My YouTube Video Went Viral
Here is what happened
YouTube is hard. I mean, I’ve built startups in the past and developed a small audience on LinkedIn, so I thought I could handle YouTube.
Boy was I wrong.
There’s a reason why YouTube has a reputation of being the hardest platform to generate an audience in. You can’t just copy-paste or screenshot other people’s work, drop a comment or two, and hit the submit button. Nor can you simply snap a photo, adjust it to your liking, and upload it for the likes. In fact, if you thought you could just record a 30 second clip and put some tunes on top of it and call it a day, you’re gravely mistaken.
No, you have to create long form content, which is what the platform is known for, and why after Google search, it is the second most visited place on the internet and a massive potential audience. That means, you have to produce content that is around 10-20 minutes long that people actually want to see. And that is a lot harder than it sounds.
But before going any further, we need to go back to the genesis: why even bother?
The Case for YouTube
One of the reasons I decided to turn down publishers that were interested in the FoFty manuscript was that I wanted to share the content through more modern channels. Platforms that allowed for incremental releases, and more importantly, feedback during the process from the audience. Publishing a book seemed so… Big Bang, and I hate Big Bang approaches to anything in life - in fact, that is one of the FoFty Principles: avoiding Big Bangs of any variant at all costs.
So the two channels I decided to use to share the FoFty ideology through are Substack and YouTube. Turns out, both are a lot harder than I thought they were going to be as Substack is not a walk in the park as well, but we’ll save that for another post 🤭.
The goal is not to monetize either platform. This was one of the issues I faced with the publishers: their entire point of existence is about monetization. So why not monetize on Substack or YouTube? The reason is simple: FoFty’s teachings must be pure, devoid of conflicts of interest, and accessible to any and all who are willing to listen. The goal is to reach out to as many people as possible and to share the Principles and the way of living life that I have practiced. Sure there can be businesses built around the philosophy of FoFty - for example a physical sancuary to help people with experiential learning - but that’s a clearly separate endeavor from the ideology itself.
Sputtering Out of the Gates
Publishing my first YouTube video was tremendously difficult. What was I going to say? Do I sound and look ok? What about the mic? And lighting? There needs to be an awesome looking background behind me. I need to buy equipment!
Now, as a founder, advisor, and investor of many startups, I fully understand the importance of “just do it” and that launches are always “too late” by default. Yet, there I was spinning around in circles, trying to perfect every single thing I could think of before finally sitting down to record my very first episode. Honestly, not only is it embarrassing to recollect, the hypocrisy is actually amusing now.
After spending over a month fretting, I finally recorded my first episode and realized how much work post-processing videos are. I think I must have spent over 60 hours on that first video cleaning, splicing, inserting, adjusting, and also learning how to use DaVinci Resolve, the video editing software. By the way, I used to be a web designer and was quite familiar with Photoshop and Premier a decade or so ago.
The day came seven months ago when I finally uploaded the video and was ready to publish. Suddenly, I realized that I need a thumbnail. Oh, and a title too! What’s this? Meta tags? End screen? Cards? WTF!
I was mentally tired and didn’t want to deal anymore so I cobbled something together, hit publish and went to bed.
The next morning, I anxiously picked up my phone the moment I woke up to check how my video was doing. I was thinking, hmm, maybe a hundred people would have seen it by now? You know, since it was day time in the US while I slept an all.
2 views.
All that work. All that stress. All that anxiety. All that research. All those weeks.
2 views.
That was a soul-crushing moment. I reminded myself of when I first started building my LinkedIn audience - I would post and get maybe 20 likes if I was lucky. Come on Sang, you got this! But then the reality sank in that with LinkedIn, it took me 10 minutes to create that post. Not six freaking weeks!
Suddenly, my hopes of getting 1,000 YouTube subscribers in my first year seemed unattainable.
A Microcosm of Building a Startup
Creating a YouTube channel and getting 100 subscribers should be required education for everybody, especially for those who want to create a startup for the first time.
Here's why:
1. The biggest hurdle is simply to get over all your fears and get started. If you research what the biggest challenge NewTubers have is, it's taking months to prepare, tinker, procrastinate and "get ready" before they finally upload their first video. Basically, what happened to me.
Lesson: You need to learn to just go... and go now
2. Your first video is going to bomb. In fact, nobody is going to really watch your first 100 videos.
Lesson: You need to learn how to get smacked in the face
3. After you get smacked in the face, you need to keep going and not give up. Creating multiple quality videos in a week is hard. You need a script, you need to perform, you need to figure out sound and lighting, you need to post-process the media, you need to create a thumbnail and title, you need to work SEO in, and this list goes on and on.
Lesson: You need to learn and improve
4. You need to be resilient, even in the face of nobody watching your videos, or people unsubscribing from your channel or hitting the dislike button.
Lesson: You need to develop thick skin
5. You need to be smart about product / market fit - the algorithm is trying to find your audience for your content, you are trying to do the same, in the meantime, you are making videos but for which targets and for what problems you are solving? Without a clear content and audience the algorithm will never find your audience and you will never grow
Lesson: You need to develop a laser focused target, or in YT parlance, a niche
6. You need to test every change, from thumbnail color, title text and font, to lighting and sound to your energy level of speaking, etc. and collect the data (which YouTube provides the most of any social platform I've seen to date), and iterate rapidly or die
Lesson: You need to master Lean Startup principles
Starting a YouTube channel is very similar to creating a startup. It is essentially a microcosm of startups - a crash course - distilled into one thing: videos. And this makes it a great training medium.
I know 100 subscribers sounds easy, but trust me, unless you're a celebrity, won something, or already have a following on YT, it's not a simple thing to do starting from scratch.
It's an excellent lesson on a critical skill: learning how to learn, by yourself.
When it Clicks
About that viral video… everything changed after I finally made progress on #5 above: product-market fit. After tinkering, testing, modifying, trying, and not giving up, I finally found my audience and the YouTube algorithm showed me the way.
I finally discovered that my target audience for my content: people interested in a 50 year old who has jettisoned himself from corporate life and is carrying his family together with his wife on an entrepreneurial journey.
You have probably already seen the episode, but here it is in case you haven’t:
This video is sitting at around 90k views and will probably pass 100k, which for me qualifies for going viral given how much less views all my earlier videos were getting.
No fancy thumbnail - it’s literally a screen grab from the video itself.
No fancy video editing - just straight talk with me looking at the camera while sitting at my desk.
No fancy sound effects… in fact, no fancy anything.
It was the most unedited, simple, and low effort to produce video I had ever made. Now do you see why I spent so much time harping about my first video earlier? And yet…
That is the power of product-market fit, or in YouTube world, finding and connecting with your niche. All the other stuff is a distant footnote. Literally.
Let this example be an important piece of advice to you, not for YouTube, but for life itself.
Don’t get bogged down by embellishments. Don’t be afraid to get smacked hard. Always take feedback and turn it into gold. Don’t give up. And most importantly, keep experimenting until your find your audience, or your customer for your product before adding the add-ons.
Do that, and I’ll see you at the next milestone in life! 😎
You are doing good man! Keep up with the sharing, you do have lots of silent audience.