Every piece of content you send into the world is a free lottery ticket. It’s an asymmetric bet with far more upside than downside. You don’t know which one will hit… only that most won’t. Still, you’d be stupid not to collect them for free.

I’ve written about this idea for years: the power of the internet to scale your ideas and expose yourself to unlimited upside. But until recently, I’d never truly felt the scale.

That changed when my wife and I started our sketch comedy YouTube channel.

At first, growth was super slow. Twelve subscribers. A few thousand views. I even did the math: at the pace we were going in the first few months, we’d hit 1,000 subscribers sometime in the next six years.

But the internet doesn’t work in a straight line. Success is really nonlinear, with massive spikes of progress followed by long periods where nothing really happens.

And recently, our YouTube channel hit one of those spikes with two massively viral videos. What those vids reveal about leverage, growth, and what actually matters when you’re building online… kind of broke my brain. Here’s what I learned.

How two viral videos exploded our channel.

Back in April 2025, I wrote this:

“Progress in digital domains is nonlinear. You don’t grow a little every day. You grow a lot — suddenly. We could get 50 subs from our first 100 sketches, then add 5,000 subs with our 101st sketch.

One of your creations will create more growth than ALL of our previous creations combined!

In our case, I suspect (we’ll see if I’m right) that a year from now, 75%+ of our subs will be from one video.”

Turns out I was wrong… but only because I underestimated it.

We just passed 3,700 total subscribers on our YouTube channel. And over 95% of them came from just two Shorts.

Here’s what the growth curve actually looked like:

The first viral Short brought in 2.8 million views and 2,500 new subscribers.

Then came the second one… 1.3 million views and 1,100 subscribers.

Together, these two Shorts added 3,549 subscribers, out of a total 3,743.

After some quick math, that’s 95% of our growth coming as a result of just two videos.

So yes, I said one creation would drive the majority of our growth. And it turns out two of them drove nearly all of it.

The internet doesn’t reward effort — it rewards leverage.

That’s what makes this work so frustrating and so magical. You can put in the same amount of time, energy, and thought into 20 different videos… and see nothing happen.

Then you post another one — one that doesn’t feel any more special than the rest — and it explodes.

This is what leveraged growth actually looks like. It’s not fair. It’s not proportional. It’s a power law, where a tiny fraction of your output creates nearly all of your results.

Before these two Shorts took off, we had published dozens of videos. Most got a few hundred or maybe a couple thousand views. Some barely moved the needle at all. And when you’re in that phase, it’s easy to feel like you’re failing — like the work isn’t working.

But that’s the trap: judging your progress too early, based on too little data.

Because in hindsight, the videos that didn’t go viral weren’t failures at all. In fact, they were critical to our growth.

No video asset is ever a waste.

It’s easy to look back at the videos that didn’t go viral and label them failures. But that’s the wrong lens. In leveraged creative work, nothing is wasted — especially not your early output.

First, each video served as training data for the algorithm. 

YouTube needs signals to figure out who you are, what kind of content you’re making, and who might be interested in it. The more you publish, the more data the system has to test and learn from. It’s like you’re slowly teaching the algorithm how to find your people.

Each video says: We’re still here. We’re still making stuff. Try again.

Eventually, it does. And when you do hit with a viral vid, that back catalog of all your other videos become even MORE important.

Because going viral too early — before you’ve built up any kind of library — is actually a missed opportunity. A viewer might love your video, click through to your profile… and then bounce because there’s nothing else to watch. You’ve sparked interest but given them nowhere to go.

That’s why your early videos matter. They’re not just lottery tickets… they’re conversion assets.

When someone discovers your channel through a viral Short and sees a wall of other sketches just like it, you’re way more likely to turn that single view into a subscriber. Not because of one video, but because of the body of work behind it.

In our case, the two viral Shorts did the heavy lifting on reach. But the rest of our library helped close the deal. That’s what people don’t see. Virality may be random, but how prepared you are when you do go viral is under you control.

So even if your current video gets 83 views and no comments, it’s not a waste. It’s an asset… for the algorithm, for future viewers, and for the channel you’re building one post at a time.

Start now, and keep going.

P.S. I actually read this one. Quick, useful, no fluff. Sign up for The AI Report:

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