Growing on YouTube Without Chasing Trends

We reached 10,000 subscribers on YouTube.

We didn’t post every day. We didn’t follow trends.

We just made slow, story-driven films about people and their homes.

And over time, people started to find us.

One of our first films was about a blacksmith in Edinburgh.

His flat was packed with things. Mango boxes stacked in the corner. Sanskrit painted on the walls from a children’s alphabet book. A purple dog (a Christmas decoration) inspired by Jeff Koons, bought just for a few pounds.

We didn’t know it then, but that film helped shape everything.

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I never doubted the slowness.

But I didn’t expect it to work so quickly either. Our first five videos brought in over 350,000 views.

We got lucky — and found proof that there’s an audience for this.

Most home tours focus on surface things: square footage, renovations, the cost of the paint.

Pinterest-perfect finishes and “Before and after” comparisons.

But we wanted to capture something else — the feeling of a life. 

How someone arranges their shelves. 

What they choose to keep out, and what they hide.

The personality of a room.

So we focused on storytelling. Emotion. Stillness. And we imagined the viewer not in a rush, not on their phone — but sitting down, fully there.

Not on a bus, but in their living room. Watching with attention. Present. Curious.

That mindset changed everything.

It gave us permission to resist the hook-for-the-algorithm and just follow our gut feeling.

And the audience we found reflects that — thoughtful, mature, loyal.

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There’s a lot of advice out there about how to grow. Post more. Cut faster. Chase trends.

But slow and quiet can be a strategy. It’s also a philosophy. One that values quality over quantity. Thoughtfulness over noise. A lived-through opinion over a hot take.

You don’t have to chase attention to earn it. You can grow by being thoughtful. By being real. By making the thing you’d want to watch.

That’s what we did — and it worked.