50 Podcasts Before YouTube

A story about how Andrew Huberman built his audience before launching his YouTube channel.

"By the end of 2020, our Instagram channel had grown to several hundred thousand followers, but that took 2 years and 50 podcast appearances as a guest. We announced we were going to launch a YouTube channel and told people to subscribe. Then we just started pushing out content.

Frequency is a big deal - we do one episode a week, and we may advance to one longer and one shorter episode each week. Consistency counts, including consistency of aesthetic.

When we first launched, our thumbnails weren't actually that good - YouTube told us they weren't legible. I had these fancy anatomical drawings. We've learned some things since then - faces do better than images. We avoided clickbait thumbnails with wide eyes because I wanted people to know I'm here with serious information.

Our first video got 652,000 views, then the next one hit a million views, followed by 630,000. This initial traction came largely because we had built up an audience through those 50 podcast appearances before we even launched the channel."