I wanted to talk about something which is both scary but (I hope) somewhat reassuring to those of you at the start of the YouTube journey and that’s that, for most creators, the journey from 0 to 1,000 subscribers is perhaps the hardest part.
I know that’s not the most inspiring opening line, but I think it’s worth saying out loud because I get a lot of messages from people who are putting in real effort – writing, filming, posting – and wondering why it isn’t clicking yet (or people aren’t clicking). And the answer, frustratingly, is that it just takes time.
I say this as someone who posted videos on YouTube for over a year with basically no traction. My first videos got a few hundred views, mostly from friends and family who were being polite about it. But the thing I didn’t understand at the time was that I was actually building the habit of creating, and slowly developing the skill of knowing what resonates. Those two things take time, and they require consistent action.
I’ve talked about it before with the Get Going, Get Good, Get Smart framework – my 3-part system for starting and growing a channel – but I keep coming back to it because I keep hearing from people who are trying to Get Smart before they’ve even built up the basic habit of posting consistently. They’re deep in analytics, A/B testing thumbnails, obsessing over retention curves – all from a channel with twelve videos and 200 subscribers.
And none of that is wrong exactly but it’s cart-before-horse stuff. When you’re just starting out, what matters far more is making small, specific improvements to each piece of content – the whole 1% better each time idea – rather than spending hours analysing data that might not even be statistically meaningful yet.
The honest thing I wish someone had told me earlier: the learning curve of content creation is steeper than it looks, and you only get through it by doing the reps. Every video I posted in that first year – even the ones that flopped – was teaching me something like how to structure a story, write a hook that actually made people want to keep watching, avoid sounding like a robot reading off a script. You can’t learn those things by watching videos about them. You learn them by taking action.
So if you’re in the middle of that difficult early stretch right now, here are three things that actually helped me:
1. Focus on publishing consistently, not publishing perfectly. Done is infinitely better than perfect. A video out in the world – even an imperfect one – is doing more for your growth than the perfect video sitting in your head. I know this is a cliché at this point, but I genuinely believe most creators underestimate how much this matters.
2. Make one small improvement each time. Not ten. One. Pick the single thing you most want to get better at this week – maybe it’s your hook, or your pacing, or actually looking at the camera – and make that your focus. Then move to the next thing. Trying to fix everything at once is a good way to feel overwhelmed and fix nothing.
3. Build systems, not motivation. Motivation is unreliable. I’ve been making content for years now and I still have weeks where I don’t feel like it. What keeps things moving is having a clear, repeatable process – for coming up with ideas, filming, editing, publishing – so that the decision of whether to make a video this week never really comes up. You just do the next step in the system.
The whole point of Stage 1 – Get Going – is simply to be in the game. You can’t iterate on content you haven’t made. You can’t understand your audience if you haven’t posted anything for them to react to. Everything else in the framework comes later. But none of it happens if you never start.
If you’re at that stage right now and want a structured way to actually get going, we put together a 7 Video Challenge – a simple framework to publish your first seven videos without overthinking it. Loads of people have found it really helpful for breaking through that initial friction of just getting started. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check it out here.
Otherwise, hit reply and let me know how many videos you’ve posted so far and how you’ve found it. I’d be curious to know.
Have a great rest of your week 🙂