I'm no Mr. Beast in optimizing engagement and user retention on YouTube.

But, I have spent copious amounts of time on YouTube watching videos and developing a taste for good and bad content.

I just started learning about optimizing engagement, so I am an absolute beginner. I've watched a few Mr. Beast podcast interviews and reverse-engineered some of his content to try to hack user retention.

FYI, I got this idea from Mr. Beat, and a group of YouTubers analyzed existing popular YouTubers and saw what they were doing.

Here's how I first got interested in Optimizing Engagement:

My friend and I started a podcast on AI a few months ago. However, we both realized this was not what we were interested in.

So, we decided to pivot to purely comedic content. This shift in strategy proved successful, as the second Instagram reel we posted received 1.7 million views.

While we understand that this was partially luck, it gave us confidence that there was an opportunity to unpack this further and give it a shot.

We immediately tried to reverse engineer it and gained a couple of key ingredients from the data: curiosity, relatability, and shareability.

So, my goal over the next year is:

• Do the Ali Abdaal course: Part-Time YouTuber

• Study the top YouTubers to emulate what they are doing: thumbnail, hook title, pacing, music, sound, etc.

• Experiment with the different techniques, starting from the high-impact, low-effort changes

• Build an excellent understanding of the different techniques and have the knowledge to grow any channel from 0 essentially