How to Build a YouTube Channel to 100 Million Views and 500K Subscribers

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today, we are talking about how you can find your audience on YouTube and LinkedIn, and we have a great guest, finn McEntee, who has over 700,000 followers.

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He's a creator and an entrepreneur.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thank you for having me.

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Why don't we start off by you giving people a little bit more context about who you are and what you do?

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Most people know me from YouTube.

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I have, like you said, I have, two channels which have a combined total of, I think, 730,000 subscribers or something like that.

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Aside from YouTube, I've spent my career my quote unquote.

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Real job has always been in product design and marketing.

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I started out in the agency world about 20 years ago, managed to talk my way into doing some work for like Nike and Nintendo and Red Bull, and then parlayed that into more stuff, worked in another agency where I did a lot of stuff industrial design and engineering agency where I primarily worked on Procter Gamble stuff like Febreze, tide Swiffer.

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I was also a designer and marketer for Abercrombie Fitch.

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And then I started a YouTube channel, which is the thing most people know me for, and I took a look at your YouTube channel.

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I'm already a fan I noticed you have for the Punk Rock MBA.

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You have half a million subscribers.

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I think that's something just about everybody would aspire towards as a creator.

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You had shared that your stuff has been viewed over 100 million times, right?

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yeah, I think probably about 130 million or something like that at this point, which is insane to think about yeah, congratulations.

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The hardest thing is when I go and see people's youtube channel and it has like very few subscribers, very few views, and you can see they put effort, they put a lot of videos up there and it just doesn't go very far.

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Part of the journey we're.

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All that's.

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Part of the deal with YouTube is it's tough in the beginning.

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You're in that phase where you're gonna put something out and realistically it's probably gonna get 50 views.

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But you keep at it.

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Eventually you find what works and you wake up one morning and, oh, I got a thousand views overnight.

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Okay, this is working.

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And once that snowball starts rolling, it really gathers steam.

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And then you eventually get to the point where you have a built-in audience for anything you put out and you're like okay, I can put out a video about literally anything and at least 10,000 people are going to watch it.

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This is pretty cool.

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So we're ready to be inspired.

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Why don't you share with us a little bit about how you've done this remarkable thing of building up this huge following and getting, as a creator, so many people to consume the great things that you've put out?

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Tell us a little bit about how you did it, what you learned along the way in your story.

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My secret weapon is autism, but it's true, because at the end of the day, this is about, it's applied psychology.

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At the end of the day, the way to build a following as a creator is to deeply understand your audience and specifically what they believe, how they think like, what they find valuable and why which.

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For autistic people, you have to spend a lot of energy trying to understand what other people think and read their emotions, and you have to think about that consciously in a way that neurotypical people don't, and so I think that is an asset for me, and that's really what I started with from the beginning is I started talking about business, which people didn't really care about, and I realized that I made probably 50 videos about that or something.

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Nobody cared.

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I said, okay, this is obviously not working.

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How do I pivot?

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And so I had written about music before his past life.

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I wrote for a bunch of magazines and stuff like that, so I knew how to talk about music.

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I knew that there was an audience for that, and so I pivoted to that, and that was the thing that made it take off.

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I knew that there was an audience for that, and so I pivoted to that, and that was the thing that made it take off.

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I got one video that a friend of mine, who was a kind of bigger YouTuber, shouted out.

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They got a couple thousand views, which at the time was a lot for me.

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And then I put it out another video that I think got 10,000 views on the day or something, which at the time was like a huge amount for me.

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And then that's a snowball that started.

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But the whole thing, the linchpin to all of this is to always ask yourself what the audience is interested in and why.

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Like you should obsessively try to understand what your audience finds interesting and specifically what they find interesting about that thing.

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I think that makes sense, like I was looking at your channel and I actually am a music fan.

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I went to college in the 90s I like a lot of the rock from that time and I watched, actually, the video you did on Blink-182.

