How “Regular” People are hitting 1 Million Subs in 2026

Over 75,000 channels have over 1 million subscribers, and expecting your first videos to be perfect is the exact reason your channel isn't growing.

And often you'll find for most YouTubers who are actually big and successful on the platform that they spent ages just making crappy videos to learn the art and the science and the skill of actually making videos. And I see so many people these days who have this expectation that like, I want video number 1 to take off. And it's like, video number 1's not gonna take off. Yeah, it was new and it was fun when I was making those first 100 videos or even the first 300 videos, I wasn't thinking about subscribers or like building up an audience. It was mainly just me having fun sharing what I found interesting about those computers and that software to whoever would watch. When I first started, I had this really crappy hand-me-down laptop. I think my brother got it for Christmas, and I ended up kind of just like stealing it and using it. I didn't know how to edit. I didn't know how to paste the video. I didn't know how to do anything. I basically had nothing, knew nothing, had no money, and just was just like grabbing things like we're just gonna try to make this work.

The regular people hitting 1 million subscribers right now expected to suck at the beginning, but they pressed record anyway.

All you need to do is— this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams of being a YouTuber— is make 100 videos and improve something every time. Do that, and then on your 101st video, we'll start talking like maybe you can get some views. But you know, your first 100 are gonna suck. I implore you to stop watching videos like this, stop overthinking, and just make your first 7 videos. 7 is the magic number. No one starts off being perfect from day one.

My first 2 years was basically me just kind of like roaming around my house trying to find things I already had, using equipment I already had, and just filming it. When you finally let go of being perfect, you'll unlock the courage to just start and begin creating the channel that makes a real difference for—

It took me like 7 years to make my first YouTube video because I spent so much time overthinking and thinking I needed the right camera and the right microphone. There's literally no such thing as a perfect video.

13 years ago when we first started on our YouTube journey, We filmed everything with a MacBook, literally the webcam from our MacBook, and we edited the videos and uploaded them all using one device. I started my YouTube channel back in 2009. I was incredibly shy, terrified of the camera. My first videos were completely embarrassing. My name is Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another edition of Modeling the Masters. I had bad lighting, terrible audio, and I looked like a robot reading the script. But I told myself that I'd rather know and fail than never try at all. So I just kept pressing record. Took me 350 videos, public videos, before I wasn't completely embarrassed to watch myself back. Took me 700 videos until I finally made something that inspired me. I sucked at the beginning, but I accepted it. If I waited to be perfect, I wouldn't have 4 million subscribers today. Look at Jimmy Donaldson, the guy you probably know as MrBeast. Today he's got the biggest YouTube channel in the world, but his first videos were shot in his bedroom on a cheap laptop camera. He was just a regular 13-year-old kid mumbling about video games. His lighting was terrible, his audio was worse, and nobody watched his stuff for years. He didn't wait for a million-dollar budget or fancy studio. He just started making videos and allowed himself to be terrible. He made over 100 awful videos before he even started figuring out how to be good. He accepted that he had to suck before he could succeed. Marques Brownlee runs the biggest tech channel on the internet today, but he started out as a regular high school kid in 2009. He didn't have expensive cameras or a massive studio. His very first videos were shot on a cheap webcam he bought with his allowance. He just pointed the camera at his computer screen and talked about free software. His videos were blurry, boring, and totally imperfect. He made 100 videos before he even reached 100 subscribers, but he kept pressing record anyway. He knew that the only way to get better was to start making bad videos and improve just 1% every single time. So right now you're probably thinking, those stories are great for people who started years ago, right? But now it's too saturated. You might think the algorithm is too smart and there's too much competition for a beginner to even get noticed. That's completely wrong. The algorithm only cares about one thing, and that's how much you connect with your viewer. People are starving for real humans with real problems. And today I'm going to show you exactly how to use your unique story to reach a million subscribers. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, Welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time.

Believe.

