How to get a million subscribers by pleasing one single person

Create to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your video will get pneumonia.

Corrado CoiaFebruary 16, 2025

You’re probably thinking that pleasing one person is easy, and pleasing a million people is hard.

And you’re right.

That’s why this method works.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote:

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Here’s the power behind this quote, and how I used it to gain 30k subscribers on a new channel in 3 months.

The power of pleasing one person

Vonnegut suggests that by pleasing one person, the better off your content will be.

The more the content is developed with one very specific person in mind;

  • the more focused the content becomes
  • the more the content will deeply resonate with that person
  • the more the content will appeal to other people like that person
  • the easier it is for a community to form around those who enjoy the same content

It’s also a lot easier to make content this way.

The downside of trying to please everyone

On the other hand, the more the content has to focus on pleasing different people;

  • the less focused the content becomes
  • the less the content will deeply resonate with people
  • the less appealing the content becomes (possibly leading to fewer shares, comments, and likes)
  • the harder it is for a community to form around those who enjoy the same content

It’s more difficult to make content that appeals to many different types of people at once.

Different people like different things.

Here’s how you can put this strategy in action:

  1. Think of one specific person (even better if it’s someone you know irl)
  2. Think of them when creating your content (you’ll know all the nuances of what they like and don’t like)
  3. Let your understanding of that person direct every part of your content: title, script, editing style, thumbnail, etc.
  4. Make your content so that one person will love it. Ignore everyone else.

I started @GetFakt (a gaming and pop-culture fact channel), and after a few weeks in, I realized that the channel was trying to appeal to too many people. I pivoted the channel and started creating only gaming videos – and made them specifically to appeal to my one gaming buddy.

I would remove and add things that I knew he would specifically like.

In 3 months, we grew by 30k subscribers and got 10,000,000 views.

Where there’s one, there’s more.

 

Until next time.
✌️

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