JT Martin knows how to go viral. 50 million organic views. 140,000 followers. A goat yoga studio that went from open classes to a waitlist. An observatory that pulled close to a thousand people to a single event off the back of one video.
And when we asked him what slow and steady means in his world, he said: “not burning out while trying to chase virality.”
That’s the tension. Here’s a guy who clearly knows the game, choosing not to play it the way most people play it.
In this episode, Jake and John sit down with JT, founder of Loudr and the brain behind The Corn Belt, to walk through how he built a hyperlocal attention engine for Nebraska, the framework he uses to decide who he works with, and the one strategic move that quietly changes everything: pick an interest category, then go win it.
Key Takeaways
- The thing that separates good short-form video from forgettable short-form video is cost signal. Visible effort the viewer can feel. A 30-foot monopod. A printed map and a dart. Counting to a million on camera.
- Most businesses are still optimizing for likes. JT optimizes for shares. Make a video that makes the person who sends it look smart to whoever they’re sending it to.
- Every business now has two ways to play: build your own attention engine in your interest category, or rent attention from someone who already owns one. Both are valid. There is no third option that works.
- The shortcut for finding your interest category: go to Reddit. Find the subreddit that fits your business with at least 50,000 subs. That’s how you know the category has the exit velocity to break into the algorithm. Then make content for those people, every week.
- Events are tough because they aren’t evergreen. Destinations and recurring experiences are better. If you have to do an event, build community before the event so there’s something to feature.
- Sponsorship value isn’t in the activation. It’s in the media the activation creates. Activation is for the room. Media is for everyone else.
Episode at a Glance
JT explains how he built The Corn Belt into a hyperlocal Nebraska attention engine from scratch, why “cost signal” is the only thing separating videos that move people from videos that get scrolled past, and the Reddit-first formula he uses to help businesses own an entire interest category. The big idea: stop trying to be good at every platform. Pick one lane. Win it. Or rent attention from someone who has.
Action step: Open Reddit. Find the subreddit that best maps to what your business actually does. If it has 50,000+ subs, that’s your interest category. Read the top three posts this week. Make content around those topics. Repeat next week. Then next year.
Main idea: Cost signal is effort the viewer can see. Effort earns attention. Attention compounds into a channel. A channel becomes a category. Owning a category is the moat.
Why it matters: Every business is becoming a media company. You either build the attention engine yourself, partner with someone who has, or you keep paying for ads and wondering why the same 300 people keep seeing them.
Quick tool: Reddit. Specifically, the largest subreddit in your interest category. A free, public read on what your future customers are actually paying attention to this week.
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About JT Martin
JT is the founder of Loudr, a short-form video and social media agency based in Nebraska, and the creator behind The Corn Belt, a hyperlocal Nebraska channel that has racked up more than 50 million organic views and 140,000 followers. Before Loudr, he spent over a decade in corporate media in San Francisco and New York City, including time at Time Inc. He came home to Nebraska in 2020 and started building from scratch.
- 50M+ organic views and ~140k followers across The Corn Belt
- Built the channel during the cratering of traditional Nebraska media (newspapers, regional broadcast) and stepped into the gap
- Worked with the Nebraska Department of Transportation, Department of Economic Development, and a 2024 presidential campaign that wanted to reach Nebraska as a swing state
- Ran a state-wide coaching project teaching five Nebraska towns how to run their own hyperlocal channels
- Quarterly client engagement in the Cayman Islands: a real estate developer renting attention from the same hyperlocal formula
- Co-creator of Corn Jam, a concert series held out in cornfields
His mantra: “Not burning out while trying to chase virality.”
Loudr: https://weareloudr.com
The Corn Belt on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecornbelt/
Corn Jam: https://cornjam.com
Highlights & Timestamps
00:00–02:00 — Welcome and Why JT Says This Episode Is His Slow & Steady Intervention
The setup, the 50M-view headline, and JT’s reaction to being asked to slow down.
02:00–06:30 — What Loudr Actually Does
Hyperlocal content as a category, The Corn Belt as the attention engine, and the surprising list of clients buying that attention: from the Cayman Islands to a presidential campaign.