Serve the one person in front of you. It's incredibly easy to look at massive channels and think you need to reach the entire world right away. But trying to please everyone means you end up pleasing nobody at all, right? When you start out, you might only get 50 views on a video. Don't see that as a failure. Imagine 50 people standing in front of your living room right now. That's a packed room. You've got the power to completely change those 50 lives. YouTube hosts over 114 million active channels right now, and they're all competing for 2.7 billion monthly users. You don't stand out by shouting louder than everyone else. You stand out by caring more. If you focus entirely on solving a specific problem for one single viewer, the algorithm will naturally find more people exactly like them. It's called the paradox of specificity. Psychologically, when a person feels truly understood, their brain releases oxytocin. This chemical builds instant trust and deep connection. So stop looking at your analytics dashboard like it's just some scorecard. Look at it like it's a mirror of human behavior. Every single digit is a human. It's a breathing human who gave you their valuable time. When you wake up and you grab your coffee and you sit down to plan your content, ask yourself one simple question: How can I make one person, in my case, believe in themselves a little bit more today? If you make your video specifically for the past version of yourself who was struggling, you'll never run out of amazing ideas. You know exactly what that person desperately needs to hear. So shift your attention completely away from just the vanity numbers. Put all of your energy into the actual impact that you're making. Focus on the depth of the connection and the width of your audience will naturally follow. But how do you actually start making these videos when you're absolutely terrified of the camera? Give yourself permission to be terrible. So you've got incredible ideas inside your head right now, right? You probably think about them constantly, but you keep waiting for the perfect moment to start. You want the perfect camera, the perfect lighting, the perfect script, the perfect microphone. Perfection is just fear. The absolute truth is that your first video is going to be terrible. You have to expect to suck at the very beginning. It took me, as I said, 350 videos before I wasn't completely embarrassed by my own content, and then 700 videos until I finally inspired myself. I made something that actually was good. I didn't wait for a massive budget or a fancy studio. I just pressed record. If you wait to be perfect, you will wait forever. So taking messy action is the only way to build actual momentum. The science of neuroplasticity shows that your brain literally rewires itself through physical repetition, not through endless planning. So every single time you press record and you talk to the camera, you're building brand new neural pathways. You're turning a terrifying task into a completely normal daily habit. You can't edit a blank page, as they say, right? You can't improve a video that doesn't exist. You need to put out bad content so you can analyze it and figure out how to get 1% better the next time. The most successful The best social creators in the world didn't start out with perfect skills. They just had the courage to be bad in public. So grab your phone right now. Don't buy the expensive gear. Don't build a professional studio. Just sit by a window with good natural light and tell your honest story. Tell people why you started your business. Tell them what you truly believe. Do it today. Stop letting your fear of judgment rob the world of your amazing gifts. And once you finally get past the fear of pressing record, you have to figure out how to stay motivated on the really hard days. Build an environment that forces you to win. So your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are today. If you want to achieve massive things, you have to completely change what you feed into your mind. You wake up every day and the world actively tries to drag you down. You look at your news, they check your emails, and you immediately start feeling anxious. You have to be incredibly intentional about what you consume. I don't watch news. I start my day by watching videos of people who deeply inspire me. I go for a walk, I call it my believe walk. I want Elon Musk and Maya Angelou and Les Brown in ear every morning. When you surround yourself with greatness, your own problems start to look very small. Studies on emotional contagion prove that you automatically adopt the emotions and mindsets of the people you spend the most time with. Now, if you can't hang out with successful creators in person, you can hang out with them on YouTube. So you need to ruthlessly curate your feed, unsubscribe from the channels that make you feel down and bad about yourself, and follow the creators who force you to level up and think bigger. If you're tracking your habits every day, then add 10 minutes of inspirational video to your morning routine. Just like you track your sleep quality or your daily protein intake, you track your mental diet. Motivation has a half-life. It fades quickly. So you need to inject that belief every day to keep you pushing forward. Set up a physical space and digital space so that success becomes your automatic default setting. Put a quote on the wall if you need to. Change your phone background. Make it absolutely impossible to forget what your mission is. When you design an environment that constantly reminds you of your true potential, taking big action, becomes less effortful. But taking action once isn't enough. Fall in love with the daily grind. So you're probably looking for a secret algorithm hack to explode your channel overnight. The real secret is just showing up every day. Consistency is your ultimate competitive advantage this year. Most people get super excited, post 3 videos, see zero results, and quit. They let their temporary lack of results destroy their long-term vision. So hitting 1 million subscribers isn't about going viral one time. It's about building a massive library of value over many years. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just check the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. You have to intensely fall in love with the work itself, not just the final reward. If you only care about the money or the subscribers or the fame, you'll completely burn out when it gets hard. So you find a deep purpose in the actual videos that you make. I make my videos 10,000 videos deep, genuinely because I need them for myself. Even if nobody watches, I'd still make the videos every day. Research on intrinsic motivation shows that people who truly enjoy the work are 3 times more likely to stick with it through difficult times. When you love the daily grind, you become completely unstoppable. So create a strict schedule and stick to it. Decide that you'll post one video a week no matter what happens. Don't negotiate with yourself. Treat your content schedule like It's an important business meeting that you cannot miss ever. The algorithm highly rewards channels that keep viewers on the platform consistently. But more importantly, consistency builds deep trust with your audience and your skillset. If you're making one video a month, you're just never going to get good at the skill and your audience learns that they can rely on you. Now, once you commit fully to the grind, you have to make sure that you're paying attention to the data that matters. Stop guessing and let the data guide your channel. So right now you're probably spending hours making a video, upload it to YouTube, and just cross your fingers and hope that it gets views. Hope is not a great strategy. The creators hitting a million subscribers right now, they're not just getting lucky. They're making decisions based on real numbers. The biggest mistake you can make is just assuming that you know exactly what your audience wants to click on. Your video could be the absolute best content that you've ever made, but if nobody clicks the thumbnail, your message dies in the dark. This is where you've got to treat your