How to build a successful YouTube channel—lessons from the journey to 1.5 million subscribers

So, you’re wondering how to build a successful YouTube channel. What does it take? Is it pure luck? Or is there a formula you can follow to guarantee your success? And how long does it take to build a YouTube channel? While there’s no foolproof path to YouTube success—and the platform is constantly evolving—it helps to learn from channels that have succeeded in building a substantial audience.

The Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel recently reached 1.5 million subscribers. Keep reading to learn what we learned and avoid the mistakes we made.

A fundamental principle of good communication is to begin with your audience in mind, and that’s precisely what Envato Tuts+ did with its YouTube channel. From the start, the team was clear on the audience it wanted to speak to: people who wanted to learn code, web design, graphic design, illustration, business, photography, and video production.

However, the team soon realized this target audience was too broad. “As Envato evolved, we narrowed our focus to designers and video creators,” reveals Joel Bankhead, Senior Video Editor. It’s all about carving out your own niche on the platform.

It’s also critical to be clear on your channel’s goals. They serve as its North Star, guiding the channel’s direction and any decisions necessary to achieve them. 

When Envato Tuts+ launched the YouTube channel ten years ago, its clear goal was to promote subscriptions to its paid service, Tuts+ Premium. However, as both Envato Tuts+ and YouTube evolved, so did its mission. Now, it aims to provide high-quality education in creative and technical fields and ultimately drive subscriptions to Envato.

However, having a goal and target audience is only the beginning.

“What helps people, helps business,” the late advertising executive Leo Burnett famously said. This means the customer must be at the center of your business, even when promoting it. 

The same applies to your YouTube channel. If you’re churning out content to make sales, you may be disappointed.

Envato Tuts+ learned this the hard way. In the beginning, its YouTube channel was populated with trailers of its Tuts+ Premium courses, similar to how a movie trailer promotes a movie. 

The problem was that trailers weren’t serving the needs of its target audience. “Our growth was slow,” Joel recalls. “We weren’t providing much value on YouTube, and this limited distribution via YouTube recommendations.”

The channel’s first breakthrough came when the team decided to put its target audience first and serve them valuable content: they published a few free courses as YouTube playlists. The 30 Days to Learn HTML & CSS playlist became the channel’s first success. “It gained traction and helped grow subscriptions on Tuts+ Premium,” Joel says.

Marketer and bestselling author Ann Handley has a good rule of thumb for the type of content to create.

“Be wary of providing something of limited value,” Joel warns. He believes the biggest reward of having a successful YouTube video is not the fact that it gets more subscriptions; it’s serving an audience. “It’s very humbling to think about the number of people our videos have helped,” he says.

It may sound counterintuitive, but giving away valuable content helps you grow a bigger, more engaged audience and ultimately increase sales. 

Here’s the channel’s very first video to hit 1 million views. Providing such high-quality free education helped the channel to grow and built an audience for future videos.

More than 500 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In that hyper-competitive environment, it’s tempting to pump out video after video, but sacrificing quality for quantity is always a mistake. With so many brands now using YouTube, the bar is much higher than it used to be. Focusing on quality is a good idea if you’re a small or solo business with limited time and resources.

Initially, the Envato Tuts+ channel posted videos almost daily except on weekends. Although the videos were not terrible, they provided more surface-level content. Not surprisingly, these early videos did not generate a lot of engagement.

That’s when the team decided to invest more time and effort into each video. They reduced the frequency of posting on YouTube, allowing them to produce more in-depth, valuable content.

Tom sums up the Envato Tuts+ ingredients for each video as “high-quality content, friendly and approachable instructors, energy and passion.”

But what exactly is “high-quality” content anyway? For Tom, quality means “well-researched topics delivered by knowledgeable and approachable instructors in a high production value way.” This means using good imagery, audio, high-energy teaching, and minimal “boring bits.” He adds: “It’s on the instructor to convey the boring but crucial information to the audience so that they are learning the topic as broadly as possible.”

“All killer and no filler” is Tom’s way of putting it. If you want to know how to get more followers on YouTube, that’s a good mantra.

For Triana Tirado, Associate YouTube Editor, the notion of quality goes beyond the technical aspects of the content to its substance.

Succeeding on YouTube isn’t about just producing top-notch content. It’s not a one-way street. In fact, a critical measure of success is whether you’re building a community of engaged viewers, not merely an audience.

Envato Tuts+ partially uses YouTube Premieres, especially for long courses. A Premiere is a YouTube feature that allows the channel owner and its viewers to watch a new video together in real-time. After uploading a video, you can instantly publish it as a Premiere or schedule it for a future date and time.

When the premiere is scheduled, it will send your followers reminders and show a countdown to when it will “air.” You can chat with your audience through comments before the video is displayed. Aside from building anticipation, YouTube premieres allow you to connect and engage with your audience. Even before your video is published, your audience can start asking questions and feeling connected to the content and the creators.

The YouTube Premiere feature also allows live chat alongside the prerecorded video. This means the instructor can answer viewers’ questions while they’re watching live for the first time.

