Our Future is a leading source of business content for the next generation founded by Michael Sikand. Their content is on typical social media outlets such as TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. But for now let’s focus on their YouTube channel. Sikand started the channel just a little over two years ago on December 27th, 2020. The channel had less than 200 subscribers in September 2021 and was not active until then.

Flash forward to today, the channel has 299,546,020 (yes, million) views (as of Feb 2, 2022) and 196,000 subscribers. Interesting to note is when we checked the subscriber count yesterday it was 2000 less than it was today. So no doubt, within a few days, the Our Future channel will likely be well over the 200,000 subscriber point. We did some additional digging and out of the 286 videos they have created, 77 of them have over one million views each. Even one video reaching over 13 million views (Mark Zuckerberg Got Humiliated By Elon Musk Here’s How, featured at the bottom of this article). But before you get there…

Titan of Tech 2021-22

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What?! How?

So, how did Sikand accomplish all this? Here is what he had to say:

Can you tell us three things that have lead to your YouTube success?

The main reason we have succeeded on YouTube is because of the platform's shift toward short-form content with "YouTube Shorts," which is part of the platform's strategy to better compete with TikTok. Our content is optimized for shorts and the YouTube algorithm has loved the kind of content we create, so we’re winning big right now on viewership and subscriber growth as we dominate in this new feature the company is experimenting with. The other two reasons I would attribute are consistency and innovation. Of course, if you’re making long-videos you may only be able to post 1-2 times a week, but we post daily original content, sometimes as many as 4 new videos per day, so the consistency and quantity of content has been a big factor in our success. Finally, when I say innovation, I mean the fact that we are fundamentally changing the way people are used to seeing business content. Typically, business content is long and complex, and we’re crushing it by taking that content and making it really short, simple, and entertaining. We haven’t seen anybody else doing content in this way, and we’re looking to continue growing and building more and more a moat around this.

What challenge or challenges did you run across early on and how did you overcome them?

One challenge we ran across early on is that we were not appropriately optimizing our videos for the YouTube algorithm / search engine and we were getting no results. Now we employ a team to make sure every keyword, tag etc. is hit to maximize the videos odds of being picked up. Before, we were really just posting our content on YouTube, expecting it to blow up on shorts, without properly adapting it to the YouTube platform. Once we solved for this, we set up a system of production and our daily YouTube content is crushing it with the team doing things like reformatting the thumbnails we use on TikTok to a horizontal format and tagging each video before it is uploaded.

Any words of advice to new YouTube creators?

For new YouTube creators, the fastest way to grow an audience will likely be through YouTube shorts. If you’re trying to make long-form content, it’s vital that you build in short-form segments and styles so that you can promote your longer stuff by virtue of giving people a taste first. So I would emphasize a short-form content strategy to be extremely important and should be top of mind when thinking about how you can grow long-form content.