THE CURRENT ARRANGEMENT IS
CHANGING EITHER WAY.
There's a fairly obvious question sitting underneath this proposal:
“Why wouldn't we just keep paying Chesto $35/hour and keep doing what we're doing?”
Fair question.
We've been working together since 2021. And in that time, my rate has basically done something very impressive:
Absolutely nothing.
$35/hour in 2021 is still $35/hour in 2026. The problem is that everything else got more expensive.
Same purchasing power
Using Canadian CPI as a benchmark, maintaining roughly the same purchasing power today would put that original $35/hour rate at approximately $41–$42/hour. So before adding a single new deliverable, strategy session, social platform, automation or growth responsibility, the existing rate is already overdue for an adjustment.
And that's only the inflation argument.
The bigger issue is that the work has evolved too. Five years of producing Behind The Lines means I now understand the show, the personalities, the workflow, the recurring problems, what makes a usable clip, what makes a good episode, and how to get the thing out the door efficiently.
That's worth more than it was when we started — not less.
So there are really two separate conversations here.
KEEP THE EXISTING MODEL.
I continue working on Behind The Lines on an hourly/project basis. No major expansion into managed social, content scheduling, audience growth, automations or ongoing channel strategy. The hourly rate gets updated to reflect 2026 rather than 2021.
- Continue on an hourly / project basis
- No managed social, scheduling or growth scope
- No automations or channel strategy
- Rate updated to reflect 2026, not 2021
Simple. Nothing dramatic. We're essentially doing what we're doing now, with a rate that hasn't been frozen in amber for five years.
BUILD THE CONTENT OPERATION.
That's what the retainers below are for. Instead of paying for individual hours of editing, inplayLIVE is paying for an agreed monthly output and for somebody to take ownership of the system around Behind The Lines:
Those are fundamentally different arrangements. The retainer isn't “Chesto would like considerably more money for the exact same thing.” That would, admittedly, be a difficult pitch.
“The existing rate needs updating anyway. If we're also going to substantially expand what I own, let's stop pretending this is just hourly podcast editing and price the actual operation.”
That's the conversation.
CHOOSE THE LEVEL OF
OPERATION YOU WANT.
All prices in CAD/month. The middle tier is where most of this proposal's argument lives: full video multiplication, channel distribution, and audience automations.
PRESENCE
Make sure the show consistently exists everywhere it should.
- Up to 4 fully edited podcast episodes
- 8 vertical short-form videos
- 2 standalone YouTube segments
- Scheduling and publishing
- Up to 2 managed platforms
- Titles and captions
- Basic thumbnails
- Basic content calendar
- Monthly performance snapshot
GROWTH ENGINE
Turn Behind The Lines into an actual audience-growth system.
- Up to 4 fully edited podcast episodes
- 16 vertical short-form videos
- 4 standalone YouTube segments
- Up to 3 managed platforms
- Custom thumbnails
- Strategic clip selection
- Titles and opening hooks
- Platform-specific descriptions and captions
- Content calendar management
- Scheduling and publishing
- Selective hook/title testing
- Limited back-catalogue mining
- Light community management
- Selected ManyChat automations
- Monthly analytics and strategy
FULL CONTENT OPERATION
You record the show. I run the machine around it.
- Up to 4 fully edited podcast episodes
- 24–30 vertical short-form videos
- 6–8 standalone YouTube segments
- Up to 4 managed platforms
- Full content calendar management
- Custom thumbnails and packaging
- Active back-catalogue mining
- Reactive sports/news content
- Ongoing hook/title experimentation
- Community monitoring and comment management
- Expanded ManyChat automation
- Selected lead capture and segmentation workflows
- Recurring content-format development
- Advanced analytics
- Monthly strategy meeting
- Priority turnaround
Note: All growth figures are performance objectives, not contractual guarantees. They are not historical results.
THINK THESE PRICES ARE FUCKING RIDICULOUS?
Excellent. I brought receipts.
I had the entire offer benchmarked against current podcast production, content repurposing, social media management and automation pricing in Canada and the U.S.
The full report compares these packages against real providers, public pricing, freelance rates, social-management benchmarks, automation costs, and what it would likely cost IPL to assemble the same operation separately.
Podcast editor + social agency + thumbnail designer + ManyChat specialist.
