100,000 YouTube Subscribers in 10 Years. Here's what I learned.

Hey, everybody. Or hey, everybody. Ryan here. Welcome to Man Meals with Ryan Moran. Tonight, we're cooking an all American raw guacamole. I am sitting in my car, clearly, and I'm actually kind of nervous because I'm about to leave Cleveland for the last. Well, I mean, for a while. I don't know when I'm coming back. The people who go after and get what they want are those who made some decision a long time ago that they were actually gonna go for what it is that they want. Happy tax week, everybody. Here it is right here. I'm holding it up. It's backwards, but you can see a check made out to the IRS for $170,000. Your success is not a threat to somebody else's. So you can go make as much as you want. If I can manifest you into my car, I can manifest a new Tesla, right? You manifested me into your old car. Ryan, without guessing, I want you to tell us what's gonna happen in the. And I want you to tell me the future of marriage.

That's a very interesting question. Every entrepreneur experiences doubt and shame and fear. But if you just sit with that long enough, on the other side of that is where success comes from.

Hi, everyone. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran, and I first wanted to say thank you to all of you who watch these videos and subscribe to the content, because we recently crossed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Which was a really big milestone for me. It was actually something that we've been working towards for about two years. We were stuck at this point for, like, 18 months, maybe longer, and finally just crossed 100,000. And so I wanted to share with you some of the things that we've learned along the way around getting to 100,000 subscribers. Because my route to 100,000 was not like most people's. It definitely was not like many influencers or content creators who have this big hockey stick up. We didn't have a moment of explosive growth. We didn't have a time where everything shifted. It looked like a lot of hard work for a long time until we took it serious enough to be consistent and then still plodded along until we crossed 100,000. And I think this is gonna be really helpful for those of you who are content creators entreprene and business owners who feel like you're putting in the work and things just aren't moving. In this video, I'll go through how exactly that affected us and what's happened on the other side of crossing a major milestone.

My first thought when we crossed 100,000 subscribers, my first thought was, well, that took longer than I expected. There was no celebration. There was no excitement. It was just, oh, that took a freaking long time. And it did. I've been making content for 10 years, maybe longer than 10 years, and it looked a lot like this.

