From 585 Subscribers to 100,187 in Exactly 1 Year

John Coogan started his YouTube channel in November 2020 and now has 302K subscribers 📈

It’s a channel about tech and geopolitics.

Top 3 videos in terms of views…

• Microsoft Just KILLED Zuck’s Metaverse (8.4M)…

• Why Billionaires LOVE MrBeast (3.7M)…

• History of Xi Jinping (Full Documentary) (1M)…

Paddy Galloway helped John grow the channel from 585 to 100,187 subscribers in a year and breaks down how it happened here.

Paddy points to a key trait John possesses 👇

Not outcome focused

It was clear from our first strategy call together that John wasn’t just focused on what youtube could “get him”, he genuinely wanted to create good content.

If you’re not starting with that, you’re in trouble

A lot of people focus on the money first, but ironically it’s often the people who focus primarily on doing great work and delivering lots of value who do best financially 😎

Another key trait noted by Paddy…

Constant iteration

Every time John posted, he learned from the data & applied it to his next upload. He wasn’t looking to just create something “good enough”…

This is anecdotal, but I’ve never seen someone with this mindset not succeed over a long-enough time horizon

John tweeted on this topic when he hit 20k subscribers…

improvements to the videos were gradual. Every week I would make small tweaks to:

– sound & lighting
– reading the script more naturally
– more engaging b-roll footage
– layering in music and sound design

Another tweet from John I found interesting, responding to someone saying that it’s embarrassing to start a podcast…

wrong. starting a youtube channel is much more embarrassing, but as Hegel wisely wrote: “do not kill the part of you that is cringe — kill the part of you that cringes”

So there you go: if you want to build a big YouTube channel, best embrace your cringe 😜