24+ finished assets, scheduling, distribution, automations and dedicated show ownership.
Baseline hourly rate required just to match 2021 purchasing power today.
ONE MONTH.
24+ FINISHED VIDEO ASSETS.
SYSTEM MULTIPLIER: Transform a single weekly podcast recording into continuous daily distribution.
And making the content is only half the job.
The package also includes planning, titles, custom thumbnails, scheduling, publishing, selected audience automations, analytics and optimization.
One person takes ownership of the process instead of another twenty things being added to everybody else's to-do list.
See how Chesto runs operations like thisGREAT CONTENT IS USELESS
IF IT LIVES IN A FOLDER.
The expanded scope is not simply additional editing. It's ongoing management of the content pipeline — an elegant, interconnected workflow.
Identify
Find the moments worth publishing.
Package
Build the hook, edit, thumbnail, title and accompanying copy.
Schedule
Organize the content calendar and maintain publishing consistency.
Publish
Distribute appropriately across the agreed platforms.
Engage
Manage selected community touchpoints and audience automations.
Learn
Review the actual results and use them to inform the next month.
Less "what are we supposed to post today?"
More "here's what's working and here's what we're doing next."
TURN ATTENTION
INTO ACTION.
Because "nice clip" is not necessarily the end of the customer journey. Selected content can produce an immediate, high-value interactive next step without requiring manual host intervention.
"Pace's live reaction when that 4th-and-goal whistle blew..."
Comment BTL and we'll send you the full uncut episode.
Turning Passive Scrollers into Measurable Traffic
Rather than hoping viewers navigate to YouTube or visit inplayLIVE on their own, we program intentional trigger words directly inside the clip narrative and captions.
Selected basic comment-to-DM and keyword-triggered workflows. Delivers the core mechanic: full episode links, resources, or community destinations directly into user inboxes.
More extensive campaign automation, selected follow-up sequences, audience segmentation, lead capture workflows and ongoing conversion rate optimization.
Does not imply unlimited automation development. Any automated messaging strictly complies with platform permissions, explicit user consent, and sports-media promotional policies. Third-party software fees (e.g. ManyChat pro licenses) are billed separately.
MORE CONTENT ISN'T THE POINT.
BETTER DECISIONS ARE.
We're not throwing clips at the internet and praying to the algorithm. We are engineering a responsive feedback loop that gets smarter every month.
If Pace and Gosu arguing produces exceptional retention:
Do more of that.
If industry stories consistently generate subscribers:
Prioritize them.
If NFL content dramatically outperforms other topics:
Adjust the calendar.
If a clip gets 50,000 views and produces zero meaningful audience growth:
That's useful information too.
Categories of Measurement
Reach
Are new people discovering Behind The Lines?
Cold algorithmic impressions outside existing subscriber base
Retention
Are they actually watching or skipping?
Detects the exact second drop-off occurs to tune opening hooks
Audience Growth
Are viewers becoming followers & subscribers?
Tracks new subscribers acquired per clip published
Conversion
Which content turns attention into measurable action?
ManyChat comment triggers generating clicks to full episodes
Topic Performance
Which subjects consistently out-deliver?
Compares sports betting mechanics vs personal industry stories
Winning Formats
Which hooks & host dynamics deserve further investment?
Identifies repeatable format blueprints for the following month
We're not throwing clips at the internet and praying to the algorithm.
We're building a feedback loop.
GIVE IT 90 DAYS.
GET SOMETHING MORE USEFUL
THAN VIBES.
Establish
Confirm the workflow, establish the publishing calendar, validate the baseline and launch the initial content mix.
Learn
Identify standout topics, hooks, retention patterns, discovery sources and opportunities for improvement.
Optimize
Increase emphasis on winning formats, refine publishing decisions and evaluate whether the expanded operation is delivering sufficient value.
Growth percentages shown throughout this proposal are objectives, not guarantees. Organic platform performance is influenced by numerous external factors.
What is guaranteed is the agreed deliverables, management work, analysis and iteration.
"CHESTO, THERE'S NO FUCKING WAY
WE'RE DOING THAT."
Fair. Here are the objections I assume are currently forming.
More on who's actually proposing thisCorrect. You're currently paying me primarily to edit Behind The Lines. This proposal includes editing the show and building, publishing, managing and optimizing the content operation around it. If all you want is the podcast edited, we don't need to pretend otherwise. We can keep doing that.
