- The journey to 10 million subscribers
has been a wild one.
Which means we get the diamond play button.
But I wanna tell you the story
of how we got here,
of how 10 million subs happen
in the course of just five short years.
Because I think it's an interesting story
with a lot of good takeaways
and some instances where
the 10 million subs
may never have happened.
And I think that's where we should start.
When I was in my final year of residency,
I knew I was passionate
to start a YouTube channel
because it was already at a time
where I was getting some popularity on Instagram
and even on some television shows.
And all they wanted to do was talk about
my looks or something superficial.
And I was passionate
about talking about myth busting,
about preventive care,
of how to empower people
to take control of their health.
So I said,
"Forget these producers who don't get it.
I'm gonna be my own producer
and launch a YouTube channel
to debunk all this BS
that I see across medical media."
And there was a lot of it.
I didn't know much about editing
or what it was like
to have a successful YouTube channel.
So I said, "You know what?
Let me put on my webcam
and try and record a video
about a recent medical study that came out."
And I did it,
and it was absolute garbage.
A new article from JAMA,
a respected medical journal,
put into question.
Luckily Dan Owens reached out to me
and said, "Hey, I see you do well on Instagram.
Why don't you do video content?"
And him and I met,
talked about this concept
of starting a YouTube channel,
and we both seemed to be
very passionate about it.
So I said, "Let's team up,
let's do this,
but we need some help."
And I actually reached out to an MCN
called "Style Haul" at the time.
Very few of them actually exist today
because of the way
that they conducted their business.
Essentially five to 10 years ago
these MCNs were huge businesses
that brought on a bunch of YouTube talent,
took a percentage of the revenue
that these YouTube talent brought in,
and then helped them
with small things on their channel,
like getting issues figured out with YouTube
or helping them figure out content strategy
or content planning.
More so than anything,
it was a lot of empty promises.
I didn't know that at the time,
signed with this company called "Style Haul,"
and I started making content with Dan.
And I will say,
when we first started making this content
I was terrible on camera.
Welcome to my YouTube channel.
Talk to your doctor.
(Mike coughs)
So for that first year I said,
"I'm gonna follow the rules,
be consistent,
upload the same time every week."
We struggled with a small team,
but we got the content up.
52 videos, first year,
we only got about 200,000 subs.
And for most people,
first year putting up content,
200,000 subs is pretty solid.
However, for me,
having 2 million Instagram followers at the time,
we thought that they would all come over
and follow me on YouTube
or at least half of them would
or some number.
And in reality,
almost none of them did.
Maybe a few thousand did.
That was a big struggle for us
'cause we were continuing
to put money into the channel.
But we said we're gonna push on,
we believe in this message,
we believe people need this information,
this is for the greater good,
it's not about money.
It was at the one year mark
that Style Haul essentially said,
"We're firing you."
Literally, they said, "We're firing you.
We don't wanna pay you what we owe you.
If you want us to pay you,
you have to sign this NDA
to not talk badly about us,
but we're not paying you."
And I was like, "What?
This is ridiculous.
Like, I believe in us,
I think we could still do great things."
And they basically lost all hope.
Who cares that they fired us?
We're gonna keep pushing on,
and this is a reason to do better.
And if you fast forward
maybe like two months later,
maybe three months later,
we were sitting in the YouTube space
in New York City
to use their own studio and equipment
to film videos.
So we were filming a video
where the topic of it was,
the difference between real doctors
and TV doctors.
We even had a med student there
who was rotating with us at the time.
After I filmed that video,
the team says, "Mike, well, you know,
so many people are asking you
to watch and react to these medical dramas,"
because that was
something that was going viral
at the time on YouTube.
Like, reaction videos in general.
If you get this video to 10,000 likes
I will watch a "Grey's Anatomy" episode.
You guys smashed that like button,
and I had to watch "Grey's Anatomy."
So we picked the first episode
of the first season, watched it,
and that video blew up.
I have never gone viral like that before.
I think I still have
all the screenshots on my phone
of the realtime analytics going high
and then falling off like a normal video does.
And then still going even higher
than that initial first point.
That almost never happens.
So we said, "Okay,
we have to do another one very quick."
So we then watched "The Good Doctor,"
and it blows up.
Then we're like, "All right,
we have to watch "House" now,"
and that blows up.
The channel started blowing up.
We picked up a million subscribers
in a few short months.
And my agent, Keith,
actually ran into some of the folks
at Style Haul, at an event,
and they refused to talk to him because,
I get it, they were probably upset
that they just fired me
and now my channel's on fire making the money
that they could have been in on,
but instead they chose to fire me
because they didn't believe in me.
I will say that that felt really sweet
because the team that did believe in me
shared in that success.
From there we said
we're gonna continue the medical mission,
keep debunking, keep educating.
