Nate O'Brien discusses how he grew his personal finance channel to 39,000 subscribers. He shares tactical advice for new YouTubers: be patient, study your analytics, and make videos about popular creators or trending topics to get initial views.
Okay guys, so in this video we're gonna talk to Nate O'Brien, who's only 20 years old and has a 39,000 subscriber YouTube channel. And Nate, we were just talking a second ago, your growth rate, it took you how long to get to 39,000?
About 16 to 18 months, I'd say.
Okay, got it. And so what is your channel about? So his channel is literally Nate O'Brien, I think?
Yeah, it's just my name.
It's literally Nate O'Brien. So what was so special about your channel? What was kind of the impetus for the growth to get you there?
Okay, first things first, when you're starting a channel, you know, I think for the first probably almost 2 months I had less than 100 subscribers, and I didn't even tell anybody about my channel because I didn't want people finding out. I didn't tell family. So, you know, it was, it was pretty difficult to get the ball rolling. Like, the first couple hundred subscribers is by far the most difficult, and then once you get those, they start sharing it with their friends, it starts popping up in search results, and ever since then it's just been growing faster and faster.
Cool. So it sounds like what I'm hearing is patience.
Yeah, definitely some patience. You know, if you're making videos for 6 months and you're not getting much growth at all, you might wanna just take a step back a little bit and just kind of do a deep analyzing of what's going on. Because sometimes people will think they just need patience and they'll do it for 2 years, and maybe it's a market that's so small, it's a niche that's so small that they can't grow much further than that.
I'm assuming you're just looking at the YouTube analytics and you're looking at what's performing, what isn't.
Yeah, and if you're looking at it and you're seeing that people are watching your video for 30 seconds and then they're clicking off, then maybe there's a reason for that. And today in 2018, YouTube analytics are so in-depth, you can learn so much from them. And I try not to spend too much time looking at analytics because sometimes you can get wrapped up in that and you're checking it every 20 minutes, looking at it.
Yeah.
But I do think that, yeah, if you're not seeing that growth after, I would say give it a couple months and be active about it, reach out to people. Don't spam people with trying to get those initial You know, you can reach out on like blogs, you can comment on other channels and leave them some valuable feedback, or, you know, you might be able to say, hey, I made a video pretty similar, really like yours. You know, but don't spam them with that type of stuff.
Okay, and so for your channel, what are you known for? What's special about Nate?
So I help people take control of their finances. So that's something that I've always just loved to do ever since I was little. I've always just liked money. I think everybody likes money, but I really like money. And so I thought, you know what, what better than to just turn on the camera and help people become financially independent? Because I think in today's society, you know, you can learn everything about art and science and everything in history in school. But the one thing that they almost always skip out on, especially in high school, is personal finance. When you see, I think credit card debt is almost $1 trillion. Student loan debt's over $1.3 or $1.4 trillion in the US.
Mm-hmm.
And I think a lot of people are struggling with that, so I created the channel just to sort of help people out and kind of just share my ideas. It's certainly fun, but it's also just something that, you know, I just enjoy.
Got it. That's interesting. So you're 20 years old, right? So are you helping people that are around your age, or are older people also reading your stuff or watching your stuff?
All kinds of people. I mean, I get comments from 80-year-old people, and, you know—
That's interesting.
Anybody watches the videos, but generally speaking, yeah, it's— It's anywhere between 18 and 30, I'd say.
Got it. And so you growing— I mean, I'm trying to think from like, let's say I'm 20 years old, I want to start a YouTube channel. Is it one video that in particular shot you off, or like, was it a series? Like, what happened exactly?
Okay, so that's a really good question. So there's a couple of things you can do for this, but usually what I would kind of suggest doing is you want to just kind of put out videos, and then one of them— and you don't really know which one it's going to be— but one of them will stick and it'll start generating views. And then, you know, a rising tide raises all boats. That's what the quote is. And so, you know, once that video starts doing well, all of your other videos will generally pick up as well. If you're trying to get some initial views, there's 2 things you can do. One thing is that you can— I don't know if there's a word for it, but you can make a video about somebody else who's already pretty popular.
Mm-hmm.
So like, you can make a video about, you know, Eric Siu, or make a video about Gary Vaynerchuk. or talk about them, and that will generally bring yourself up in the search results for that. Something else you can do is something that's pretty time-specific. So if there's a news event or something that's pretty current, you can make a video on that. And it won't be evergreen content. It'll probably die out after a week or two.
Mm-hmm.
But it's a great way for people searching that if there's only 5 videos on the topic because something just happened today and you made a video about it today, That's a great way to get some initial traffic on your channel.
Great, that's perfect. So Nate, what's the best way for people to find you online?
Well, they can just go onto YouTube actually and just look at Nate O'Brien. I only have a YouTube channel at the moment. I'm probably gonna have to branch out a little bit. You can also follow me on Instagram. It's just Nate O'Brien as well, but with 2 N's at the end.
Alright, so that's it. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a comment, let us know what you're gonna do to grow your YouTube channel, and we'll see you tomorrow.
