the single best thing I've ever done in my life.

And so in this video,

I'm going to be sharing my top 10 tips,

on how you can get started with setting up your own channel

if that's what you're into.

Coming in at number 10, we have,

don't worry about what other people will say.

I always ask this question.

I ask the question on Twitter and on Instagram

and I ask people, you know

what are your fears about starting on YouTube?

And what do you want to know?

And the number one complaint is always

I'm worried about what my friends and family will think.

I've been running a course

called the Part-time YouTuber Academy,

where we have people who are sort of aged

from 18 up to like 55.

And basically everyone in that age range

also worries about what their friends and family will think.

But you know what?

The thing that everyone realizes

is that once you've uploaded your first video,

all of that fear kind of goes away because you realize,

that no one gives a shit,

like no one actually cares

whether you're uploading videos to YouTube.

You might think it's like the biggest deal in the world

that, oh my God, what is my mum going to say?

What am my cousins going to say?

What are my friends and university going to say?

But no one actually cares.

Everyone is just so worried about their own lives,

that the fact that I'm doing YouTube, no one cares.

The fact that you're going to start a YouTube channel

talking about whatever you want, no one cares.

And we just need to get that into our heads.

And this is such a common fear and we all have it.

And it's just the first thing you have to get over.

Basically, no one cares.

Stop deluding yourself into thinking

that people are thinking about you,

because everyone is just worried about themselves.

They're worried about

how they are appearing to other people.

There's this thing in psychology

called the spotlight effect,

which is that we all walk through life

thinking that there is a spotlight trained on us

and just not realizing that everyone else

is absorbed in their own life,

and we are only the heroes of our own story,

and we are supporting cast and everyone else's story,

if they're even thinking about us at all.

So start your YouTube channel.

Do not worry about what people will think.

99% of the fear is

in just before you publish your first video.

But I promise you, as soon as you hit publish on that video,

99% of the fear will disappear,

and you will stop worrying what people think.

Then at point number nine,

we have gear doesn't matter at the start.

Gear does matter in the long run,

but at the start gear does not matter at all.

When I started my YouTube channel,

I started filming on my iPhone,

I did not have any microphone attached to it.

I literally just got the camera,

lay in bed, pointed at myself and said,

hey guys, I think I'm thinking

I'm going to start some kind of vlog.

I knew absolutely nothing about editing,

I just followed free YouTube tutorials,

about how to edit videos.

And that's what you have to do when you're getting started.

It's like, if you're starting learning how to write,

it doesn't matter what pen you're using

as long as you're writing something.

If you're getting started learning how to draw,

it does not matter what pencil and what paper you're using.

That's all a distraction.

what you need to do is just

pick up any old pencil you've got lying

or pen that you've got lying around the house,

any old piece of paper or scrap paper

and just start learning from day one.

It's the same thing with YouTube really.

If you're watching this,

you have a device which is capable of recording video.

You have your phone.

If you want to get started on YouTube, screw the gear.

Don't think, oh, I need to wait to upgrade

to a fancy ass camera before I'm allowed

to get started on YouTube,

start with whatever you have,

start with your phone and you can always upgrade later.

And in fact, over there is a video where I talk about

exactly how to start filming videos with just your iPhone,

and it looks pretty reasonable.

If you do want to upgrade something,

then upgrade your audio quality.

Firstly, because people will sit through a bad video quality

but no one will sit through bad audio quality,

so that's the first thing to upgrade.

And if you want to learn more about

exactly which gear to upgrade

and like a shopping list for gear at different levels,

you should definitely sign up to my Part-time YouTuber

free seven day email course.

This is totally free.

You just enter your email address

and then every day I will email you with a long ass article,

which contains lots of tips

about getting started on YouTube.

And one of those in the seven-day course

is about exactly what gear you need to upgrade,

and in which order, and I give you different levels

for gear a different budget levels.

So again, that'll be linked in the video description

if you want to check it out,

again, totally free.

Just seven days of emails from me,

where I give you my top tips on getting started

on YouTube as a beginner.

