#228 · un-pausing my daily updates
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.
Focus on becoming exceptionally good at a skill and leverage that credibility on YouTube, but don’t let the channel become an emotional crutch. Treat content as a lever: build runway, produce consistently, and don’t expect immediate ROI. Aim for sustainable output rather than perfection. Improve thumbnails and packaging, and make sure key links are placed above the fold to boost conversions. The goal is to find content‑market fit, not just packaging‑market fit, and iterate based on real‑world feedback.
Let it ride. Do not publish. I think he's talking about a video I published on my main YouTube channel a while ago that went super viral — we're at like 1.3 million views now — and I did indeed give it some space to grow. That's generally what you should do: give it a little bit of space to grow, not too much space. I think a lot of people take this too seriously, but on the main channel where you have a lot of growth occurring on a specific YouTube video, just give it 24 hours. Don't publish anything in the next 24 hours after that video and you'll have significantly higher odds of success, because your channel can only compete in browse to a certain extent — you can't fill every video slot with your video. Logically speaking, if you have multiple additional new videos, your subscribers will be forced to pick between one or the other, because some people will only ever watch one. So you just kind of have to give it a little bit of room to breathe.
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.
Connecting deeper to my online community before school was really about doing the same things I do now on School, just on the platform I was growing—YouTube. One big trend I had, that few others my size did, was responding to nearly every YouTube comment on the main channel. I kept that up until around 30–40k subscribers, which is about ten times more than most people stop at. The key insight for me is having some element of two‑way communication. That’s why the daily updates channel works so well, and why I’ve grown to almost 12k subscribers in 183 days of consistent posting. As long as you can create some back‑and‑forth, it humanizes you, moves you from a pure creator archetype to something more approachable and equalized. I try to do that by replying to YouTube comments, joining other people’s Schools, commenting in their Schools, doing Q&As, sharing knowledge drops and value drops. Those are the main parts.