No. Respectfully, that rate has had a very good run. $35/hour made sense for a much narrower arrangement: Edit the podcast. Deliver the podcast.
It does not make sense for editing the podcast, identifying content opportunities, cutting shorts, building standalone segments, making thumbnails, writing hooks and titles, scheduling posts, managing channels, reviewing analytics, testing formats, building automations and helping decide what the show should do next. At that point I'm not just the guy editing the podcast.
I'm running a meaningful chunk of the content operation.
There's also a fundamental problem with hourly billing for this kind of work: the better and faster I get at doing it, the less I get paid. That's a pretty stupid incentive system for both of us. A retainer prices the responsibility, output and ongoing value of the work rather than asking everyone to keep a stopwatch running while I move keyframes around.
So: can I keep editing Behind The Lines under our existing arrangement? Sure.
Can we turn Behind The Lines into a managed content and growth operation for $35/hour? There's no fucking way we're doing that.
Potentially! If inplayLIVE doesn't want to make audience growth a meaningful investment right now, then it is too expensive.
The cheaper option is Presence. The even cheaper option is continuing to do what we're doing now.
The question isn't whether $2,950 is a large number. It's whether having somebody produce the podcast, create 20 additional video assets, package them, publish them, manage the channels, build automations and continuously optimize the system is worth $2,950.
Absolutely. And we should use AI wherever it makes the work faster. AI can find timestamps. It can transcribe. It can suggest clips. It can generate captions.
What it doesn't know particularly well is why Pace making that face while Gosu says something ridiculous is the actual clip.
The point isn't avoiding automation. It's automating the boring parts without automating away editorial judgment.
Yes. If somebody owns it. That's the important bit.
Someone needs to choose the content, package it, write it, schedule it, publish it, monitor it, review the numbers and make different decisions next month.
If inplayLIVE already has that person and they have the bandwidth: Great. Don't pay me to do it.
Maybe we don't. That's what the first 90 days are partly designed to discover.
Sixteen gives us enough volume to test topics, hooks, hosts and formats without turning the feed into an industrial accident.
If eight great clips consistently outperform sixteen: We change the system.
The packages are a starting operating model, not scripture.
Sort of. But less:
HELLO HUMAN 🤖 WOULD YOU LIKE TO PURCHASE PRODUCT?
And more:
"Comment BTL and I'll send you the thing you literally just asked for."
The useful part of automation is removing friction between interest and action. If nobody uses it, we kill it.
Then after 90 days we'll have something considerably more useful than vibes. We'll know what people click, what they watch, where they leave, what generates subscribers, which topics perform and whether the increased output is justified.
And if the answer is:
"This isn't producing enough value."
Then we don't keep doing it because a proposal once said we should.
Absolutely fucking not.
Anyone guaranteeing organic social growth percentages with certainty should probably also be able to tell us next week's NFL scores.
The percentages here are targets. What I'm committing to is a system designed to pursue them — and enough measurement to tell us whether it's actually working.
Yes. That's literally why Presence exists.
Start there. Establish the workflow. Measure it.
Then increase output when the evidence says increasing output makes sense.
Obviously.
If the correct answer is:
12 clips, 3 segments, YouTube + Instagram, one ManyChat campaign and absolutely no TikTok because John has declared war on vertical video —
We can price that.
The tiers make the choices understandable. They are not holy tablets handed down from Mount Podcast.
NO SURPRISE COSTS.
No mysterious growth-hacking surcharge. No pretending a software subscription is the proprietary Chesto Artificial Intelligence Growth Engine™.
- Monthly CAD pricing
- Up to 4 standard edited episodes per month
- Initial 90-day engagement
- Additional episodes or significant production requirements scoped separately
- Content mix may be refined after the initial period
- Publishing channels confirmed during onboarding
- Light community management is not unlimited customer support
- ManyChat and third-party software charges billed separately
- Advertising spend excluded
- Third-party messaging and usage fees excluded
GROWTH ENGINE
Plus scheduling, publishing, social management, selected ManyChat automations, analytics and monthly strategy.
MAKE EVERY BEHIND THE LINES
EPISODE WORK HARDER.
The show is already being recorded.
The conversations are already happening.
The raw material already exists.
Let's actually use all of it.