Stephen Bartlett scaled Diary of a CEO to 4 million subscribers by A/B testing over 100 thumbnail variations per video, securing four $500k sponsors to fund early ad spend, and mobilizing his community for a 24-hour view surge that triggers YouTube's algorithm.
This is Diary of a CEO over here. This is Stephen Bartlett. He has about 4 million subs on YouTube. This guy is also, he's a dragon on Dragon's Den, which is the UK's version of Shark Tank. So he's getting a ton of views, right? He tests over 100 thumbnails and headlines per video. It's a lot of testing, right? The other thing which I learned was that in the very beginning, he was spending a lot of money to drive views. The way he would do this is he would get like, let's say 4 title sponsors. So it's like sponsored by Pepsi, for example. They might pay him $500,000, right? So you get 4 of them for $500,000, that's $2 million. Take that $2 million and dump it all into ads to get the views going in the early days, right? They will then find a community of people that are engaging and viewing the videos. They'll always try to blast those people hard when a video comes out, and so the video gets a lot of play in the beginning, right? And usually when YouTube sees as a signal where there's a lot of views coming in initial first 24 hours or even faster than that, that video is usually going to do better.