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Great video, by the way, and I just went and saw them in concert last week Fantastic concert, as they said.

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Millions of dollars of lasers made them look really good in concert.

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But I think you did a great job.

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For people who are interested and have a connection to rock music, say from the 90s, your video on Blink-182 of the secret story behind the band over the last 25 years was really great.

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There was a lot of things in there I didn't know, so I think that's just a really good example of things that people care about and will spend 20 minutes to watch.

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So I took a little bit of experimenting but what I realized is that ultimately that channel is about capitalizing on millennial nostalgia, basically millennial males.

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Validating their taste in music from high school is my job on that channel to tell them that the music they liked in high school was good.

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In my case, college, because I'm Gen X Same thing, but yeah, you do a great job of it.

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So I think I just brought up that example to bring what you said home, because I think that's exactly right.

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It's just finding something that your audience really cares about and is willing to spend time on, because one of the biggest things YouTube looks at is the number of minutes people watch your videos, right?

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So, even if you spend a lot of money advertising videos, videos.

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Which you shouldn't.

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It's pointless to spend money on paid media for a YouTube channel.

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It does not work.

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I wish it did.

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I wish you could just throw money at it, it doesn't work.

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It's got to be 100% organic, and so is that the same secret to getting to the half a million subscribers.

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It's just to have content that people really care about.

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Yes, you have to just be relentlessly audience focused and understand that your job.

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You have one job, which is to make content people want to watch.

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That's it, and that may not necessarily be the video that you want to make.

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There's probably lots of times in which you would like to make a video about a certain thing, but there just isn't an audience for that on YouTube, and so you have the sort of choice to make there.

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I can make this video for myself and nobody's going to watch it, or do I make the video that people want to watch?

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And understanding what people want to watch is easier said than done.

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But again, that goes back to just it's psychology at scale of just very deeply on.

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It's the same as if you're a marketer, very deeply understanding who your audience is and sometimes knowing what they think and value more than they know it themselves.

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So a lot of times, when marketers are trying to promote their company and their products, there would be a tendency to just do the easier thing, perhaps, and make videos that are boring about.

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Here's our product, here's our company, so I would you watch that?

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I wouldn't so exactly nobody does, which is why when you go to microsoft's youtube channel, they spend millions and millions of dollars on videos.

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They get 1200 views.

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Yeah, and so I think the call for marketers is to be more creative and to come up with creative approaches that would tap into what people care about.

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So do you have any thoughts about how marketers can do that for their company and their products?

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Anything you've seen.

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I think almost all companies are bad at YouTube for this reason, because preneurs and founders of small companies have a tremendous advantage on YouTube.

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Because of this, because, basically, there's no reason why a large company would be good at YouTube, specifically because of the way that creative teams are structured there and just the politics of it.

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Because YouTube, to be successful in YouTube, you need to have a strong point of view, you need to be able to move quickly and you need to be able to take some risks, and none of those things are true of large companies.

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Right, the bigger a company is, the slower it moves, the more stakeholders there are to appease in the creative process and the less incentive there is for any employee.

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If I was whatever running the marketing team at Oracle or some other giant company like that, why would I take a risk on making a YouTube video that might upset some people?

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I wouldn't.

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For my career I wouldn't do it.

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But if I'm a small company, I can do that because I don't have to answer to anybody else.

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If I'm a solopreneur or the founder of a small company, I can take those risks right.

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Worst case scenario people don't like the video and you delete it, so you just have to always put yourself in that audience first mindset, and you have to be willing to take some risks.

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Sometimes you're going to make a video that people don't like.

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That's okay.

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I love that.

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I think marketers do have to be empowered to be able to take some of those risks in order to be successful.

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In channels like YouTube, which I think is one of, brands can do something a little bit more risky, a little bit more funny.

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But Duolingo did a funny one of instead of Disney on ice, duolingo on ice and they did a really funny video that went with it.

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They just took it pretty far and I thought that was just an example, because people could have hated it.

