Road to one million with Reza and Puja Khan
Apr 25, 2023 – [[read-time]] minute read
Back in 2020, Reza and Puja were just two people working in tech during the day and planning their wedding by night. They had multiple dances prepared which is typical of South Asian weddings. When they received their wedding video back, the two spontaneously decided to make a YouTube channel and post all of the dances on there. One morning, they woke up and found that every single one of their dance videos had millions of views. They were absolutely shocked.
This led to the couple to gaining about 10K subscribers and sparked the idea in their heads, "Should we start creating content? Are we cut out for this?"
So, on January 18, 2021 they set out a goal to make one short video every single day for up to a year. Slowly but surely, they grew from hundreds of views to thousands and eventually, to millions. Their channel was gaining up to 12K subscribers a day during some weeks.
Puja ended up quitting her job by April 2021 to dedicate more time to their content creation, while Reza held down the fort and continued working his day job and making content at night with Puja. It wasn't until April 2022, when Reza quit his job and joined Puja in making content full-time.
When we make our videos, we are consciously looking to see that every 2 seconds the scene is switching, or a sound effect is happening or the camera is zooming.
Reza and Puja KhanBelow are their 5 tips that helped them hit 1.86 million subscribers on YouTube!
1. Make every second count
Back in the early 2010s, there were a handful of insanely viral videos that we all can remember. The grape lady falling, Charlie bit my finger, the "I like tuhtles" boy, etc. Now in 2023, we are watching 100s of videos of that same caliber every single day.
In this extremely noisy environment, you have to figure out a way to get someone to watch your video from start to finish and engage. When we make our videos, we are consciously looking to see that every 2 seconds the scene is switching, or a sound effect is happening, or the camera is zooming, etc. All of these things keep the viewer engaged and ultimately keep them watching your video. These things tell the algorithm to push your video to more people and BOOM. Your video goes viral. We approach every video we make like it can go viral.
2. Templatize your process
We had a goal of making one short video every single day. This can be extremely hard to do if you want to make every video unique from each other. We focused on templatizing our process to be able to produce high quality content in the shortest time possible.
What we mean by this is, making every video have a similar structure but about different concepts. Now all you have to do is fit each unique idea you have into the same video structure.
Another way we do this is by having a starter pack of our favorite edits to use in our videos. So we usually will add sound effects, music, captions and a few zooms. That's it. It gets the job done for us and we move on to the next video.
3. Create videos you LOVE
As a YouTuber, you can't just think about the next few months of making videos, you have to think about how you can stretch this career into one that can last decades. The only way this can work is if you are making videos you LOVE. If you ever feel like you are not enjoying the process or not enjoying what you are creating, take a step back and re-evaluate.
4. It's a marathon, not a sprint
It's great to have aggressive goals and want to hit a certain subscriber number by a certain time, but the fact is, it's okay if you miss a posting day. It's okay if you didn't hit your subscriber goal. Throughout our process, we set so many aggressive goals that we didn't hit. But we kept moving forward and eventually we hit it. Burn out is real in this profession, so take it slow.
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5. Don't sweat the small stuff
One of the worst feelings is working super hard on a video, only for you to see it perform 10 of 10 on your YouTube analytics. Maybe the views are way lower than you expected, or no one is liking the video as much as usual. All of these things can bring your mood down, but the fact is, none of that matters in the long game. Just keep making content, focus on the next video and becoming a better creator. The views, subscribers, likes, etc. will come. We promise :)