I've seen a lot of smaller channels grow faster than million-sub channels — it's easy to hit a plateau where YouTube 'cages' you. Subscriber count is really just an ego metric at this point; shouldn't you aim for better funnel numbers instead, like new/casual/regular viewer splits?
That's an interesting point, but what else would I aim for — a percentage split of new vs. casual viewers? I could hit some arbitrary target for that today. I feel like I need something to actually progress toward. I do understand the danger of a plateau where the percentage of new viewers relative to your subscriber base goes down over time — I felt that at 100K subs, and it forced me to adopt new strategies to keep growing. But as long as the absolute number of viewers keeps going up, I'm fine with it — I don't care that much about the relative performance metrics, because what I actually care about is getting big enough to meaningfully influence adoption of these AI models at scale among small-to-mid-size business owners and average people. I don't see anything better than subscriber count as a goal right now, but I'm open to being told I'm wrong about that.
I don't really ask people to subscribe. Why not try it today? If you're watching this video and you're not subscribed to my channel, would you mind subscribing? Then we'll see how many of these viewers are recurring and how many are willing to take a few seconds to help me reach my goals. I find repeated subscriber pitches annoying, so I usually avoid them. Over the long run, people will keep seeing my face—I'm not planning to go away—so eventually they'll subscribe. But I also get that it's not optimal; I just don't like seeming like I'm begging for subs. There could be a tactical way, like the Diary of a CEO host who does a minute pitch early in the video and asks, 'Would you please subscribe?' That works for him—he has 15 million subscribers. I've tried it, but I didn't see a big difference; I already have a high viewer‑to‑subscriber ratio. On my Cloud Code course I got about 3% of viewers to subscribe (60k subs), while most creators max out around 0.5%. So I think it's really about making great quality content, which has earned me most of my subscribers. If you spend four hours with me and I make three subscription asks—roughly one per hour—that probably makes sense.
The most important metric for me is not the amount of money I'm making (MR). It's not the number of people in my community. It's none of that. The most important metric for me is YouTube subscribers. Why? Because I believe strongly that in an age of intelligent machines, in the AI era we are heading toward at breakneck speed, the only thing that will matter and distinguish me from other entrepreneurs or business people is my distribution. I believe strongly that the ability to build and have a distribution in the AI era is the only fundamental thing that will set you apart. Let me give you an example: If I were Netflix and existed in an era where any website or company could clone my entire tech stack by typing 'make me a Netflix dupe' into chat GPT, what value would my company have? The only value my company has is in my customer base. Everything is essentially commoditized. Therefore, the only value I will have in this market is how many customers I currently have. You can call this wealth divide, follower divide, audience divide. But I believe strongly the only real thing that matters and will matter to me is the number of subscribers, the number of followers, and the strength with which those people follow me—like authenticity. I don't just want to be one of a million YouTube channels; I want to be the best YouTube channel talking about the topic I discuss. I want an unbroken chain of me showing up every day and delivering on my promises, because the probability that others will do that is extraordinarily low. That's what I'm optimizing for. Sure, the money I'm making now with school and all that is nice, but what will I do with that money? Let's be real: the difference isn't between people starting at zero dollars and those at $5 million net worth. The difference is between basically all of us and the select few at the top with net worths in the hundreds of millions or billions. So that is the only money-wise divide that actually matters. I won't get there in the next couple years realistically. When you view anything from a sufficiently high vantage point—say, on a skyscraper—nothing down at the bottom that we do really matters. From that height, people with hundreds of billions of dollars and me with a few million dollars look basically the same as everyone else with zero million dollars. Does that make sense? So, in terms of money, there's no point optimizing for money because I'll never reach that level in any reasonable time frame. But the one play I have is the subscriber base, and that's what I'm going for.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm planning to do — I've been dragging my feet on it, but I'm working with someone now to set it up. Retargeting is the way to do it, based on working with a lot of people in the coaching space — the story behind a lot of their revenue spikes is almost always the same: growing steadily, then adding retargeting, then a big jump. I think if I don't change anything else in my funnel and just add retargeting, I could easily 1.5x results. That's the next thing on my list.
Just be consistent with posting. When I started I had almost no viewers, but by posting regularly I grew to about 22k subscribers. Keep at it and you'll see growth.