🎬 6 lessons after making 100+ videos

i recently crossed 100 videos on youtube. not all of them were good. a lot of them were honestly pretty bad. but i learned a ton along the way, and here are the 6 biggest takeaways.

1. subscribers don’t mean much early on

when you’re starting out, it’s really tempting to obsess over your subscriber count. i definitely did. but the truth is, subscribers barely matter in the early days. what matters is making videos that you actually enjoy making. if you’re having fun, it comes through in the content, and good content eventually finds an audience.

chasing subscribers early leads to making content you think people want instead of content you actually care about. and that’s a recipe for burnout.

2. don’t take every brand deal

when brands first start reaching out, it feels amazing. someone wants to pay you? to make videos? incredible. but i learned pretty quickly that not every brand deal is worth it. if the product doesn’t align with what you actually use or believe in, your audience can tell. and once you lose that trust, it’s really hard to get back.

i’ve turned down deals that would’ve paid well because the product just wasn’t something i’d recommend to a friend. and i think that’s the right filter — would i tell my friend about this?

3. be careful chasing the algorithm after a viral hit

nothing messes with your head like having a video blow up. suddenly you’re getting 10x your normal views and you think you’ve cracked the code. so you make 5 more videos just like it, trying to recreate the magic. and they all flop.

the algorithm is fickle. what works once might never work again. and if you spend all your energy trying to reverse-engineer a viral hit, you lose sight of why you started making videos in the first place.

4. slow growth is better than viral growth

this sounds counterintuitive but hear me out. when you grow slowly, the people who subscribe actually care about your content. they watch your videos, they leave comments, they share your stuff. when you grow from a viral video, a lot of those new subscribers came for one specific thing and don’t care about anything else you make.

slow growth builds a real community. viral growth builds a number.

5. fewer subscribers can actually be better for niche content

if you make niche content — and you probably should — having a smaller, engaged audience is way more valuable than a large, disengaged one. a channel with 10k subscribers where everyone watches every video is in a better position than a channel with 100k subscribers where nobody watches.

brands care about engagement, not just numbers. and more importantly, making content for people who actually care about the topic is just more fulfilling.

6. youtube is an infinite game

there’s no finish line. there’s no point where you “win” youtube. some months are great, some months are terrible, and the only thing that matters is whether you keep going.

the creators who succeed long-term aren’t the most talented or the luckiest — they’re the ones who just didn’t quit. they kept making videos, kept improving, kept showing up even when the numbers were bad.

treat it like an infinite game and you’ll be fine. the moment you start treating it like a competition with a winner and a loser, you’ve already lost.