In this post, I'll share the biggest lesson I've learned from 40,000,000 long-form video views and also show you some behind-the-scenes of my YT Dashboard (don't share this lol). ________ This @Andrew Kirby guy keeps talking about me so I thought I’d address this… Yes, I didn’t want to do this at first. I don't want to be a YouTube guru, I don't want to be a course creator. I want to just focus on making content. Keep focusing on my craft. But after countless conversations with Andrew, he convinced me to share what I've learned. I love this Synthesizers group and I think we need more educators on YouTube who are crushing it, so I said yes. (I'm noticing this all sounds like a marketing copywriting post lol, but it's all true) I'm only doing this once and Andrew won't convince me to share this stuff again publicly (knock on wood, he is very persuasive...). But... Whether you’re deciding to join us for this weekend or not, I wanted to leave you with something valuable. As a fellow content creator who makes educational videos, I know how challenging it can be in the early days of YouTube. It took me 9 months to get my first 1,000 subscribers. Then about 3 months to get to 100,000 subscribers. There’s one thing I wish I would’ve understood a lot sooner. (I wish I could go back in time and punch myself actually lol) This is by far the biggest lesson I’ve learned after gaining 40,000,000 views (long-form videos, short-form doesn’t count). Here it is: The importance of packaging can never be overestimated. Never. Even if you've "already heard this before". However important or impactful you think titles & thumbnails are… …it’s way more important than you think. Let me give you some examples: - She is getting millions of views with potato camera quality and no editing (her packaging looks random, but it’s actually genius) - I made this video from my bedroom and it got 1,000,000 views. The packaging looks stupidly simple, but I optimized it like a madman. - We invested $25,000 into this video and it only got 50,000 views. Nobody cared despite the crazy production quality. We changed the title & thumbnail and it shot up to over 3,000,000 views. - Rian Doris' first-ever video got 700,000 views because we optimized the title & thumbnail.