Another critical element to getting good engagement is knowing how to package the video. You have to know how to entice a viewer to click and watch. This entails having an emotional hook that draws people in. “But you have to make sure to deliver on the promise in the video itself,” Joel says. This video explains what he means:

Envato Tuts+ also strives to create engaging videos that make the audiences feel seen and heard. As Tom explains:

For Tom, the community needs to help shape the content. “Personalized and community-driven content is the future of YouTube content,” he explains. “I hope we can find a way to ignite our community into telling us what they want to learn, what challenges they’re facing in their work, and ultimately, that will help us shape our content creation, tailored to their needs.”

And it’s paid off.

“I’ve always been proud of how our community engages on YouTube,” Joel says. “We receive hundreds of curious, kind, and genuine comments daily.” That’s the kind of attentive—and engaged—community you want to achieve.

For Envato Tuts+, this means long-form, in-depth educational videos—some running five to eight hours long! When Joel and his team noticed these videos were gaining more traction, they leaned into it, and the channel grew fast.

“Authenticity” has become a buzzword in content marketing. Every expert tells you to “be authentic.” But what does it really mean?

For Joel, authenticity means “bringing yourself” to the videos. Show your personality.

“It’s just about being yourself,” says Tom. “Especially on YouTube, there are plenty of people teaching the same skills as you. However, there’s only one of you. If people like your style, they will likely stick around for your other videos.”

Tom believes authenticity comes across as a presentation style. As a presenter, he positions himself as a helpful peer rather than an expert instructor.

Authenticity is also about bubbling over with passion. “Your passion will shine through,” he adds. “If you’re not passionate about your content, how is your audience expected to be passionate about it?”

When you make videos that excite you, you’ll find your audience—even if you’re creating lo-fi video. That’s because viewers connect with creators who are genuinely invested in their content. Read more about what it means to be authentic.

Video production, by its nature, requires a lot of work. For Envato Tuts+, running a successful YouTube channel is a team effort involving presenters, editors, and other roles.

Solo creators may start out juggling all these roles by themselves. But as your channel grows, you may need to bring in other creative talents so you can focus on your core business.

The Envato Tuts+ video team naturally relies on many tools to keep their YouTube workflow smooth and efficient even though they’re spread across wildly different time zones, from Mexico to Manchester to Melbourne. These include:

“Creating videos is complicated and involves close collaboration between creators, producers, editors, and designers,” says Joel, who leads the team.

Triana, who uploads and optimizes the videos on YouTube, says the trick is staying in touch to ensure that each video meets high standards while keeping the production team aligned. Envato Tuts+ can produce many in-depth videos with the team running smoothly, even as it focuses on quality over quantity.

Take heart if you’re a small or even a one-person video production team. Similar tools will make the job easier for you, too. Also, remember to use Envato’s go-to subscription so you have all the creative assets you need, from video templates and music to sound effects and fonts, right at your fingertips.

YouTube gives you detailed analytics about your videos’ performance. You can see key metrics and reports in YouTube Studio. And if you want to look deeper, there’s an Advanced Mode with an expanded analytics report.

This means you don’t have to guess about what’s working and what’s not. You know which videos resonate with your viewers and which are falling flat. Remember Lesson #1: It’s not about you; it’s all about your viewers. So, you need to pivot somewhere if you like to talk about a specific topic or create a particular video format, but that’s not what your audience engages with.

Envato Tuts+ focuses on metrics like view duration and retention over vanity metrics like the number of subscribers and likes. Yes, some metrics will show you how to get more YouTube followers, but engagement metrics allow the team to understand what engages viewers.

The insights gleaned from analytics inform future decisions. As mentioned, the Envato Tuts+ channel went from posting course trailers frequently to posting entire courses less frequently… and steadily grew from its first 100,000 subscribers to over 1.5 million!

That’s because the team analyzed the metrics to listen to their audience. Essentially, they gave the audience what they wanted: substantial how-to videos that provide in-depth learning.

This may sound risky, but since it’s a decision based on results, it’s not as risky as decisions based on emotions and hunches.

This same attentive and responsive attitude led to the recent decision to create a brand new channel, Envato Video. This time, the team is starting right. The new channel has a very clear and focused target audience: video creators. Its single goal is to support anyone on their journey to becoming a professional video creator or editor.

Once again, the team is providing in-depth courses and practical tutorials, which have become the signature of Envato Tuts+. But this time, they’re returning to Lesson 1 and focusing on an even tighter target audience.

With YouTube itself and audiences constantly evolving, there are no hard and fast rules for building a successful YouTube channel. However, the lessons discussed above—identifying and knowing your audience, defining a clear purpose, prioritizing quality, building community, being authentic, staying organized, using tools to make the work easier, and learning from analytics—are vital principles to follow.

As you’ve seen, succeeding on YouTube is more than just uploading good videos. It’s about delivering value to your audience and fostering community. While success can never be guaranteed, learning from the experience of Envato Tuts+ can make your journey much smoother and give you a better chance of finding your audience. Follow the lessons above, and you can cultivate a channel that resonates with viewers and grows sustainably over time. Learn from our successes and setbacks as you set up your channel for a journey with purpose, growth, and impact.

Learn more by reading our Ultimate YouTube Guide and our companion guide to starting a YouTube channel. Check out Envato for an unmatched selection of video templates, photos, fonts, graphics, and much more—everything you’ll need to create professional-looking videos and thumbnails for your channel, all in one place.