The ICM Production Line: 27 Videos For $26.76

Ryan “RyMac” McKinney · USMC · 2 September 2026 · 4 minute read

Last month my production line put out 27 videos. The bill for all of them was $26.76. It runs on Jake Van Clief's ICM folder system, and I just made a video walking every stage of it.

The video IS the demo. Every animation in it was rendered by the line it teaches, and every receipt on screen is in this post.

What is an ICM production line?

An ICM production line is a set of folders and text files. They turn 1 recording session into a finished video, a community package, and a blog post. The steps live in the folders. The AI reads them in order and does the building.

You may hear this called an automation pipeline. It means the steps are written down where the AI can see them, so it walks the same road every time instead of guessing.

The method isn't mine. Interpretable Context Methodology, ICM for short, belongs to Jake Van Clief and David McDermott. They wrote the paper on it, and Jake teaches it himself at Clief Notes. I'm the guy running it in public.

What did the line produce last month?

My channel's entire catalog is 27 videos. All of them landed inside the last month, and every number below was read off the screen on 1 September 2026.

40,393 views in 28 days, up 391%. 931 new subscribers. 2.4K hours of watch time. 402 contacts on my list. 493 members in the community.

Agency owners ask me who edits all of it. Nobody does. A 6 person marketing agency would staff this output with an editor, a writer, and a designer. The line replaces all 3 seats, the same way it did on the small business video that pulled 7.5K views in its first 2 days.

What would the same 27 videos cost to rent?

$21,600, modeled on going rates. An editor at $100 a video. 2 thumbnails at $50. A script at $300. A blog post at $300. A community package at $50. That's $800 a video. 27 of them is $21,600.

Or $0, which is what most owners spend. They make nothing, because the rent is too high and the afternoon never shows up. Nothing means no traffic and no leads.

The line's real bill is in the picture above. The AI doing the building is Claude Code, and the finished videos come out of the cloud for cents each.

How does the line run?

9 stages, in a fixed order. Research. Gameplan. Script. Spec. Reader. Record. Render. Package. Blog.

I only show up for the judgment calls. I approve the script. I approve what goes on screen. I record. Everything else is the AI reading the skills that carry each stage, 20 of them, each one a text file holding the lessons my failures paid for.

You may hear the word render in there. It means the slides and my voice become the finished video file. That part costs cents in the cloud instead of an afternoon on my machine.

Can you run one without being technical?

I can't write a line of code. That isn't modesty, it's the entire point of the folder system. The line is plain text files a 9th grader could read, and the AI does the building.

If you want to see what the machine looks like when it's running, watch the video above or any of the 27 it made. The folder system underneath them is the same one in the free kit below, and the desk it all runs from is 2 text files.

I build in public every day in my group. You see the parts that work. You see the parts that don't.