Andrew McMurry is a professional visual special effects editor, more commonly known as VFX. He started 9 years ago and taught himself so that he could better express his creativity. He has since grown his YouTube channel, Nukazooka, to over 2M subscribers and now does partnerships with major brands to produce entertaining and enjoyable videos. 

Now, let’s break down what made him successful so that you can replicate it.

Traction: When Andrew started, he had no prior creative work and no audience. He started by producing short videos that highlighted his interests, mostly Airsoft guns. In order to obtain his first 100 subscribers, he had to do his own marketing. That consisted of posting on blogs, special effects sites, and other sites that fell in the theme of VFX. Around the 1k subscriber count, a much larger YouTuber reached out to him and offered him audience exposure in exchange for free VFX work. To this day, Andrew attributes that partnership with the rapid growth and success that he’s had on YouTube. Finding someone that can help you hack the growth cycle can dramatically increase the speed and rate at which you gain noteriety. 

Growth: The partnership that he had with Tomska, the YouTuber that was much larger than him, got him to his first 20k subscribers. After that, Andrew focused on producing high quality content. That content was then posted on social media outlets like Reddit, where a few of his videos became viral. Those non-linear growth spikes helped him to massively grow his channel. He took that success and established brand partnerships to produce videos for major brands, like LEGO and Nerf, that enhanced his viewership tremendously. 

Income: The thing thing that most surprised Andrew was the possibility of partnering with brands, where they would pay them for him to produce partnered videos. That was made possible by having a Multi Channel Network represent him. The one that he went with was Studio 71, where they represented his talent to various brands and did the negotiation on his behalf. By the time the deal arrived to Andrew, it was just a yes or no decision. In order to maintain his authentic connection with his audience, Andrew will never do branded videos back-to-back.