Amber Hollingsworth celebrates reaching 10,000 YouTube subscribers and recounts the long, difficult process of building her channel focused on providing strategic advice to families affected by addiction. She describes early struggles (taking months to reach 100 subscribers, about a year-and-a-half to reach 1,000), the workload (she's produced over ~400 videos), financial and personal sacrifices, and thanks her staff (Campbell, Kim, Scott, Bree, Taylor, Jim). Her stated mission is to "spread recovery faster than addiction" by giving actionable guidance to families.
Questions this video answers
10,000 subscribers.
More than 400 videos.
Months (described as "months and months and months").
About a year and a half of regular posting.
Campbell (parent recovery expert), Kim (relationship specialist), Scott (parent recovery coach), Bree (calendar magician), Taylor (social media), Jim (video editor/thumbnail creator).
Chapters
Guys, put the shovel down. Just hit 10,000 subscribers. I could not be more excited. This is, for sure a very happy day. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Amber, 10,000 subscribers. That's not that big of a deal on YouTube. But for us, it is huge. I cannot even tell you the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that has went into growing this channel. So when I decided to start making videos and do the YouTube thing, I'm pretty sure everyone around me thought, whatever, we'll just let her do her thing and we'll just carry on as normal. Seriously, learning how to talk to the camera has been an adventure. You see, initially, I thought, oh, this will be easy. Because people are always saying, amber, I wish I had that on video. Because I would just play it back to myself and remind myself of that. And I thought, oh, I could do that. I can put it on video. I talk to people for a living. No, no big deal. But then you sit down and you start talking to a camera lens, and you feel like a complete idiot. And even now, I've probably done at least more than 400 videos, and it still feels really, really silly. But I'm getting used to the feeling. It took so long to build any subscribers at all. I'm telling you, it took months and months and months to get to 100 subscribers. And. And this was even when I had been posting regularly. It took me probably, like, a year and a half of regular posting videos to get to 1,000 subscribers. And during the time when things were moving super, super slowly, I was putting a ton of time, money, and energy into these videos. And the people around me started getting annoyed with it because I couldn't see nearly as many clients because I was busy making videos. And we were pouring so much money into it. My family, my. Everyone's looking at me like, why are we doing this? This is crazy. Like, we don't have a hundred subscribers yet. But I knew in my heart of hearts, it's just something we had to do because there is almost no resources out there, particularly for families worried about an addicted loved one. And even though there is lots of support and information out there for people who are struggling with addictions, it's mostly just support, which is kind of different than what we do on this channel, which is give you strategic advice, action steps, things that actually make it better. Because our job, as you know, is to keep you five steps ahead of addiction. I'm telling you, over the course of the last year and a half or so, it's been Tough. I got confronted more than once or twice from my accounting team saying, you have to stop doing this. We cannot do this anymore. You're losing so much money. But luckily, you guys stuck in there with me. And you know the thing that kept me going? It's you. It's the comments about how the videos were helping you. It's the fact that you took the time to share these videos and like these videos and leave me feedback. Those are the things that kept me making videos, even when it was really hard, even when no one else around me wanted me to be doing it. Now, I know that I'm the one that you usually see sitting here talking to you, but in actuality, it's taken a whole team of people to get here. My staff that kept believing in me and never quit on me. We've got Campbell, our parent recovery expert. We got Kim, the relationship specialist. We got Scott, the parent recovery coach. And Bree, who's the calendar magician. Those guys kept the office running so that we could make this happen. And then we have our behind the scenes staff, Taylor, who helps us manage our social media. And we have Jim, who edits all these videos and makes the great thumbnails. So I just wanted to take this time to say thank you, thank you, thank you to my staff, my team, and all of you guys, because you're the ones that are making this happen. You know, people tell me all the time, Amber, I wish I found these videos 10 years ago. And so my goal is to spread recovery faster than addiction is spreading. And every time you watch a video, every time you like it, every time you share it, you're helping get the right information in front of the right people.