channel like a real business. You need to test your ideas. A 2026 survey found that channels with 10,000 100,000 subscribers see an average 22% increase in click-through rates just by running A/B tests on their thumbnails. That means they're uploading multiple thumbnail options for the exact same video and letting the audience decide the winner. Top creators are consistently hitting high click-through rates because they test everything. When you test your titles and thumbnails, you take the emotion of the process. You stop being attached to the design just because it looks pretty to you, and you start looking at what actually stops a person from scrolling and clicking on your video. If your click-through rate is low, YouTube stops showing your video to new people. It's that simple. You've got to capture their attention in a fraction of a second. So use high contrast colors, show clear emotion, remove confusing text that's too hard to read. And once you've got the video up, you look at the audience retention graph. Are people leaving in the first 30 seconds? If they're leaving, your hook didn't match the promise of your thumbnail or wasn't emotional enough. You need to analyze this data every single week and use it to get 1% better on your very next upload. But I know looking at analytics can feel completely overwhelming. YouTube has a ton of data. I love it, but it can feel like you need a math degree just to understand what all the numbers actually mean. That's exactly why I built Brandlytics specifically for you to stop guessing and start dominating on YouTube. You can't rely on luck to grow your channel. And so instead of hoping a thumbnail works, the software gives you the exact data points across 5 metrics so you know exactly what your viewers want. I designed it because I saw too many creators wasting time and losing momentum. You can plug in your ideas, do a split test, and let the science tell you exactly which one gets more clicks. To learn more, you can check the link in description below. And once you've got the data working for you, you unlock the absolute freedom to focus on what actually matters. Stop hiding your true self from the camera. So you might think you need to act like a loud, high-energy TV host to get views. If you're an introvert like me, you probably don't feel like you belong on YouTube at all. And that's not true. Viewers can instantly spot a fake persona from a mile away. They don't want your polished, fake, perfect anymore. They want real humans with real struggles. Leaning fully into the insecurities you've got is the absolute fastest way to build a massive audience. If you're awkward, be awkward. If you're shy, own it and say you're shy. When you show your flaws, you give other people permission to be themselves too, and it creates an incredibly powerful bond. A famous study on the pratfall effect demonstrates that highly competent people actually become far more likable when they make visible mistakes. So your audience doesn't connect with your victory, victory, victory. They connect with the struggles that you go through. So share the exact times you almost lost your business. Share the moments that you cried on the floor wondering how you'd ever pay for your bills. When you openly share your pain, your purpose becomes more clear. Your viewers, they realize that you actually understand them, that you're like them. They'll stop seeing you as just another talking head and Mr. and Mrs. Perfect and start seeing you as a mentor for them. So you don't have to worry about having everything perfect and scripted. Speak from your head. Speak from your heart. Imagine you're sitting across from your best friend. You're at a coffee shop. Talk to them. Talk to them naturally. Vulnerability is your absolute greatest superpower. You don't need to hide the messy parts of your journey. You can showcase them. But to truly stand out in a crowded market, you need to be willing to take serious risks. Make bold moves and ignore the haters. Your brain is constantly trying to keep you safe, It's trying to keep you comfortable always. It'll give you 100 completely logical reasons why you shouldn't start a YouTube channel, right? It'll tell you the market is way too saturated this year. It'll tell you you don't have enough free time. You've got millions of other things to do, and you'll have to learn exactly how to ignore that voice. You need to make big decisions with your heart and small ones with your head. If your heart is screaming at you to share your message, you have to deeply trust it. The boldest ideas that come to you, I think, are the ones that you actually— those are the ones you need to act on. Those are the ones you need to execute towards. So don't ask for permission from anybody. Just go and do the actual work. When you start taking the risks, people, they're gonna judge you. Your friends might laugh at your videos. Your coworkers might make some weird comments. Ignore them completely. You're not making your content for them. The people who judge you, they're not the ones paying your bills. They aren't the ones that are off chasing their own greatness. This one is wild. Research on social conformity shows that humans naturally suppress their unique ideas just to avoid social rejection. So you have to aggressively fight the biology that is in you. If you let the opinions of the average people around you dictate your actions, you're going to end up with a completely average life. You will end up like the people that you're talking to. So you need to care more about serving people than the people who are around criticizing you. That's a risk. That's scary. Post a controversial opinion. Share the bold idea. The way to hit a million subscribers is to stand out, and you can't stand out by trying to blend in, right? So taking those risks, it creates momentum, and momentum changes everything. Take the first step today. The biggest thing missing right now is just simple momentum. You've got great ideas, but you sit on them for years. You plan your research, you overthink massively. Overthinking is the absolute enemy of everybody's success. You need to drastically shrink the gap between having the idea and taking any kind of physical action. If you want to start a channel, don't spend 3 months studying the algorithm. Just pick up your phone and record a 1-minute video today. That's what I call the 2% difference. It changes everything. Taking one small step immediately creates a powerful psychological shift. It moves you from a state of dreaming into a state of doing. The Zeigarnik Effect is a psychological principle stating that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks far better than completed tasks. By just starting the project, your brain will naturally obsess over finishing it. You'll wake up the next day desperately wanting to do more. This is exactly how you build an empire. One video at a time, one single day at a time. Don't look at this massive mountain of a million subscribers in front of you and feel completely overwhelmed. Just look directly at the very next step in front of you. When things get hard, constantly remember why you started. Focus on your most important core value. Think about the people that you're here to serve and why you want to do this channel in the first place. Let that belief drive you forward even when the results are not going to be there yet. You've got absolutely everything you need to make a massive impact on the world right now. You just have to finally decide to start. Which brings us to the most important realization to make right now. Your time is now. You've got a unique gift that the world desperately needs right now. So stop waiting for the perfect moment and start trusting your own potential and ideas. The only thing standing between you and the life you truly want is the willingness to begin. So step up, share your voice, claim your greatness, make the impact you're looking for, and congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let's learn if I started from zero subscribers, what I would do to get to a million. If you think YouTube is too crowded, that is a lie that you are telling yourself to avoid doing the hard work.

