Everyone wants a successful YouTube channel, but very few people talk about how to keep it once you build it. Matt D’Avella had to figure that out for himself.

He’s a documentary filmmaker and YouTuber with 3 million subscribers who covers minimalism, habits, and productivity. He started out by releasing one video a week—and soon his numbers started to pick up. It was exhilarating at first: he never expected his videos to get so popular so quickly. When they did, what started out as a fun outlet for creative expression soon became something entirely different.

Matt wanted to make sure that his channel growth didn’t stop and that his existing subscribers stuck around. So he doubled down on doing exactly what he’d been doing from the start: continue releasing one video a week, and trying to make each one as popular as possible:

“It was this kind of internal belief I had created for myself. I guess I believed that if I stopped making them [on that schedule], then people would stop showing up.” 

Creators everywhere feel the same way: YouTubers, newsletter writers, streamers. It’s the same problem in different forms. I’ve felt it firsthand with this newsletter. You start doing something because you love it—and when it starts to work, it introduces a whole set of complications that can take you away from the thing you loved about it in the first place. 

If you’re not careful, you’ll hit burnout quickly. And that’s exactly where Matt found himself: making videos at a relentless pace, and never satisfied with the numbers. “You’re always in hyper comparison mode against yourself—and you can never win, because you're rarely going to beat your best video.”

Over time though, he’s learned to approach making videos differently than he did earlier in his career. And in the process he figured out one of the most valuable lessons of being a solo creator: the things you need to do to build an audience are different from the things you need to do to keep it.

In the rest of this interview, we go through the systems and processes Matt uses to keep his channel growing without burning out. We go into everything from how he sets goals, to how he does his email, to the habit that changed his life.

Let’s dive in! 

Matt introduces himself

My name is Matt D’Avella. I’m a documentary filmmaker and a YouTuber. 

I started making videos on YouTube in 2017. After a year and a few months, my videos started to gain some traction, to the point that within a couple of years—to my surprise—I was able to build an audience of over three million subscribers. I still pinch myself today that I’ve been able to do that.

Early this year, Netflix released one of my documentaries, The Minimalists: Less Is Now. And, of course, I’m really excited about my new course platform, Slow Growth Academy.

Even though I’ve got so much going on in my work, I’m transitioning into a period of my life where I'm less obsessed with the numbers and more focused on my mental health, happiness, and well-being. As part of that focus, I’ve had to make some major changes to how I work so I can continue to create in a sustainable way.

How I burned myself out building up an audience

When I first started out I was making one video a week. That’s how I built my channel—and it was working. But it also felt daunting to keep up with. I remember a moment where I was talking with my wife very early on. My channel had first started to grow, and I was trying to explain to her the idea that, “I’m going to have to make a video and a podcast every week for the rest of my life." 

I don't know why I thought that was the case, because it clearly is not true. But it was this kind of internal belief I had created for myself. I guess I believed that if I stopped making them, then people would stop showing up. 

When you get into a place like this you start to kill yourself over the numbers, and they begin to influence the decisions you make. You end up creating more and more with the numbers in mind, rather than thinking about what you truly want to create and the kind of impact you want to have. Anxiety starts to rear its ugly head. 

The way YouTube works doesn’t help. When you log in to YouTube to upload a video or to see how your last video did, it shows you a breakdown of how your last video performed relative to your most ten recent ones. As a result, you’re always in hyper comparison mode against yourself—and you can never win, because you're rarely going to beat your best video. And then there are those red arrows that point downwards, telling you that you have 30% less viewership, and your income is down by 40% too!

As a result, maintaining balance has been really hard. It's insanely difficult to build a successful YouTube channel. It's even more difficult to build a channel that doesn't burn you out.

But I’ve realized that what you need to do to build an audience isn't necessarily what you need to do to maintain it.

Avoid comparing yourself to others

Feeling like I needed to do more than I actually did, and constantly comparing myself to other channels and creators, were real pitfalls for me. But when you put that kind of pressure on yourself, you're not giving yourself a chance to rest and take a break from a really demanding work life.

Before I had an audience, I thought that building one would generate some kind of feeling in me. I think that I held people with millions of followers in a certain esteem because of what they had been able to build. We do the same thing for successful entrepreneurs and celebrities—we kind of put them into a different tier, mentally.

But having gone through it myself, absolutely nothing changed about me personally when I gained tons of followers. If anything, I just added more pressure onto myself to create.

I’ve had the chance to meet so many of the wonderful creators that first inspired me, and I’ve been fortunate to work with a few of them too. I realized that though they were incredibly talented, hard-working, and kind people, at the end of the day, they were just ‘regular’ people.