Not the big explosion, not the big, hey, this one finally hit. I know that's a story that a lot of people tell. It just wasn't mine. It wasn't my story of how we crossed 100,000. It was more like we threw a lot of videos together for a long time, got a little bit of a following, and then we started taking it seriously about a year ago, and things started to actually pick up some momentum at that point. And the popular videos on this topic are like, 100,000 subscribers in two months, 100,000 subscribers in 90 days. Well, ours looked more like 3650 days. 10 years of doing it consistently. Which means sometimes the boring work is what gets you to the goal line. And there's no magic strategy, no magic change, and you might even be doing the right things. It just takes longer than most of the people that you follow, which. So lesson number one, don't look at everybody else who's crushing it as the model of what's working. Just go do your own thing. Do the thing that you can sustainably do for 10 years, and don't worry about the results. Now, however, I will say that after processing it or after seeing that 100,000, the emotion that I felt was relieved. Like, I no longer had this tenseness over this goal hanging over my head, because I will confess that there was this sense of like, gotta, gotta get to the 100,000. Thinking up to the hundred thousand. A friend of mine, Todd Herman, talks about this as thinking up to the goal. When you think up to the goal, you plan for the goal, which slows you down, rather than planning through the goal, which actually gets you there faster. I was totally guilty of this. I had been planning up to a hundred thousand, and my thoughts in my head were like, what do I do that's going to get the next hundred subscribers? Like, I'm trying to force the algorithm. And now that I've crossed it, it's like, oh, I just feel relieved to just show up and serve the people who are following my content. Which, ironically, is exactly what I should have been doing five years ago. That would have made the channel grow even faster. So, in a way, I'm more excited now than I was before because I'm much more Relaxed into the process because I don't feel like I have anything to prove. Whereas before, I definitely felt like I had something to prove to myself about are 100,000 people gonna actually follow my content? And now that I don't feel like that's hanging over my head, I just feel relaxed and eager to create great content. I wish I could go back in time and just have that same feeling. But I had the same experience when I crossed the first million dollars in my businesses. I had this sense of I got to work up to the million, I got to be a millionaire. I got to check that box in my mind in order to justify all the hard work that I'm putting in. And because I thought like that, I did all these little projects that would get me a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit here, rather than going all in on something and just building what I wanted to build, which is ultimately what took me to becoming a millionaire in the first place. So I think the faster that I can relax into that mode, the faster I end up getting the results. Whereas if I prioritize the goal, like hitting this number or this metric, I tend to slow down. And so finally I feel like I'm able to check that box and relax into it. But I wish that's something that I could have done years earlier. It took 808 videos to cross 100,000 subscribers, which is way more than most people will tell you that it takes. And the bulk of my content in the early stages was live trainings on building an Amazon based business. If you were watching those videos, would you please comment on this video so that I can say thank you. Thank you for being with me in the early parts of those journeys. Because at the time I was just using YouTube as a way to broadcast to my live students. It was the best tool that existed. I wasn't trying to make a channel. I was just using it as a tool to communicate with people who were paying me to be part of a little mastermind that we were doing. And, and this is the early stages when I was still figuring all this stuff out. It was the very early parts of my own journey for success in E commerce and as an entrepreneur and those early videos still get views to this day. I wasn't trying to make something happen. I was just showing up to serve the people that I was in charge of serving. That mentality is what I live and breathe by until I forget it sometimes. And when I forget it, I make content for the algorithm, or when I forget it, I start Resenting the work rather than enjoying the work. When I stay in that mode, everything else seems to unfold just perfectly. So I'm really thankful to those of you who watch those early pieces of content and have stuck with me for all of this time. Thank you. It really means the world to me. And if you look at the timeline of the different types of content that I've tried and tested, it's gone through several different variations. You can see me looking different throughout the years as well. Sometimes I look at some of those videos and I'm like, oh, I was so fit before I had kids.