Yeah, YouTube is saturated with content nobody wants to watch.

The platform is crowded with boring copycats, but there is always unlimited space for someone who shares their true struggles. And if you let the fear of competition stop you from hitting publish, you will spend the rest of your life working a job that you hate. So press record right now and get started because there's a massive wave of opportunity as it pertains to YouTube, and you don't want to miss it. When I first started my YouTube channel, I was so shy and bad on camera. I literally had to make 350 videos before I could watch myself back without feeling completely embarrassed. My name is Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. I am Evan Carmichael. My name is Evan Carmichael. Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another edition of Modeling the Masters. It took me 5 full years just to cross a couple thousand subscribers, but I did not quit. I kept hitting publish. Because I wanted to help entrepreneurs feel less alone in the struggles. Now, you might be thinking that this year is completely different and that the algorithm only rewards big channels with huge budgets. But the truth is, the platform is actually starving for real human connection right now. People are bored of the over-edited robotic content. They want your real personality. And if you follow the exact strategies I'm going to share today, you can bypass the noise and build a million subscriber channel faster than you ever thought possible. Stop chasing viral trends and serve your audience of one. You probably look at your YouTube dashboard and feel depressed when you see 10 views. You think 10 views, it's a massive failure. You want to quit and you feel this way because you're focused on the wrong metric. You're focusing on vanity instead of impact. And I want to completely shift your focus to service. You're built to serve. Think about the hardest moment in your entire life. Think about the deep pain that you went through. Now think about the fact that you survived it. You figured out solutions, and millions of people are currently stuck in that exact same pain right now. They are crying themselves to sleep because they do not have the answer. You have the answer, and I think you have a moral obligation to share your solution with them. So when you make a video, don't make it for a computer algorithm. Make it for the version of you from 5 or 10 years ago. Talk directly to that person. Tell them exactly what they need to hear to get unstuck. And when you do this, your content, it stops feeling generic and it starts becoming highly specific and deeply emotional. The people watching will feel like you are reading their mind. They will trust you. A study by the Harvard Business Review found that increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases overall profits by 25 to 95%. The exact same rule applies to your audience on YouTube. Deep loyalty is vastly more powerful than a million random clicks. Focus on changing one life at a time. If you get 10 views, imagine 10 real human beings standing in your living room asking for your advice. You'd be pretty thrilled to help them. Treat your small audience with that level of extreme respect. They will become your greatest advocates and share your message with the world. You have to realize that every massive creator started exactly where you are today. They stared at a screen with zero views. They felt the exact same doubt. The difference is they did not let the lack of immediate validation stop them. They focused on the work. You can adopt this mindset. So think about the specific questions that your ideal viewer is typing into the search bar. Answer those questions directly. Give them practical, actionable advice that they can use the second the video ends. Expect to suck and force yourself to build momentum. The biggest reason your subscriber count is stuck at zero is that you're trying to be perfect. You have a great idea for a channel. You spend months planning. You buy a fancy camera, you buy expensive lights, you plan the perfect script, and then you sit down to record and you freeze, right? You feel awkward. You hate how you sound. You hate how you look. So you delete the footage and you tell yourself you'll just try it again next week. Next week never comes. You're using perfectionism as a shield to hide from the world, and you have to stop that immediately. The American Psychological Association, they published a massive study showing that perfectionism is a leading cause of severe burnout and depression. You will burn out before you even launch it if you demand perfection. And I need you to completely lower your standards for your first video. Just expect to suck. It's a brand new skill. You do not expect to play piano perfectly on your first day. You should not expect to be a natural on camera either. When I started my channel, I was terrified. I couldn't even look at the lens, right? I talked about recording 350 public videos before I could watch myself without feeling completely embarrassed. And then it took me 700 videos before I actually started to inspire myself, like, oh, I'm starting to get I'm good at this. You don't need to wait that long, but you do need momentum. Momentum is the single most important thing that you are missing right now. So make a promise to yourself. Promise that you will upload one new video every single week, no matter how bad you think it is. Use your phone, sit in the car, just hit record and talk. Focus on taking action, not getting it right. Perfectionism is a disease. It is a brilliant disguise for procrastination. You tell yourself that you are researching, right? You tell yourself that you're just waiting for the right moment, the perfect moment. It doesn't exist. It will never exist. If you wait until you feel completely ready, you will wait for the rest of your life. So embrace the concept of the 2% difference. Just make your next video 2% better than your last one. Maybe today you just focus on speaking a little bit louder. Maybe next week you focus on removing some filler words. You build your skills incrementally. You do not try to master everything on day one. And once you build momentum, the fear disappears. Master the satisfaction engine. YouTube algorithm has completely changed. If you use the strategies from years ago, your channel will die. Back then, creators use sneaky thumbnails, misleading titles. They just wanted to trick you into clicking. They focus entirely on just the click-through rates, and that era is completely over. The YouTube system now is driven by highly advanced artificial intelligence. It is no longer just a search engine, it is a satisfaction engine. The algorithm tracks complex data to figure out if a viewer actually felt fulfilled by watching your video. It measures the watch time, it measures emotional resonance. I A recent report on digital trends by Cisco showed that video will account for 82% of all internet traffic. Because there is so much noise, the platform only rewards content that truly changes how people feel. So you have to master the satisfaction engine. And to do this, you must deliver on the promise of your title immediately. So do not waste the first 2 minutes talking about your weekend, right? Do not welcome people back to the channel. The viewer clicked because they have a specific problem. Give them the solution in the very first sentence. Respect their time. Structure your videos clearly. Give a powerful hook. Tell a relevant story. Provide a concrete step-by-step action plan that they can use to fix that problem today. When viewers finish your video, they should feel more energized. They should feel smarter. When someone clicks on your video, they are giving you a massive amount of trust, right? They're giving you their most valuable asset, which is their time right now. If you abuse that trust by rambling or hiding the answer, they will leave immediately. And YouTube, they track this. They track how long someone watches. They track what they do after they watch. Do they watch another video from you? Do they close the app completely? If your video genuinely satisfies them, then they want to watch more. And YouTube loves this. They will reward you by promoting your content for free. Keep your pace energetic. Cut out the dead space. Remove long pauses. Every single sentence must serve a specific purpose. If a sentence does not educate or entertain, then remove it. Turn your channel into a business development machine. Now you probably think you need a massive audience to make money. You think you need to rely on ad revenue, and that's a terrible strategy for a beginner. You will starve waiting for YouTube to pay you a full-time income. You need to flip that model in your head completely. You can build a 7-figure business with only a few hundred subscribers. You do this by turning your channel into a business