# Secrets to Growing a Successful YouTube Channel in 2023 - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/secrets-to-growing-a-successful-youtube-channel-in-2023/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Video & Animation · Quick win · Rated 7 /10 # Secrets to Growing a Successful YouTube Channel in 2023 Updated September 2026 Jordy Vandeput · Filmmaker and Youtuber All levels · 52 min A YouTuber with 2.5 million subscribers compresses his entire growth strategy into 52 minutes, no fluff, no gear requirements. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fsecrets-to-growing-a-successful-youtube-channel-in-2023%2F1272170475) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Jordy Vandeput opens with a confession rather than a boast: a video he'd poured effort into flopped, and the class exists to explain why. That framing sets the tone for all nine lessons. This isn't a gear tutorial or an algorithm-hacking seminar. It's a course about story structure applied to a business that happens to run on video. ## The Method, Not the Machinery The backbone of the class is the persona card, a technique borrowed straight from brand marketing and pointed at YouTube. Instead of chasing whatever topic performed well for someone else, the course asks viewers to build a fictional audience member, complete with a name, hobbies, and a specific struggle, then run every video idea past that persona as a checklist. It's a simple idea, demonstrated twice with concrete examples (a hiker named Jeff considering a campfire gadget, an aspiring comedian named Emily), and it does real work: it gives a creator with no data yet a way to make decisions anyway. That persona resurfaces constantly, most usefully in the thumbnail and title lesson. Vandeput breaks the click decision into three stages: attention, understanding, and relevance, then walks through real thumbnails from FortNine and Mr. Beast to show how each stage gets satisfied. The lesson is candid about clickbait, drawing a line between titles that mislead and titles that exaggerate but still deliver, and it's more useful for admitting that a bit of exaggeration is simply how attention works online. The story-structure lesson is the strongest stretch of the class. The four-part arc, setup, incident, struggle, resolution, gets applied to an intentionally dull premise: installing antivirus software. Watching that arc turn a search-intent tutorial into something built for the homepage is the moment the course earns its "secrets" framing. It's a genuinely transferable planning tool, not a platform-specific trick that expires with the next algorithm update. ## Where It Thins Out The filming and editing lessons are competent but brief, covering light direction, background contrast, framing headroom, and audio proximity in broad strokes. There's real value in the audio advice (bring the microphone close, full stop) but little beyond what a beginner could find in countless other free tutorials. The call-to-action and engagement lessons are similarly sound but familiar: ask for one thing at a time, frame subscribing as a trade rather than a favor, prompt comments through genuine questions rather than pleas. None of it is wrong, but none of it is new to anyone who has spent time studying creator channels already. The course also leans on a small set of examples, mostly Vandeput's own channels plus a handful of the same marquee names (Mr. Beast, MKBHD, FortNine), and repeats the vidIQ recommendation more than once in a way that reads as a plug. The pacing is efficient almost to a fault. At 52 minutes across nine lessons, depth is sacrificed for breadth, and the conclusion's honesty about a six-year slow build is a useful gut check but not something viewers can act on directly. What the course does well is give a scattered creator a repeatable sequence to follow before hitting record: define the audience, design the hook, plan the story, then shoot. That sequencing, more than any individual tip, is the actual product here. The standout The four-part story arc (setup, incident, struggle, resolution) applied to something as mundane as an antivirus tutorial is the clearest, most transferable idea in the class. ## What you will learn - · Building an audience persona card to filter every video idea through a specific viewer's motivations and struggles - · Designing thumbnails and titles together using the attention, understanding, relevance framework before shooting anything - · Structuring any video, including boring tutorials, around a four-part story arc: setup, incident, struggle, resolution - · Basic lighting, framing, and audio setup using existing gear, including the case for a $20 lav mic - · Editing techniques for retention: cutting silence, J and L cuts, B-roll, and using cuts to land jokes - · Writing a single, value-driven call to action and prompting organic engagement instead of asking for likes directly Best for: A beginner or stagnant creator who already films semi-regularly and needs a repeatable framework for planning, not equipment or software training. Skip it if: Anyone hoping for hands-on editing software walkthroughs, camera settings, or a data-driven SEO and analytics deep dive. Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples Audio & Video Quality Clarity of Instruction [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fsecrets-to-growing-a-successful-youtube-channel-in-2023%2F1272170475)