How we Organically Built our YouTube Channel from Zero to Over 400 Thousand Subscribers.
by Jeremy Pang
We’ve just hit a massive milestone in running our own business, or at least our sister company; School of Wok Limited has, with its celebration of 10 years in Covent Garden, having become not just a local institution, but with the success of the School of Wok YouTube channel going from zero to hero in less than 5 years, we here at Curious Crab couldn’t thank our older sibling enough.
But it’s not just the chefs and presenters that make this tick. It’s the whole team behind the production, and we are of course okay to tell you that’s us here at Curious Crab Productions! In 2017, Nev Leaning, Yolanda Ocon and I put our School of Wok Marketing heads on and tasked ourselves with our long-term aspirations for the business. We decided after 3-4 days of non-stop workshops and drooling over epic food adverts from the likes of Lurpak and other big companies, we agreed to embark on our own video journey. Knowing the School of Wok brand inside out, how-to videos for this food brand was the only logical direction to go in. Very quickly on, we employed our first Videographer Lee Skillett. Lee was tasked with the easy job of getting our YouTube channel in good shape and increase our then measly subscriber count of 1800 subs to the first 10,000. Once we hit 10,000, Lee was Knighted by a School of Wok, wok in true style and I quickly asked him the next question: “how quickly can you get us to 100,000 Lee?” And so Lee did what boss asked…and we got our silver plaque of You Tube mini-stardom a few months later. This whole process took us about 18 months and a whole lot of trial and error. But more importantly, the key for us was consistency. Interestingly, whether it’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik Tok, consistency is such a major part in producing content that I’m unsure many people talk about; when humans do things individual, we are intelligent beings, when we work or play in herds, we become far more robotic and all seem to like the same stuff!
People are often trying to work out the algorithm and how it has changed from yesterday to today, but for organic brand building in the social media space, when you’re a content creator wanting to grow systematically, the hard slog is knowing how to be consistent and patient with your organic growth. Being consistent in quality, engagement, comments, responses, messaging, and frequency of posts is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve, and an ultramarathon in itself; especially with a small team or perhaps for most, even being a one-man-band.
Since Lee started, we then started to build upon our quality and each one of those points of consistency, where we could afford to do so and more importantly for Curious Crab Productions, we started to grow our versatile production team and soon after our silver plaque extravaganza, we employed Chris Jackson <who also has many crabby thoughts>, Clare Cassidy <our very crabby producer who keeps us on track> and more recently, Arthur Barker, who make our young team seem that much younger and more eager to please…
Very much like a good big sister should, School of Wok has provided us with a whole lotta love and care; in fact, the cookery school is a fantastic studio space for Curious Crab Productions HQ. There’s always food around, we have all the equipment in the world to make a food or drink video look great, authentic and rustic or modern and bold when need be and we have access to some of the best chefs and recipe developers in the capital (we can say that, we have taught a few them in our time). So with such a pool of talent from the food world at our doorstep, the crucial logistics that food photography and video shoots require is taken care of and the rest is left to us – to film, eat, drink, sleep (with very crabby dreams) and repeat.