But I have tried a bunch of different content forms. I've tried a regular show, I've tried just going live a bunch of times. I've tried more recorded videos like this one. I've tried a bunch of different forms and some of them felt like they worked and some of them didn't. But I'll tell you that I've always gotten the best results out of the processes that I enjoy the most. The more relaxed that I feel in the process, the more sustainable it is for me to do and get better at doing. Whereas when I would try and create this complex system for creating content, it always felt forced. And I can actually look in the numbers and see that I lost a group of my audience or a percentage of my audience when I was trying too hard, when I was over professionalizing it, or when I was trying to do something that I just couldn't sustain. So whatever you can do, consistently prioritize that which oftentimes looks like doing something simply at first and just getting better and better and better. And I like to think that our content is way better today than it was when it was really effortful. And some of that is because of team members knuckle me out. And some of that is because I've just learned to not care so much about standing out in the marketplace. I care about amplifying what feels good, amplifying what feels meaningful to me. And I think the faster that you can do that, the results sort of take care of me themselves. If I had to describe that 10 year journey of creating content, I would say that most of those 10 years are really figuring out who I am or figuring out who I think I am. Because a lot of that content was me trying to figure out who I thought I needed to be. Me projecting a certain way of being a businessman or a certain level of success that I thought the marketplace needed to see in order for me to have credibility, or for me to have status in the marketplace or stand out in this crowded, noisy world of Internet entrepreneurship where people are driving Lambos and have hot girls in all their videos. I drive a Tesla with two car seats in the back and I still don't know how to talk to girls. So. Well, I guess I was able to talk to one girl enough to have two kids. So like just, just enough to stay uncool, enough to have two car seats in the back seat. So it's just who I am, right? And, and I think for many years I felt like I had to look like other people or I had to, I had to project a certain level of authority that didn't match how I really felt about myself or didn't match who I really was, didn't match the style that I really, really was. And for that reason it couldn't work because it's exhausting to be something that you're not. It's just, it takes too much energy to project something that is not in alignment with who you really are. Now that's different from becoming something, different from growing, from investing in yourself. And so I like to see the last 10 years, all of that content, as investments into who I have become at 34. And at 34, I have a very strong understanding about what my strengths and weaknesses are, about what my communication style looks like, about where I am going. And it's easy for a lot of us to get three years into something and say it's not working, so I'm going to quit. But your brain is so freed up when you can just see all of that as research and development. It was an investment into getting to this point. And I see all that content, all that calibration, all that figuring it out, all of the money put into team members in production and marketing and scripting and everything that we've tried over the years as research and development, into getting to this point, this being the launching platform, into moving forward. It was one year ago, almost to the day, that we as a team decided to make YouTube a three year commitment. We're going to take this seriously, to quality and to consistency for three years. We are one year into that process, right? At one year we crossed 100,000 subscribers. By the way, we thought it was going to happen way sooner. Totally thought it was going to be sooner. Totally thought the view count on these videos was going to be higher. Totally thought that the consistency in quality would get us to higher numbers. They didn't. And we've still committed to three years of this, which means I don't Even get to evaluate the result for two more years. Two more years of consistency and to qualify quality and continuing to get better over those next two years. And that's the commitment. I will continue to get better. And now that I have come to a place of knowing where I'm strong and where I'm comfortable and where I can be consistent, you know those results are going to follow. Maybe two years from now, we'll be at 105,000 subscribers. I'll still be doing it. And I will get to a point in two years that it's so enjoyable for me that I won't care if there's more or fewer people watching. I know that if I stay in that zone that everything will work out just fine. I'll have the customers that I want to hang out with. I'll have the subscribers who love my style and everybody who doesn't like my style will be following everybody else else. And I'll be able to come from a place of real, genuine service because it'll just be me and it'll just be enjoyable. And I'll have the partnerships and the mastermind partners and the other influencers as friends that I genuinely like being with. And guess what happens then? Everything grows. As long as you're not thinking about what do I need to do to make this grow. So from this place, from that fertile soil, I just want to plant great seeds and water the ones that are sprouting. And I want to continue making content from a place of genuine service and interest. And I want to continue developing relationships with subscribers and with other creators. Because all along this journey, for the last 10 years, I've been meeting people in airports, at coffee shops, on the street who have seen some of my content. Sometimes it's the videos that got hundreds of thousands of views and sometimes it's the videos that got 2,000 views. But I've met people from all over the world as a result of putting out content consistently. That's like the best part. It's the part that you can't predict. We think that it's going to unfold and we're going to hit 100,000 subscribers and we're going to make a bunch of ad money or we're going to get a bunch of opt ins or sell a bunch of coins courses. But what actually happens is as you continue to put out content, you create relationships and connections with people that open up new opportunities that you couldn't expect. Yesterday I was having a great conversation with somebody who partnered with us on some content and they're developing a platform that we want to use for an NFT launch sometime next year. And this morning I had coffee with somebody who I met because we were, we wanted them to help us create some content@capitalism.com they did some videos with us, we had them on our stage, and we're talking about collaborating on some content in Q1 of next year. So you make these relationships that open up opportunities that you couldn't exist and that's where the real business happens. So thank you to every single one of you who watched old Amazon content for investment content, for the lives that we've done, for the interviews that we posted on this channel, for our more recent just me to you type of content sharing stuff that is working in our businesses or going on in my life. Thank you to those who have reached out personally. Thank you to those who have come to our events, who have joined our communities or have just watched the YouTube channel and liked these videos, left comments and told a friend about these. The most common comment that we get on these channels is how do these videos not have more views? So if I have ever brought you any value in any of these 800 and now nine videos, would you please share this video with one friend? One friend who is putting in the time, going through the grind, putting in the work, and is not seeing the results that they expected, or with somebody who's starting their content journey or someone who is in the middle of their grind growth phase as an entrepreneur. Please share this video with them. And if I get at least a thousand likes on this, I'll donate $1,000 to the Trump 2024 reelection campaign. But if I get over 2,000 likes, then I will give $2,000 to whoever's running against Trump. But if I get 3,000 likes, I'll donate $3,000 to whoever's candidate they want gave the top comment of this video.

So that's how you win on YouTube, right? Yeah. Okay, cool. Thanks.