development machine. So stop trying to go viral. Start using your content to build high-level relationships. Figure out who your perfect client is. Figure out who could refer massive amounts of business to you, then invite them onto your channel for an interview. Most successful people are never asked to share their personal story. They will be flattered. They will say yes. You sit down with them for an hour, you ask them brilliant questions, right? You make them feel important. You build a deep and genuine connection with them. And after the interview, you give them the video clips to share with their own audience. You're giving them free marketing. You are providing massive value upfront instead of taking. A major psychological study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology proves that giving upfront value creates a powerful feeling of reciprocity. We do this with our Movement Maker students. People have closed 8-figure deals by doing this exact strategy. You can use it too. When you help someone win, they naturally want to help you win. When they need the service you provide, they will hire you. They will not search Google for a stranger. They will hire the person who just spent an hour making them look like a hero. You just landed a massive client and it doesn't matter if the video only got 10 views. Imagine the power of having 50 deeply connected referral partners in your city. Imagine if those partners sent you just one new client per year. Your business would absolutely explode. This is the magic of the Business Development Show. You completely bypass the traditional algorithm. You're not waiting to get discovered by millions of strangers. You're taking direct control of your own growth. You're identifying the exact people people who hold the keys to your success, and you are building a bridge directly to them. The strategy completely removed the anxiety of looking at your view count. Stop guessing and start testing like a scientist. So in the beginning, you just need to build momentum and hit publish. But once you build a solid audience, the creators who grow the fastest are the ones who treat their data as seriously as their art. You cannot rely on guessing anymore. You cannot just pick a video thumbnail because you think it looks good. You must test everything. I've run tens of thousands of split tests on my own channel. I once took a 4-year-old video that was only getting 100 views a day and brought it up to almost 15,000 views a day just by changing the thumbnail. YouTube actually saw what I was doing and they wrote a private case study on my split testing methods to share with their top creators. If you want to reach 1 million subscribers, your biggest growth will not come from your new uploads. It will come from fixing the old videos that are sitting dead in your back catalog. Those old videos are low-hanging fruit. If YouTube is trying to promote them, but people are not clicking, you have a massive problem. And this is exactly why I built my software called Brandlytics. You can check it out at brandlytics.ai. It's a tool designed specifically to track your testing history, tell you exactly what to test next, and fix the videos that should be winning right now on your channel. Mistakes cost you momentum. Every wrong step pushes you further behind. If you want to scale to 1 million subscribers and build a massive business, you have to replace the guesswork with certainty. Use modern technology without losing your soul. So you live in an era when technology gives you literal superpowers, right? The AI tools available to creators right now are unbelievable, but you have to use them correctly. Most new creators are incredibly lazy, right? You use AI to write all your scripts. They use AI to generate fake voices. They remove their entire personality from their videos. I think this is a massive mistake. Authentic. People desperately are craving human connection. If you just sound, sound like a robot reading a Wikipedia page, your channel will stay at 0 subscribers forever. You need to keep your authentic voice so you can use your technology to scale your reach, but not to replace your soul. Record your videos yourself, pour your actual emotion into the camera, then use the software to do the heavy lifting. For example, AI localization is a massive growth lever right now. You can take your English videos and instantly translate it into Hindi or Spanish or Japanese. Research by Nimdzi Insights show that 90% of global consumers will completely ignore a product or video if it is not in their native language. So by localizing your content, you open up entirely new markets without filming the video again. Think about the massive advantage this gives you. 5 years ago, creators— I did this too. I had a team in Russia, I had a team in Argentina. You had to hire entire teams of translators to reach a global audience. It cost thousands of dollars and took weeks of work. And today you can do it from your laptop in 10 minutes. You can also use tools to automatically find your best moments and cut them into short vertical videos. You can distribute these clips across every platform to protect yourself from algorithm changes, right? And platform changes. Let the machine handle the editing and the translation and the distribution, but you must focus all of your energy on your ideas and your passion, your unique experiences, your failures, your specific worldview. They're the only things that can't be captured by software. A machine can never tell a personal story about how you struggled and overcame adversity. It can never show genuine emotion. So lean heavily into your raw, unfiltered humanity. Let your flaws show. Let your genuine excitement shine through. Use the AI to distribute that pure humanity to every corner of the globe. Design your environment to protect your belief. Your biggest enemy is not the YouTube algorithm. Your biggest enemy is the voice inside your head telling you that you are not good enough. Creating content is an intense emotional rollercoaster, right? You will put your heart into a video and nobody will watch it. You will face painful rejection. You will feel completely alone. You will have to build an iron shield around your mindset, right? Your current environment is perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are today. So if you want to achieve something massive, you have to ruthlessly protect your belief. You need to audit everything that you consume. Consume into your head. Pull out your phone right now. Look at who you follow. Do those accounts make you feel inspired? Do they make you want to take action? Or do they make you feel jealous or angry or depressed? Unfollow every single person who drains your energy. Fill your feed with people who show you what is possible. You have to manufacture your own daily motivation. Every single morning before I do anything else, I get outside, I go for a walk. It's our Believe Walk Challenge. 15 minutes outside at least. And I listen to a famous entrepreneur. I listen to Steve Jobs. I listen to Howard Schultz. I listen to Michael Jordan. I need these powerful voices in my head. I need to borrow their belief until I have enough of my own. A massive study by the University of Oxford shows that the people you surround yourself with, even virtually, directly dictate your long-term success. You cannot afford to leave your mindset to chance. Your brain is a sponge. It absorbs the energy of whatever you put around it. If you surround yourself with people who complain, guess what? You will become a complainer. If you surround yourself with people who doubt themselves, then guess what? You will doubt yourself too. This is why you must aggressively prune your environment. Build a digital fortress around your mind. Seek out the content that challenges you to play a bigger game. Study the creators who are doing exactly what you want to do. Watch their interviews, read their books, immerse yourself in their worldview. When you do this consistently, their courage will rub off on you. You will start to think think like them, you will start to act like them. You will begin to ask yourself what the boldest version of you would do right now. And if you implement every single strategy that I just gave you, your channel will start to explode. You will build a much bigger audience and a deeply profitable business. But none of these tactics matter if you fail to grasp one final essential truth. Your next step to greatness. You already have everything you need inside of you right right now. Stop waiting for permission to share your powerful voice with the world. The people who need your help are out there searching for you today. So keep taking action, keep serving, and never let fear win. Now let's learn all of YouTube growth condensed down and explained. Your first 100 videos on YouTube are going to be terrible, and that's exactly how it's supposed to be.