06:30–12:00 — Coming Home: SF, Time Inc., and the Bet on Nebraska
A decade in ad tech and legacy media. The Stanford lunch-and-learn that predicted AI. Why the magazine industry’s “beaches, boardrooms, bathrooms” mantra didn’t save it. And why COVID plus the metaverse promise was the moment to come back.
12:00–18:00 — The TikTok Moment and the Cost Signal Framework
The Christmas 2018 video that hit 50k views and rewired JT’s brain. The single concept that separates videos that work from videos that don’t: visible effort.
18:00–25:00 — Goat Yoga, Northern Lights, and Optimizing for Shares
How JT actually builds the videos that pull a thousand people to one event. The campground that became an Omaha date night itinerary. Why “feel smart sending this” is the metric that matters.
25:00–35:00 — Pick an Interest Category. Win It. Or Rent It.
The Reddit formula: 50k subs, top three posts, four years of consistency. Why ARTILLERY can rank for “web design Lincoln” using the same logic. And why most small businesses should rent attention instead of building it themselves.
35:00–43:00 — How to Capture What You Catch
Building your social grid before the wave hits. UTM tags, contact-form data, and what to do with the people who actually click through.
43:00–49:00 — Events Are Tough, Sponsorship Value Is the Media
Why destinations beat events. Why sponsorship dollars buy media, not activation. The Corn Jam pitch in plain English.
49:00–End — Jake’s Wrap: Every Business Is a Media Company Now
JT’s mic cut out, so Jake closes with the three threads they were riffing on: media-company mindset, the death of the hard pitch, and brand equity that compounds.
What Is Cost Signal (and Why It Decides Everything)
JT’s word for it is cost signal. The rest of us would call it effort. Specifically, visible effort. The kind a viewer can feel without being told.
“Cost signal is just a fancy word for effort. That’s all it is.”
MrBeast’s first viral video was counting to a million on camera. No editing trick. No payoff. Just the visible cost of a guy willing to sit there long enough to do it.
JT’s version is a 30-foot monopod. A printed map and a thrown dart. A drive across the state on a Tuesday. The viewer doesn’t have to be told he tried. They can see it.
This is the part most small-business video gets wrong. The instinct is to make something polished and on-brand. JT’s instinct is the opposite. Make something where the effort is the message. Polished is forgettable. Effort earns the watch.
If you remember nothing else from this episode, remember this: ask “what’s the cost signal?” before you make the video. If you can’t answer it, don’t make the video.
Optimize for Shares, Not Likes
A like is cheap attention. A share is the audience doing the work for you.
JT optimizes every video for the share. Specifically, for the share that makes the sender look good to their friend, their partner, their boss.
“You want that asset to be a piece of value that they want to send to the other people in their lives to make them look smart.”
The goat yoga video isn’t about goats. It’s about being the kind of person who texts goat yoga to your girlfriend on a Thursday afternoon. The campground video isn’t about the campground. It’s about being the friend who has the date-night ideas.
This is a subtle reframe but it changes the whole production. If the question is “will people like this,” you make something pretty. If the question is “will someone send this to make themselves look good,” you make something useful.
Useful, sendable, and a little bit fun. That’s the trifecta.
Pick an Interest Category. Then Go Win It.
This was the hot take of the episode and it’s worth slowing down for.
JT’s mental model: every business operates inside an interest category. Yours is somewhere on the map. The question is whether you’ve named it and committed to it.
His Reddit shortcut, which is the cleanest tool we’ve seen for this:
- Open Reddit. Find the subreddit that best maps to what your business actually does.
- If it has 50,000+ subscribers, that’s your category. (Below that, the category is too small to gain algorithmic exit velocity.)
- Each week, read the top three posts. Make content about those topics. That’s your editorial calendar, written by your future customers, for free.
- Do it for four years.
Why this works: the same human interests that surface on Reddit are the ones the TikTok and Instagram algorithms reward. Reddit is the upstream signal. Everything that goes viral on short-form video lived on Reddit first.
