3 Lessons Learned from Growing a YouTube Channel to 200,000 Subscribers

What’s up boys and girls? We God, just last week we passed 200,000 subscribers on the primary YouTube channel, which if you’ve never checked out, go check it out. YouTube.com anthonydasino it is mind boggling that number 200,000, we started a year and a half ago on that channel at around 200 subscribers. So 200 x in the last 18 months is absolutely hard to wrap my mind around. It’s an unfathomable amount of growth and I appreciate every single person who’s been part of this journey. If you’ve seen any of those videos, I appreciate your support. I wanted to take some time in this episode today to share three lessons that I’ve learned in that 18 months or so of growing the YouTube channel. And maybe these lessons can help you if you’re trying to grow your own channel, trying to grow on any other social media channels, or, you know, just trying to build a business and thinking about growth in general. The first lesson is that consistency matters more than intensity on any social media platform.

The ability just to show up consistently and produce great content is going to increase your likelihood of eventually realizing success. The more you can consistently show up, the more likely you are to eventually hit the ball out of the park. And often it can feel very demoralizing. Because consistency means doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to see consistent growth, doesn’t mean that the trajectory is smooth. In fact, if you were to look at my graph over the last 18 months, it is wildly inconsistent in terms of growth. And yet you will notice that I consistently show up and publish a video every ten to 20 days, right? We’re a little 15 loosey goosey on when like what exact that timeframe is, but we’re consistently showing up and putting out videos and a lot of the growth that you’re going to occur isn’t going to come in this steady ramping up. This is the other thing that you really need to understand about social media and business in general is that your growth tends to come in lumps. It tends to look like for long periods of time, nothing is happening.

And then suddenly overnight, everything is happening. It happens really, really quickly. And for me, I’ve seen this now on three different spikes on the graph. Initially last year, about 18 months ago, we had a really good string of six or seven videos that really catapulted the channel and we went from 200 subscribers to 100,000 subscribers really, really quickly. But then around seven, eight months in, we hit 130,000 subscribers. This would have been around last March and then we hit a plateau. And from March until September, the channel only grew by maybe 5000, which is still incredible. But if you look at it compared to the growth that we had seen before, it was very, very difficult for me personally to understand, like, what’s happening? Why is this content not working? What am I needing to do differently? What have I changed? Right? And so the next spike that we had was in October, so that would have been almost a year after the initial spike.
And then we had a very good maybe month, two month run where we had a lot of good traction, but then again in November and December, it kind of plateaued again. And then in January of this year. So just a couple months ago, we saw another massive spike. Incredible, massive spike, where again we went from 140,000 subscribers to 200,000 in the span of like a month. And so all that’s to say is that, like, this growth just looks, plateau, spike, plateau, spike. And that can be very demoralizing when you find yourself in one of those plateaus. But this is a game where you only ever strike out when you stop swinging, when you walk away from the plate. So just stay at it, keep putting out the content, keep putting out your product, keep making the offers, and you will feel like nothing’s happening.
And then all at once, everything will be happening. So that’s number one is consistency, number two is iterations. It’s important, you know, you have all these swings at bat, which gives you the opportunity to collect feedback and collect data points and say, what’s working? What could I do better? And as long as you’re continually improving, you’re gonna get to that point where quality eventually wins out. But you can only do that if you take like, intention to everything that you do, reviewing what worked, what doesn’t, looking at your analytics and really questioning, was this the best way to do this? And then on the next version, you know, iterating slightly and say, okay, what if next time we craft our hook like this, what if we condense it and we try to finish our hook within the first 28 seconds? Or what if we try a thumbnail in this way, the iteration is what leads to that quality. But in the beginning, you don’t have the ability to produce quality. And so all you can rely on is quantity. You gotta put out as much as possible. But in each one of those, just try and do it a little bit better than the previous.
Mister Beast talks about this, people come to him all the time and hey, what do I need to do? What’s the secret? Hey, how can I grow my channel. And he says, go make 100 videos. And then on every single one of those, your goal is just to make the next one a little bit better. Pick one thing in the next video that you can improve on. Do that 100 times, and then come back and talk to me. And he goes, people fall into one of two categories. Either they say, I’m not going to do that, and in which case they never come back. The other group, they do exactly what he said, and then they don’t need to come back, because after 100 iterations and 100 improvements, they go, I’ve already figured this out, right? So in either case, it’s the best piece of advice you can give, which is just to be consistent, keep putting it out there, keep iterating, and keep trying to improve.
And that’s eventually how you win any game that you’re trying to play at all, right? The third piece of wisdom or piece of advice or piece of learning that’s come from this last 18 months of growing on YouTube is that packaging is part of the product. And this is really important. The packaging. What we’re talking about here is like the physical presentation that could be the thumbnail and that could be the title that is part of the product. And in a very real way, the thumbnail and the title influences a lot of the consumption pattern of the product itself. And you see this in very clear night and day terms with things like Apple, which has a very beautiful unboxing process. And in that experience of the packaging and unpackaging it and like opening the box and then getting the product, it starts to influence the experience that you have of the actual product. And you go, well, this unboxing experience was so good.
This product must be amazing. So we can start to influence the end user’s behavior that they’re going to have with your product based on how we present it, how we package it. And this is so important in YouTube with the thumbnail and the title, but it’s important in every aspect of business. And I really encourage you to think through what is the packaging? How am I wrapping up this offer and presenting it to people? Because it’s not necessarily like the product itself can be great, but you can make it truly exceptional by positioning it in your consumer, your prospect’s minds, before they ever even interact with the thing. And that’s where the packaging really comes into play. I did another episode on packaging recently that I recommend going back and listening to because I think that’s, it’s being consistently reinforced in my mind as like one of the most important things for a good offer. A good product is in the packaging and it’s something that I think it’s very easy to take for granted and just kind of slap some things on this thing because, you know, oh, my product is amazing and not really giving that the time and the attention and care that it deserves, given how much influence it can ultimately have on the prospects experience. So those are three lessons, consistency, iteration and packaging.

Take those, use them in whatever way you can. But more than anything, everybody, I just. I feel so grateful. I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to share, you know, the things that I’ve learned over the years with you guys. And it means the world to me. It’s not lost on me that your time and attention are two of your most valuable resources. And so the fact that you’re, you know, investing those in me means the, the world to me. So thank you very much for that.

I appreciate you. And we’ll see you in the next video, next episode. We’ll see at the next 200,000 and, yeah, that’s all I got.