All you need to do— this, this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams of being a is make 100 videos and improve something every time. Do that. And then on your 101st video, we'll start talking like maybe you can get some views. But you know, your first 100 are gonna suck.

This is what I love about YouTube is you get to see this growth.

Yeah.

You get to see the Super Mario effect in action. You can go back and see the first video. There's a few before that that are even more awkward where it's like, you know, I haven't found my voice. I haven't learned how to like talk to the camera and I I freaking love it. I think for any new creator, that's so important. You have to be able to get past the first 10, 100, 200 videos based on your love for it. Success on this platform isn't about your natural talent. It's having the courage to suck until you finally get good.

Your first video is not going to give views, period. It's not. Your first 10 are not going to give views. I can very confidently say that. So stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end and just just get to work and start uploading.

Failure is the process. Like, if you're not failing, you're not reaching far enough. If you demand perfection from your very first upload, you will paralyze your progress and deny the world the exact message it desperately needs to hear— yours.

There's literally no such thing as a perfect video.

I would be blown away if that me could see me today doing this interview. I'd be like, you're crazy, but that's just incrementally keeping that treadmill on jog. I've just stuck with it. I think it takes practice to make videos, and I think it doesn't hurt to get started with what you have. When I started my channel in 2009, nobody was making educational videos for entrepreneurs. I didn't have any idea what I was doing. My first video got exactly 3 comments in an entire year. One was from my mom, one was from my sister, and one from some random guy who saw my video, and I was so excited that that a stranger watched my video, but my videos were terrible. It took me 350 public videos before I could watch my own content without being completely embarrassed by my own work, and 700 videos until I finally made something that inspired me. If I quit because my first few videos were bad, I wouldn't have reached the 4-point-whatever million subscribers we have today. Now I know what you're telling yourself right now. You're saying YouTube has changed, and today you need a $10,000 camera and a massive editing team just to get 10 views. But the truth is the algorithm doesn't care about your expensive gear. It only cares about people clicking and people watching. You can actually beat channels with massive budgets just by using your phone and the right strategy. Let me break down the exact system you need to steal their traffic and build your audience this week. Stop chasing viral views and focus on impact. You're probably focusing on the completely wrong metrics. Over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single day. The competition is massive. You look at those numbers and you feel totally overwhelmed. You see that 95% of YouTube videos get fewer than 1,000 views and you just want to give up. You think that if you don't get millions of views, you're failing. But you don't need a million subscribers to make $1 million. Remember, you're built to serve. You have a specific message that can change the life of the person watching your video. Focus on who you're serving, not who you aren't serving. If your video gets 50 views, that is 50 real human beings who sat down to listen to you. Imagine 50 people in a room listen to your speech. You'd probably be thrilled. Treat your YouTube channel the exact same way. Your goal isn't to please just a robot algorithm. Your goal is to build deep trust with a highly targeted audience. When you change your focus from going viral to making a real impact, the game changes for you. You stressing over the vanity numbers and you start caring about the actual humans on the other side of the screen. Master the click and the hook. Now you can have the greatest video in the world, but if nobody clicks, your message dies a slow death in the dark. Your thumbnail and your title equal 80% of your success on this platform. The algorithm looks for high click-through rates. If your thumbnail is confusing or boring, people will scroll right past you. You need to test your thumbnails constantly. If you're interested, we have Brandlytics. It's the most advanced thumbnail and title split testing software in the world that I highly recommend checking out. Keep your design simple. Use high contrast. Don't put too many words in your thumbnail. Your title needs to promise a specific outcome. Don't use vague words. And once they click, your first 60 seconds dictate your retention. The data shows that if you can keep people watching past the first minute, your average view duration will skyrocket. It. So cut your long intros, stop talking about yourself, deliver value immediately. Tell the viewer exactly why they need to keep watching. Give them the most important information right away to hook their attention. If your 1-minute retention stays above 70%, YouTube will push your video out to tons of new people. Steal traffic with growth videos. You're probably wondering, how do you get discovered when nobody knows who you are? The answer is what I call growth —videos. You don't want to show up at number 1 for a search term that nobody's looking for. The real secret to rapid channel growth is ranking after other popular videos. You need to model success. So find the biggest creators in your specific industry. Look at the videos that are getting lots of views for them right now. You don't copy their video, but you can model their topic. You make your own version of that successful concept. Add your unique perspective and your specific philosophies, your story, When someone finishes watching that bigger creator, YouTube will look for the next logical video to play. Because your topic, title are highly related, your growth video has a chance of showing up in the suggested feed. You are legally stealing their traffic. This is how you build an audience fast without waiting for the search algorithm to slowly rank your content. It puts your face right in front of the exact buyers that you are trying to reach. The 100 video rule and unstoppable momentum. Okay, your first videos are going to be terrible. You need to accept this right now. Success on YouTube isn't about your natural talent. It's about having the courage to suck until you finally get good. As I mentioned earlier, it took me 350 videos, public videos, before I could watch my own content without cringing, and another 700 videos to actually inspire myself. Right? You're setting your expectations way too high. So commit to the 100 video rule. Your only goal is to upload 100 videos and make each one just 1% better than the last one. The biggest thing you're missing right now is just momentum. You sit around overthinking every single detail. You rewrite your scripts 20 times. You delay your upload because the lighting isn't perfect. Perfectionism is just you being afraid, and that's okay, but stop letting your fear hold you back. Hit publish. Do it again. Build undeniable momentum and