So we kept making new forms of content.
I remember that year
we created the medical meme review,
which meme reviews
is a popularized thing by PewDiePie,
we said let's do the medical version.
That exploded,
brought even more life to the channel,
a million more subs came in
as a result of just launching that series.
Other series that have done quite well,
they responding to comments,
watching other shows that are not medical dramas,
doing the Day in My Life videos.
All of these, essentially,
were ways that me and the team
thought we could leverage
something that is known to people
with something that is unknown,
and we make it medical
and we lean into it with some of my knowledge
of what I can bring to the table.
That was a tremendous success for the channel
because we saw the views just consistently
grow, grow and grow.
Then came 2020 when the pandemic happened.
You know, I remember
it was December, 2019
and people were in the comments section
of my videos saying,
"You have to talk about
this virus thing that's happening in China."
You know, I didn't wanna talk about it
in late December.
I didn't wanna talk about it early in January
when it was all over the news
because I felt like I didn't have
enough accurate information
to put in a YouTube video.
Which is in stark contrast
to what media does nowadays.
Everyone wants to be first to break a story
regardless of its accuracy or its value.
And even if you watch
our first videos on the pandemic,
they are still pretty accurate.
I think we approached everything with reason,
with honesty and transparency
as to why we're saying certain things,
what we know, what we don't know,
how things may change.
And I think we did a good job with it
as far as education goes.
During those early days of the pandemic,
we were the source
of medical information on YouTube,
we were debunking the misinformation,
we were watching these ridiculous
fake documentaries about it.
And I think we served a really good purpose
for people who needed accurate,
easy-to-understand information
at a critical time.
So I was really proud
of the channel for succeeding there.
It continued to grow.
Honestly, some of my favorite
videos of the channel
happened during that time
of when we got a hundred doctors
to talk about what they were experiencing
during the pandemic,
when we ended up buying
$50,000 worth of N95 masks
and donating them to my hospital through like,
a black market or gray market source.
But all of that was unique content.
And the reason I point out that unique content
is because I think that's where
the success of the channel really comes from.
It's that experimentation
of constantly willing to try new things
and push the boundaries
as far as the channel can go.
I mean, this year we did a tour,
I did two boxing matches.
So many things,
reaching so many audiences
with a message of health and wellness
and accurate health and wellness,
not BS gunk.
And while hitting 10 million subscribers
certainly does feel good
and obviously we've been rewarded
substantially financially with it.
The things that I'm most proud of,
of the channel is,
the fact that we've educated
so many people about their health.
We constantly get emails of people
who've saved someone's life
by performing chest compressions
'cause they've heard about it on this channel.
The messages of support that people send
that they've been able to turn around their lives
with the advice that they've gotten on this channel.
The amount of fundraising we've been able to do.
Whether it's donating a hundred thousand
to Feeding America for Ryan Trahan's campaign,
to donating my last fighter pay.
- He is donating his entire purse
to the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem.
- To donating all of our Patreon money
that we get from our Patreon community
every single month,
tens of thousands of dollars
over the last few years.
It's been amazing.
And then the final point
is that despite all of these positive things happening,
and a lot of offers
for ridiculous sums of money,
we've never sold out our medical ethics.
It's very easy to do that,
especially as a person
who does not come from means.
You know, I grew up on the welfare system
coming as an immigrant to the United States.
And when I started the YouTube channel,
I was 300 plus thousand in debt
or some figure like that.
And believe me, we turned down
95% of sponsors that come to us.
There were periods of time
when the channel struggled
and I was wondering if this was gonna be
a long-term project that couldn't even continue.
I remember, you know,
after having this tremendous growth
there was a period of time
where the channel stumbled heavily
where the subscribers dropped by like 80,
90% new subscribers.
And I thought, "Okay, well,
we reached the end of it.
This was my 15 minutes."
I remember laying on the floor with Dan
and pounding the floor and saying,
"Ah, I wish there was something I could do
to change this!"
What we did was, we changed our mindset
into thinking that it's not the algorithm
that we're trying to please,
or the algorithms that's mistreating us.
It's, "I am not pleasing the audience.
I am not reaching the audience.
I'm not engaging the audience
instead of the algorithm."
And the more I started thinking
about the audience
and what we needed to achieve
with the audience,
the better the results were.
And I think that was a major mindset change
that happened in that year.
As well as understanding
that hitting 10 million subs,
getting one of these is beautiful,
but this is not why we do it.
That if you set your goal
to get 10 million subs,
you're gonna be so disappointed.
Not if you don't hit it.
You're gonna be disappointed once you hit it.
Because once you hit it
and the high of that moment leaves,
which it leaves very quickly,
the number itself is not what's satisfying.