For The Corn Belt, the category is Nebraska. ~80,000 subs on r/Nebraska. JT planted his flag there in 2020 and has been hammering keywords, racking up keyword authority, and building cost signal ever since. Now anyone who wants attention in Nebraska (a department of state government, a campground, a goat yoga studio, a presidential campaign) can rent it from him.
The applied version for ARTILLERY is the same. We rank #1 for “web design Lincoln” not because we game the algorithm. Because we said no to social media, no to SEO, no to PR, and only said yes to websites. The narrowness is the strategy.
Pick your lane. Stay in it. The compounding shows up in year three, not month three.
Build the Engine, or Rent the Attention
The trap most small businesses fall into is trying to “do social media.” That phrase has no edges, no goal, and no scoreboard. So nothing happens. Or worse, three grand goes into one video that the same 300 followers see and don’t share.
JT’s framework gives you the actual choice. Two paths. Pick one.
Path 1: Build your own attention engine. Win an interest category. Four years of consistent, high-cost-signal content. This is the long game. It’s also where the compounding lives. ARTILLERY did this with web design. JT did it with Nebraska. The body lab could do it with mobility, or recovery, or post-race performance. Pick one and commit.
Path 2: Rent attention from someone who already won the category. This is what most small businesses should do. It’s faster, cheaper than you’d think for the right partner, and meets you where you are. Find the creator who owns the category your customer is already paying attention to. Rent a series of posts, not a one-off. Plan for four touches a year, not one.
The mistake is doing neither and calling it a strategy.
The other mistake, the one JT flagged honestly, is starting with the biggest creator you can find. Don’t. The reach gets priced out of your math, the same way Coca-Cola got priced out of MrBeast. Start small. Match the cost signal to the budget. Build the relationship.
Sponsorship Value Lives in the Media, Not the Moment
This came up while talking about Corn Jam, the concert-in-a-cornfield series Jake and JT have been building together. A five-figure sponsor was trying to value the activation: how many people will be at the event? How much signage?
JT had to reframe the whole pitch.
“The actual activation and the experience of that activation isn’t actually where the value is. The value is in the media that it creates.”
Two thousand people at a concert is not the win. The win is the video the concert generates, the people who see it, and the way that media positions the sponsor as part of the community for the next twelve months.
This is the same reason John’s mid-episode brainstorm (Body Lab cold plunges at the Gravel Worlds finish line) was a great experiential idea but a marginal media idea. The activation would crush in the moment. The media wouldn’t carry it after the moment.
The lesson for sponsors: stop counting heads at the event. Start counting eyes on the content.
The lesson for businesses thinking about activations: ask the same question you’d ask about a video. What’s the cost signal? What’s the share trigger? What’s the category you’re staking?
Jake’s Wrap: Three Threads After the Mic Cut Out
JT’s mic dropped near the 49:54 mark. Jake recorded a wrap so the back third of the conversation didn’t get lost. Three threads:
Every business is becoming a media company. You don’t get to opt out. You pick the lane (email, podcast, short-form video, long-form) and you commit. If you’re not building one of those, you’re working with someone who is.
The hard pitch is dying. What’s working now is the opposite: subtlety, embedded storytelling, sponsorship that lives inside the media instead of interrupting it. Product placement in a Bond film. The 1984 Apple ad that never showed the computer. Tim Dillon telling stories through his ad reads. Selling without selling.
It’s the long game. Brand equity compounds. One video isn’t going to ring the phone. Forty-eight will. The payoff shows up later, when a stranger picks between you and a competitor and already feels like they know you.
That’s the slow and steady version of an industry that mostly rewards burnout.
Call to Action
Want help making sure the attention you earn on social actually goes somewhere — a website that captures, converts, and compounds?
Start here: https://artillerymedia.com/contact/
Show Credits
Hosts: Jake Kramer & John Wooten
Guest: JT Martin (Loudr, https://weareloudr.com, and The Corn Belt)
Produced by: ARTILLERY, Lincoln, Nebraska
Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY 🎧
https://artillerymedia.com/podcast/