stop judging your first video against somebody else's 100th. Just get the reps in and the quality will follow naturally over time. Build a business development machine. If you want to monetize your channel without relying on ad revenue, you need to build what I call a business development show. Ad revenue pays pennies when you're small, but you can use your channel as the ultimate networking tool. Create an interview series Reach out to the top 50 people in your industry who could refer massive amounts of business to you. Invite them on your show to share their story. Nobody's asking them for interviews. They say yes. You get to sit down with them for an hour. You build a genuine relationship. You do a great interview, hopefully, and give them amazing content that they can share too. By simply being a good host and building that trust, they naturally are curious about you and what you do. You could have 200 subscribers and build a 7-figure business just from the relationships you created on your tiny YouTube channel. Inside my Movement Makers program, entrepreneurs use this exact strategy to completely transform their income. And if you want to learn more about Movement Makers, check the link in the description below. It works because you provide a massive value upfront where most people are leading with an ask. Quality of thought over quality of production. People use expensive gear as an excuse to procrastinate. You think you need a massive editing team and a fancy studio You don't. Quality of thought will always beat quality of production. If you have a message that can genuinely change someone's life, they don't care if you filmed it on your iPhone or in your car. They only care about the value that you provide. Your background visuals and your transition effects won't save a terrible idea. So stop worrying about looking professional. Start worrying about being impactful. Share your raw, unfiltered truth. As you get going, there's lots more that you can continue to add. More gear, more analytics, etc. But right now you just need to focus on delivering profound value. You have a unique perspective that the world desperately needs. Your specific experiences have shaped a viewpoint that nobody else has. Lean into that. Let your raw authenticity be the thing that attracts your loyal viewers. Find your purpose in your pain. Now you might be struggling to figure out what your channel should even be about. Out. The answer is already inside you. Your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled the most with in your life is exactly what you need to help other people through right now. I struggled with being a shy, introverted entrepreneur. I quit on my first business partner for a day, and then I came back, right? I felt completely isolated. Now I make videos for the 19-year-old version of me who desperately needed someone to believe in him. So look back at your darkest moments, Look at the problems that you conquered. There are millions of people out there right now who are currently trapped in the exact same pain that you escaped. They need your guidance. They need your voice. When you build your content around helping the person you used to be, you'll never run out of motivation. Your channel becomes a mission instead of just a marketing tactic for you. It gives you the endless motivation you need to keep recording videos even when you're exhausted and nobody is watching. It's the reason I've made 10,000+ videos and still wake up and want to make more videos, because I feel like the work that I do actually matters. When you're just chasing a strategy, you're way more likely to burn out. Model success and copy the rise. When you want to achieve something great, look for people who've already done it, but you must copy their rise, not their result. So you look at massive creators and you try to do what they're doing today. You see them doing huge productions or big giveaways or celebrity guests, and you try to replicate that, and then you fail. You need to look at what they did when they had zero subscribers. What were their daily habits before they became famous? How did they title their videos when nobody cared who they were? Study their beginnings. Find out how they got their initial traction. Success leaves clues. You don't need to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Find your heroes, analyze their early strategy, and apply those exact same frameworks to your own channel today. You need to go back to their oldest videos. You can sort their channel by the oldest, watch the terrible lighting, look at the bad audio, look at how they struggle to look at the camera lens. This gives you the confidence to start. You'll realize that every expert that you see was once a complete rookie online. They just started earlier and they refused to quit. And you can do the exact same thing right now. Starting today. Stop overthinking and just hit record. So we need to agree to stop letting perfectionism destroy your ability to get your message out. You think you're protecting your brand by waiting until your video is perfect, but you're actually just hiding. You're hiding behind research. You're hiding behind planning. Planning is just procrastination. Hiding. You don't need another course. You don't need another strategy book. You need to hit record. The market will tell you what works what doesn't work. You can't learn how to ride a bicycle by reading a book about it, right? You have to get on the bike, you have to fall off a little bit, you have to scrape your knee once or twice. YouTube is the exact same way. You have to post bad videos to learn how to make good videos. The algorithm rewards consistency. It rewards creators who show up every single week without fail. So make a schedule and stick to it. Treat your upload day, uh, like a sacred commitment to yourself and to the people that you want to help. If you say you're going to upload every Tuesday, then upload every Tuesday. Don't make excuses. Just get the content out there and let the data tell you how to improve. Your environment dictates your success. You'll never achieve massive growth if you're surrounded by negative people. Your environment has been perfectly designed to keep you exactly where you are right now. So if your friends tell you that YouTube is a waste of time, you'll eventually believe them. If your family laughs at your videos close, you'll lose your motivation. You have to protect your mindset. You have to change your environment. If you cannot find supportive people in your physical life, you have to build a digital environment. This is why I watch videos of successful entrepreneurs every single morning on my believe walk. I want Warren Buffett in my ear. I want Steve Jobs in my ear. I want people who have achieved impossible things telling me that I can do it too. You need to flood your brain with positivity and ambition. So subscribe to channels that lift you up and stop watching the news. Stop consuming drama, negativity. Think about your mind like a garden, right? Whatever you plant in that garden will grow. So plant belief, plant courage. And when you change your inputs, you drastically change your outputs. How to handle the haters and trolls. So when you finally start getting views, the haters will arrive. This is a guarantee. Someone will leave a mean comment