Point number eight,

we have, don't worry about the numbers.

Once you started on YouTube,

this is a mistake everyone makes is that you're

way too focused on the analytics,

but at the start, like it doesn't really matter.

The only thing you have to do

is just keep on producing more and more and more videos

and not really worry about the fact that

no one is watching them,

and that you're not getting very many subscribers.

If you look at the stats,

according to Tube buddy, the average channel

with 1000 to 10,000 subscribers has made 152 videos.

So until you've made 152 videos,

you do not have the right to complain,

that you're not growing on YouTube.

You have to make 152 videos first

and then we can think about

how to tweak your growth prospects on YouTube.

For me, it took me 52 videos and six months

to hit a thousand subscribers,

that was making two videos a week, six months in a row

while I was a full-time medical student at Cambridge

while preparing for my final year medical student exams.

Two videos a week, six months

and then I hit a thousand subscribers.

And so at the very least,

if you've made anything less than 52 videos,

then don't worry about your subscriber count.

You can always email me for advice

or sign up to my YouTube,

Part-time YouTuber mailing list and reply to emails on that.

You can always email me for advice further down the line,

but I can't give you any advice

until you've made at least 52 videos.

That's just how it works.

All right.

Point number seven is this idea

of stacking the deck in your favor.

So we've established that you're going to start your channel

and you're just going to do it

and not care about what people think,

but to succeed on YouTube,

you want to think in terms of

stacking the deck.

How do you take the deck

and how do you stack it in your favor?

Now, the extent to which you should stack the deck

depends on how you're thinking about YouTube.

If you're thinking about YouTube purely as a hobby

where you don't actually care about the numbers

and you're thinking,

oh it would be nice to make money from this

further down the line,

but it's not my primary aim right now.

And that's great,

you don't need to worry

about stacking the deck in your favor,

but if like a lot of students in our course,

the Part-time YouTuber Academy,

you're thinking of YouTube more as a business opportunity

so the more business

entrepreneurial people minded end of the spectrum,

you then want to think about how do I stack the deck

to try and grow on YouTube or to try and get,

achieve my goals for YouTube, you know,

as effectively as possible.

And there's broadly two ways of stacking the deck.

You can stack the deck in terms of time,

or you can stack the deck in terms of money.

How do you stack the deck in terms of time?

Well, it involves putting in the time

to learn how to get better on camera,

which happens over time as you make more and more videos.

It involves putting in the time

to get better at editing videos.

Again, it happens as you just produce more and more videos.

I've got a friend called James Johnny

who has grown from zero to 500,000 plus

subscribers on YouTube

by making like 10 or 12 videos or something stupid like that

because he spends hundreds of hours editing each one

to make it, craft it into a perfect

Netflix documentary style video.

He is stacking the deck in his favor,

by spending large amounts of time,

hundreds and hundreds of hours,

writing, scripting and editing his videos.

The other way of stacking the deck in your favor

is by using money.

Now we're not going to talk about this

because this is a more advanced point.

But for example, you can invest in gear,

and number two, you can invest in hiring your own team

which is now what I've done.

And actually a lot of people don't realize

that you can outsource video editing for quite cheaply,

very early on.

And so, especially if you have a job

where your time is worth let's say more than $10 an hour,

you can easily outsource video editing

to someone who you're paying less than $10 an hour too,

if you want, as a way of stacking the deck in your favor

by using money.

Again, that's a bit of an advanced point.

We'll talk about that more

in my Part-time YouTuber free email course,

just sign up in the video description,

if you want to check that out.

But yeah, that's kind of how I think about it.

Like there are no guaranteed formulae to success on YouTube,

but really it's all about stacking the deck in your favor

in whatever way you can

depending on what your goals for YouTube are.

Are you a hobbyist

or are you a entrepreneur, business person?

I'm somewhere in the middle

leaning kind of towards the business side.

So I do whatever I can to stack the deck in my favor.

Point number six, use your unfair advantages.