[Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 10: Should you grow fast or slow on YouTube? I think you'll like my answer....

Hello, and welcome to this episode. I’m going to share you a secret! A lot of advice I hear out there about the time frames to get to a certain subscriber count on YouTube, or revenue goal in your business is wrong. Stay tuned and I think you’re going to like my answer in this episode 😉

Episode 10: Should you grow fast or slow on YouTube? I think you’ll like my answer…. – Podcast Transcript

A question that creators ask me all the time is how long should I expect it to take for my YouTube channel to grow to 5,000 subscribers, 10,000 subscribers, 20,000 subscribers, a hundred thousand subscribers? And in addition to that, when will I start to see my business doing 4k months, 5k months, six, seven, eight figure years?

When Sara? When? A lot of the advice I hear about the timeframes to get to a certain subscriber count on YouTube or revenue goals in your business is wrong. And we’re talking about it in today’s podcast. Hey, Thrivers.

I’m Sara Nguyen, creator of Thrive Video Academy. And I’m here to help you go from stuck and overwhelmed to becoming a confident, profitable and thriving creator. Join me here each week for honest conversations about what it really takes to become a successful YouTube creator without compromising your creativity, sacrificing cheeky drinks with people you love or downtime for yourself.

You’ll hear about the hard lessons I’ve gone through, so you can avoid making the same slow and costly mistakes on your journey, as well as my secret weapons to help you dig deep and do the work it takes. I’m so honoured and grateful to have the opportunity to share this together with you right here on the Thriving Creator Podcast.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started. Like you, I know there are gurus and there are creators out there who constantly say that you should be getting results within 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. I remember Gary Vaynerchuk saying in one of his videos, if you haven’t succeeded and you’ve been at entrepreneurship for years, you suck.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Gary and I think his content has some solid stuff, but I don’t agree with this. And I understand the desire to grow fast. I really, really do.

But the problem with the advice about how your growth needs to be fast, otherwise you’re deemed as a failure, is that it doesn’t take into consideration this thing called life. In my view, instead of thinking about how much time it should take to grow your channel or to increase your business revenue, I think it’s more important and more helpful to focus on how much time you can dedicate to your goals.

Because for me, it’s more impressive to hear that someone, despite having life challenges of things like the death of someone they love, raising kids, full-time study, full-time work, physical injury, sickness, mental illness, all of these things are real and they happen to us and they are outside of our control. And it’s part of the human experience.

And despite having things like this and the pressure of life, you can still make time and you can still carve out the energy to work on YouTube. This is way more impressive than if you are able to grow quickly because you have no struggles, no challenges and all the time in the world.

So whether that’s four hours or 40 hours a week, that you can spare, it’s the consistency and the grit to keep going, which is the true measure of your progress and your success. 2020 was a hard year for me and my family because my younger brother passed away unexpectedly.

I had to learn how to cope with grief and to keep going, despite experiencing a deeply painful event in my life. In one second, everything changed. But what this has taught me is that every day is a gift.

There’s no present, like the time. The answer that I have for you and for me in terms of, should you grow fast or slow on YouTube and in your business? Is that it really doesn’t matter. If you’re brand new to creating videos, it will take you time to learn the skills to script a video, to edit it, to optimise it, and then release it on YouTube.

If you’re lucky enough to have a background in video content production, the time it takes maybe faster for you. Or if you have the money to spend on outsourcing the skills you don’t have, this will also decrease the time that it takes for you to produce content.

Or if you have a mentor and supportive community to provide you feedback, this also helps keep you on track and move you faster. Once I personally started reaching my YouTube growth milestones, such as getting monetized and accepted into the YouTube partner program, reaching subscriber milestones, it was a strange thing because I had reached these YouTube goals, and in parallel, I reached my income goals from YouTube for 4k months, then 5k months, and then making six figures a year from YouTube related activities.

What I learned looking back now is that the milestones didn’t matter anymore. That didn’t matter because I had reached them and then began working on the next goals.

Now you may be saying, it’s easy for you to look back and say they don’t matter once you’re there, but shouldn’t you have goals so that you have something to work towards? And to that I say, yes. However, think about this.

Do you really have control over YouTube growth in terms of the numbers of subscribes you get? And when you get them? The number of views and the sales that you can make from YouTube?

If you think deeply about it, the answer is no. You don’t have control over that. These are things you actually can’t control, but what you can control are your inputs. Things like producing content, working on your video so that it holds viewers attention and encourages people to subscribe.

You can control things like improving your videos with every upload, focusing on ensuring your content is quality and that it meets your viewers’ needs. You can control things like developing a signature offer for your YouTube audience.

And I’m building the part that takes them from viewing your YouTube videos into your sales mechanism, without being sleazy. At a content level, you can control your focus to make sure that your videos are delivering on your viewers needs, that they’re helping your viewers by educating them, entertaining them or inspiring them.

The core fundamental things that you need to be doing with your content. And if you focus on these things, these were help your YouTube channel grow and your business income grow.

On top of that, if you keep your focus on creating and improving your YouTube content on developing your products and increasing your sales and optimizing your YouTube effort, and I’m talking about relentless focus, then in a year, you too can look back and say, Hey, I’ve grown. The channel’s moving forward, and my business has progressed.

And you’ll realise that the speed at which you’ve grown is really not important and all of that pressure you’ve been putting on yourself is really unnecessary. It’s cliched, but beautiful and true that the joy is in the journey.

Fast or slow as long as you go. One last thing before I go, I created this podcast as a reminder that you are not alone in this. Growing with video is hard and I want to be here to help and guide you and others through it.

If you found this podcast episode, helpful, please leave a review. This helps Apple and the algorithms put my podcast in front of more people just like you. I’d be incredibly grateful. Thanks for listening.