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They could have been like this is dumb, and they just took a little bit of a chance doing something fun under the guise of April Fools.

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But probably, to take it further, people need to learn how to do that on a consistent basis, which I think is even another level.

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That's harder.

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Yeah, even Duolingo, as great as they are.

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If you look at their YouTube channel, a lot of it is the typical boring corporate stuff, like some keynote speech that their CEO did at a conference, and nobody wants to watch that stuff.

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But if you're the person who manages their YouTube channel, if whatever the CEO's EA comes over and says whatever his name is, he would really put his keynote from our conference on the YouTube channel.

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Can we do that?

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You're going to say yes, even though you know that's bad YouTube content.

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But that's the reality of big companies.

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Is politics oftentimes Trump results?

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of big companies is politics oftentimes Trump results.

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So I love this advice about empowering the marketers who are running our YouTube strategy to take some risks and be brave and be allowed to do some, test some things and do some things that may not work.

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Yep, before we move on because I want to talk a little bit about LinkedIn, because you also have been pretty successful on LinkedIn Is there any other advice on YouTube that you want to share with creators and marketers of how to be successful?

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If you put the audience first 100% of the time in everything that you do, eventually you will be successful on YouTube.

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And putting what is that?

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What is that?

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Where does a rubber meet the road on that?

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Give me an example.

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Let's say you want to make a video.

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Let's say that you have a new product that came out and you would like to make a video demoing that feature.

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Does that sound like something that people on YouTube would like to watch?

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Yeah, if the answer is no, then don't release it.

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Okay, same thing, probably for people like having a guest.

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If the guest isn't really a good fit for a video on YouTube, you just shouldn't do it.

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You shouldn't because you want to do it.

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It's not about you, it's about the audience that is.

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The only way to grow on YouTube is to put them first in every single thing you do.

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Great advice, thank you.

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So let's pivot and talk for a few minutes about LinkedIn.

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You've got a good following there.

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What have you done and seen that's worked well for you on LinkedIn to grow your audience and find your audience there?

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I'd say the biggest thing on LinkedIn is to show up as a real person.

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I think people understandably feel like, because LinkedIn is work, that you feel like you have to show up as the very contrived, inauthentic version of yourself that you would put on your resume or something like that.

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But that's not what anybody wants from you and it's not what they expect from you and it's not what they expect from you and it's not what works.

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Show up as your real, authentic self and people will respond to that.

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Just let go of all these things that you're telling yourself you can't do because it's quote unquote, unprofessional or what will people think?

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Or blah, blah, blah.

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Let go of that stuff.

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The more authentic you are, the more success you're going to have on LinkedIn.

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The more authentic you are, the more success you're going to have on LinkedIn.

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Yeah, I think from what I've seen, I agree with that 100%.

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Being just professional or faking it in a certain way probably doesn't result in very much.

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Yeah, you're going to be safe.

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Nobody's going to criticize you, but you're also going to get ignored.

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So I would say, in reality, playing it safe is actually the more risky choice.

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Interesting, I agree.

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So, stepping back from the channels, when you think about being a creator over the last couple of years, getting to the size of audience and the visibility that you've gotten, is there any other broad themes about being a creator, things you've learned that you think would be helpful for others?

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Really, if you want to be a creator, it really just comes down to again putting the audience first, Everything that you make.

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Why is this going to make your audience's day better in some way?

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It could be that it just makes them laugh, Maybe they learn something, Maybe you help them overcome a challenge, whatever.

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But everything you do has to be with the goal of making your audience's day a little bit better.

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I like it.

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I think your advice is very simple, it's very clear, it's very actionable and I think that's the beauty of it is that if people want to be successful, they can just do the couple of things that you share here today and they'll be well on their way.

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I'm going to link to your YouTube channel and your LinkedIn and your website so people can check it out and try to learn from your example.

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I think it's a great one and we appreciate you sharing your story and these insights with