Reaching 20,000 Subscribers on YouTube
Posted on March 5th, 2024
It’s not a huge number by any stretch. I call mine a “small YouTube channel” whenever it comes up in conversation.
The subscriber metric itself is a little silly. Subscriber count doesn’t say much about your usual views or recent impact, but it’s a decent indicator badge saying: “you’ve helped THIS many people”.
Let me hit you with some things I’ve learned in my journey from 0 to 20,000 subscribers. If you’re considering starting (or dusting off) a channel on YouTube, I hope this post helps you out.
First, the benefits of doing YouTube…
YouTube has enabled me to:
- Start my own small business (you are looking at it!)
- Create a bunch of career networking opportunities.
- Meet lifelong friends around the world
Despite being a pretty small channel, YouTube has been a huge net positive in my life.
It comes with a lot of stress, though. You’ve gotta invest a ton of side hustle time, you’ll deal with occasional rude comments, and battle mega imposter syndrome, but I’d say each video has been a compounding investment. Some of my earliest videos are still circulating and introducing me to amazing peers and friends.
The stressors make it easy to not show up, but generally every video has been worth making in the long term.
My channel started as a way of sharing technical things I learned from building Danger Crew. I was starting to work on a new game, too, so I thought putting some videos out throughout the process would be a good way to get the word out there about it. Somehow I keep gravitating back to making tutorial style videos.
Getting started is the hardest part
The first 1,000 subscribers are an absolute grind. You get practically ZERO views at first. In the early days, it helps to hustle a little bit for some external traffic. My first videos all featured public CodePen demos, so I’d link to the videos from those demos. I posted a few times on Dev.to. I think I tweeted every video I made, even though I hate tweeting. Those little moves add up when you are just getting started.
(I was in this period from 2019 to 2020. YouTube is way better at recommending videos to new viewers now. More on that in a bit.)
I felt on top of the world when I finally hit 1,000 subscribers. Now I could place ads! I felt like I was “in” and had unlocked a new avenue in my life. Like, what if this could grow to becomes the thing I do for work?
My interest in numbers faded pretty quickly as I was heads down making videos. It came back when I was close to 10,000 subscribers, which feels like a big milestone, but from 10,000 to 20,000 (took a little more than 1 year) I hardly even checked.
Learning to keep at it
The secret is consistency, but not the annoying “please-the-algorithm” kind of consistency. The tough truth is that making compelling videos takes practice. Everybody is terrible at it at first. Thankfully, nobody cares too much. The viewers see it all the time.
The real secret to “keeping at it” and uploading consistently is finding a niche that gives you energy. If you get a rush from making the video, you have a massive advantage over all the other exhausted creators that are guided by chasing views. A friendly reminder to lean towards creating videos you are interested in making rather than ones that will supposedly perform well.
I super struggled with this in 2023. I was freshly laid off and desperately trying to make YouTube and Co-Op Mode work as my full time gig. Given the pressure, I kept trying to “crack the code” of making videos that appear to wider audiences. Not just videos for new game developers, but videos anybody who appreciates video games! Honestly they were all missing the mark. That kinda burned me out over time and now I need to find my personal video creation mojo again.
A cool thing about this site, Co-Op Mode, is that I can crank out anything I think that’s cool pretty quickly without even thinking about view counts. But then again, now I’m trying to do both. It’s a tricky balance.
Anyway, back to YouTube. For the record, publishing consistently probably is good from an algorithm perspective. It can’t hurt unless you are spamming low value uploads every day. YouTube’s Creator Insider channel says upload frequency is not a factor. Your videos just need to be consistently good to keep viewers happy and build genuine trust.
I don’t have any hard data to prove this, but I do talk to a lot of peers in the space that all agree - times are ‘a changing. YouTube is getting better at serving the right video to the right person at the right time. That’s a good thing for new creators! I bet you’ve personally noticed videos with pretty small view counts appearing in your feed lately. View counts are lower, but quality of viewer is way higher. That’s the thing that counts!
Make a focused video that shares something useful or interesting, YouTube will find the audience FOR YOU. That is incredible. I find my love for the platform again when I remind myself of the basics.
Comments
I gotta admit, I didn’t want the comments. I think nasty jerks on the Internet stop a lot of people back from creating YouTube videos.
I mean, every video WILL get them, but you also mostly won’t. Assuming you genuinely put thought and effort into the video, most of your comments will be positive, encouraging, and thankful. Probably at least 99% in my experience.
That said, the internet is full of terribly sad and angry people that will take out their problems on you in the comment section. They bothered me at first, but I got used to them after awhile. YouTube has some great features for hiding users from your channel, so you can be instantly done with these people.
The comments that really sting usually have some truth to them. As an example, there are a couple of videos on my channel that I was in a rush to produce because I was trying to keep up a strict upload schedule. I mistakenly left a prettttty bad bug in the project code and didn’t realize it until I was a quite a few more videos into the code. At that point, it was difficult to undo without redoing a lot of videos. (YouTube doesn’t offer the ability to edit your existing videos).
Nasty comments about that bug still bother me, mostly because I know I let my quality slip there. Pinned comments and description edits can help mitigate past mistakes, but they aren’t perfect solutions. At some point, you have to accept your mistakes, forgive yourself, and learn for the future. Practice, practice, practice, right?
Gear doesn’t matter so much.
Friends occasionally ask what kind of recording setup I use. I admit I like tech things, so I’m always tempted to buy new cameras, lights, toys etc. Honestly, very few of those purchases really helped anything.
The one thing any video creator does need is a decent microphone. Bad audio will tank any video, no matter how great the message is. If you want to get into this stuff, just order a Logitech Blue Yeti on Amazon and be on your way.
Good software helps, but isn’t required. Admittedly, picking up ScreenFlow (editing software) was a personal game changer for my workflow, but honestly some of my most successful videos were just me recording and chopping with OBS, which is free. Anything that can splice up some clips is fine to get started.
Graphic design wise, the agony of titles and thumbnails is so annoying. Mine are terrible. It’s a skill to work on, but ultimately shouldn’t stop anyone from uploading.
Watching out for bad advice
Last year, in that pursuit of big views, I followed a lot of bad advice from people saying “try this with your thumbnail” or “clickify your title”. It’s hard to truly A/B test these changes, so I don’t know if they were net positive or not, but I do know that the advice versions didn’t feel like me. I’m still embarrassed about them. I think 4-year-ago-me who was just starting would watch the videos and be like “dude, who are you?”
My successful videos
I mean, what is “success” really? The YouTube platform unapologetically wants you to know that success = views. YouTube Studio straight up celebrates when you upload a hit and shames you when your latest video flops. Here are the ones that did my heavy lifting from 0 to 20k:
I had prepared this talk for a remote JavaScript meetup. I put the work into the slides and flow and all that, so why not record it real quick for YouTube? I’m glad I did.
This video is the front door to arguably the thing most people know my channel for. Any reference to Pizza Legends points you to this first video. It took me a couple months to prep the codebase for this series, and it taught me a lot about how to manage recording a video project of this size. I’ve refined my process a lot for video series here on Co-Op Mode, mostly shaped by mistakes and pain points I made during the recording of Pizza Legends.
I’ll always look back fondly on the night this first video was uploaded. It was the beginning of a wildly stressful but pivotal ride in my life.
I did this in one weekend. I wrote the initial code at a brewery on a Friday night. I recorded the codealong on the next day, spending some decent time on the intro. I edited the whole video on one Sunday and quickly threw together a thumbnail. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it surprisingly did well.
Again, it’s probably worth doing
If you’ve been on the fence about clicking “Upload”, you should just try it. And let me know you did.
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