It has to be the things
you achieved along the way
that bring you intrinsic happiness.
The real lasting success
comes from the experiences,
the things you built,
the people you met along the way,
the relationships that have been created
and the lasting change that came
from getting 10 million subs.
You can't talk about getting 10 million subs
without talking about burnout.
Because for the last five years
we've never really missed an upload date
in the last four years,
that means two videos a week.
So there's a lot of videos
that need to be uploaded,
edited, ready to go.
But I will say in creating content
and constantly having to up the quality
makes it for a very tough mental space.
Because you're essentially never stopping.
You know, "Game of Thrones"
makes season one very good and you enjoy it.
You're gonna come back for season two.
But the algorithm is not like that.
Where the algorithm will serve you episode one
if a bunch of people clicking on it,
watching and enjoying it,
getting high satisfaction.
But if episode two
suddenly has a slightly lower click rate
'cause the thumbnail sucks,
or maybe it's not as engaging of a video
and people watch it for a shorter period of time,
it'll drastically decrease
its reach and impressions.
Therefore it won't get
the same viewership as episode one.
So you constantly have to earn your views
with a quality thumbnail,
quality title, quality content
and high viewer satisfaction.
That's why, by the way,
so many of you people comment,
"Why is the thumbnail changing all the time?
Why is it-?"
Because we're trying to figure out
what works best to get the most views?
Remember, I can make the best video in the world,
but if people don't click on it
because the thumbnail's off,
it's not gonna do well.
So that's why I'm constantly
trying out new thumbs.
Dan's been a whiz at getting some of the best
gear for us to make sure that
the quality of the content is fire,
the lighting's on point,
the background, the set is on point,
the cameras are delivering the best,
most accurate image,
the computers that we're editing on.
So constant reinvestment
into the channel has been key.
So the bar is always to the roof,
and that's good for the viewer
because you're gonna get the best content
served to you,
that's gonna make you enjoy your time on YouTube.
But really rough on creators
'cause it sets a precedent
that we always have to make fire content.
I like this challenge
and I think we need to own it as creators
and know that it's gonna happen.
So maybe setting some boundaries
as far as taking time off,
giving yourself breaks.
For me, because I have so many different jobs,
being a doctor, being a boxer,
doing YouTube,
other projects I'm involved in,
when I'm making those pivots,
I feel refreshed
because I'm not doing the same thing.
And because I'm constantly doing those pivots
I don't feel as burned out.
Don't get me wrong,
do I feel overworked at times?
Absolutely.
That's any job.
Anytime you're trying to be the best at anything
you're gonna feel that way.
And there's different strategies
you can do to cope with that.
You know, therapy,
having a good social support system,
making sure you take care of your physical health
with quality, sleep, food,
exercise, et cetera.
But it's most definitely part of the journey
whether you like it or not.
And obviously I can't go without mentioning
that we've grown the team.
You know, Dan and I started the channel together.
Sam has come on in the beginning of 2020,
he has been a rockstar producer.
Caroline, our new editor from Canada.
Laun, our new editor from Costa Rica.
We're constantly expanding the team,
trying to figure out new ways
to make the things work.
And we've tried different things.
We've tried hiring other producers,
we've tried going under management firms,
PR firms.
None of that has been successful
except really hiring people that were self-starters,
self motivators who were excited
and shared in that same mission statement
of wanting to be a part of something amazing.
It's bigger than just us.
It's more so a goal that we all uniformly share.
Now, where do I go from here?
I want 10 million more subs.
Because we always wanna set high marks for us
and continue to grow
and get billions of more views
educating people about health.
So there will be new formats coming.
We just launched the podcast,
had some amazing first guests.
I'm really excited for what the future holds
with that podcast,
having intimate conversations with big names,
with giving you good takeaways
is a format I love
and I want to continue to nurture.
We also have new merch coming out.
I have a book that I'm working on.
We're gonna potentially do the tour again.
Maybe more boxing fights
if my body will hold up.
And the thing I'm excited about most is,
I'm launching an academy called
the "Professional's Media Academy"
where if you are an expert in your field,
whether you're a doctor,
a lawyer, real estate agent,
and you have a message
you want to share with the world,
and you want to be on television,
you want to be on the big shows,
you wanna launch a social media platform,
but you don't know where to start.
My Professional's Media Academy
is exactly where you start.
So I'm actually linking that down below
for people to check out.
I think the more we have
good quality experts
study from what I did,
learn from my successes and my mistakes,
the better you can do.
And that's what I'm a fan of.
I wanna up the level of competition,
up the level of quality education content
here on YouTube and on television.
And Professional's Media Academy
is the place to do it.
Click here for 10 natural remedies
that actually work.
Click here, check it out.
As always, stay happy and healthy.
Get your merch.
(upbeat music)