Gary Vaynerchuk has been preaching a simple idea for years, and it’s one every sports creator should internalize: your best content is hiding inside content you’ve already made.
In his post Content on Content on Content, GaryVee lays out what he calls the Content Pyramid — start with a big, substantial piece of content at the top, then mine it for everything it’s worth on the way down:
“When you have something at the top, use it as a source to create other content … There is an enormous amount of content that can be mined from the big pieces of content that sit at the top. It’s the hacking of the mothership-content into micro-content.”
He calls the output sawdust — the shavings left on the floor after you cut wood. Most people sweep it up and throw it away. Smart creators package it and sell it:
“It’s all sawdust. I’m fascinated by sawdust. It’s the byproducts of your output whether you’re a podcaster or a writer or entrepreneur. It’s someone who took the sawdust after cutting a bunch of 2x4s, repackaging it and then selling it. Figure out your sawdust.”
This isn’t just a philosophy. It’s a production system. And it maps perfectly onto what creators are already doing on Assist.
The Assist Version of the Content Pyramid
Think about a typical game night on Assist:
The Mothership: Your Watch Along.
You go live, call the game, react in real time, argue with chat, and ride the highs and lows with your audience for two or three hours. That’s your pillar content — raw, authentic, and full of moments.
The Sawdust: Shorts.
Buried inside that stream are dozens of clips waiting to happen. The call you nailed right before a buzzer-beater. The hot take that aged perfectly (or terribly). The genuine shock on your face when a rookie throws down a poster. Each of those is a short — a standalone piece of micro-content that can travel on its own across social platforms and pull new viewers back to your next stream.
How to Put This Into Practice
Stream first, mine second. Don’t overthink the live broadcast. Your job during the watch along is to be present and authentic. The clips come after.
Clip the peaks. Go back through your stream and look for the emotional high points — big plays, wild reactions, scorching takes. Those moments are your sawdust.
Let the shorts do the recruiting. A 30-second clip of a genuine reaction can reach people who’d never sit through a full stream cold. But once they see you in a short, they know what they’re signing up for when they join your next watch along.
Repeat every game night. The beauty of live sports is that there’s always another game. Every stream is a new mothership. Every mothership produces new sawdust. The flywheel compounds.
Why This Matters
GaryVee built a media empire on this principle. He records a keynote, and his team turns it into dozens of Instagram posts, tweets, YouTube clips, and articles. You don’t need a team of twenty to do the same thing — you need a live game, your commentary, and Assist’s tools to clip the best moments into shorts.
The content pyramid isn’t just a strategy for marketing gurus. It’s the natural rhythm of sports creation: show up live, capture the moment, share the highlights, grow your audience, and do it again tomorrow night.
Figure out your sawdust.