about your voice. Someone will insult your background. Someone would tell you look like Nicolas Cage. Someone will tell you that your business is a scam. Most creators let one negative comment ruin their entire week. You cannot let strangers dictate your emotional state, right? Haters are often just confused fans. They are projecting their own insecurities onto you. Happy, successful people don't spend their time leaving mean comments on YouTube videos all day. Only hurting people hurt people. So when you see negative comment, Feel bad for them. Realize that their life must be in a really terrible place right now. Don't argue with them. Don't try to defend yourself. Just block, delete, move on. Protect your peace. Focus entirely on the people who are thanking you. Focus on the viewers who need your help. The more haters you get, the more it means you're actually making a real impact and reaching a wider audience. Turn your channel into a daily habit. You have to build your channel into your daily routine. Motivation, it has a half-life, right? It, it wears out. You feel fired up today, but tomorrow you'll wake up tired. You won't want to film. You won't want to edit. If you rely on motivation, your channel will die. So you need discipline. You need to schedule your YouTube time in your calendar, just like the most important doctor's appointment. Block off 2 hours every Thursday morning to film. Block off 3 hours every Friday to edit. Don't let anything interrupt that time. Treat your content like a million-dollar business, and it will eventually become one. Treat it like a hobby, and it'll only ever cost you money. The most successful creators I know are disciplined. They do the work even when they're exhausted. They do the work when nobody is watching. They do the work when they have zero subscribers because they know that consistency compounds. The effort you put in today will pay you back 10 times over in the following years. Identify your core value. Every successful channel stands for something specific. You need to figure out your most important core value. For me, that word is believe. Everything I do filters through that one word. When you have total clarity on your core value, creating content becomes incredibly easy. You stop guessing about what to talk about. You just share your truth. If your core value is freedom, then every video you make should help your audience achieve or believe in more freedom. If your core value is resilience, then every video should teach them how to bounce back after failure. Don't try to copy someone else's brand. You will always sound fake. Figure out what matters to you the absolute most. What is the one message you'd share with the world if you only had one day left to live? And build your channel around that single idea. People, they don't subscribe to the topics. They subscribe to people. They subscribe to leaders who have a deep conviction in what they're doing. So stand for something powerful and the right audience will find you automatically. The power of deep analytics. Now, you can't grow what you don't measure. You have to look at your data objectively, right? All progress begins with telling the truth. YouTube gives you the most incredible dashboard full of analytics. Most creators only look at their subscriber count and their total views, and that's a massive mistake. You need to look at your click-through rate. It's incredibly important. You need to look at your audience retention curve. Those two things will make or break your channel. You need to see exactly where viewers are rewinding your videos. If you notice that everything drops off at the 3-minute mark, you need to figure out why. Did you start rambling? Did your audio go bad? Did you go off topic? Use that data to fix your mistakes. Even with the most basic of YouTube Studio information, you have everything you need to start to win. So stop guessing. Let the numbers tell you the truth. If a video fails, don't get all emotional about it. Just look at the data, learn the lesson, and get better with your next video. It's a scientific process of making small adjustments until you find the exact formula that you and your audience loves. Monetize before you're ready. You do not need to wait for the YouTube Partner Program to make money. Waiting for ad revenue is the slowest path to making money on YouTube. You can start monetizing your channel today with zero subscribers. If you're an entrepreneur, your channel is a top-of-funnel marketing engine for you. You should be driving views to your own your own products and services. Put a link to your consulting calendar in the description. Offer a free guide, right? We call it a lead magnet, in exchange for their email address. Sell a digital product. If your video solves a specific problem, people will gladly pay you to help them solve it faster. Don't feel guilty about selling. If your product genuinely helps people, then selling is just another form of serving. You are doing your audience a disservice by hiding your solutions. So tell them exactly how they can work with you. Be bold about your business. You are an entrepreneur first and a content creator second. Use the platform to fund your mission and scale your impact to reach even more people. Your true story is your biggest asset. People crave authenticity more than anything right now. They are tired of the fake gurus and perfectly polished lives. Your biggest competitive advantage is simply telling your story. Share the embarrassing failures, talk about the times you almost went bankrupt, reveal the mistakes you made when you were first starting out. When you show your vulnerability, you become more relatable. You build a deep, uh, emotional connection with your viewers that a perfectly scripted corporate video could never achieve. Your audience wants to know that you are a real human being who struggles just like they do. When you stop trying to look perfect all the time and start focusing on actually being real, your channel will experience a massive shift in engagement. People will start leaving long emotional comments because they finally feel seen and understood. So don't hide your scars. Your scars are the exact proof that you survived the battle that they're going through right now, and they are the reason people will trust you to lead them. You have the exact blueprint to grow your YouTube and turn your channel into a massive engine for your business. But none of this matters if you don't actually put it out into the world. You have to take the very first step today. Your message matters. Your message matters, and you have an obligation to share your voice. Playing small does not serve the world or the people who desperately need your help, or your family, or your bank account. Don't let another day pass by keeping your story hidden behind fear and overthinking. You have greatness inside of you, so give yourself permission to be great right now. If you want to learn how to turn your hobby into a career, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Keeping your passion as just a hobby is a waste of your potential. Think about it. Most people, they slave away jobs that they hate, suppressing the things they love. No wonder they feel stuck and unhappy. If you never act on your passion, you risk waking up at 80 with nothing but regret.