🔴 5-step formula for 100B YouTube views

Our guest this week helps her clients net 200 million YouTube views every month. It’s not as complicated as you’d think.

Hayley Rose is the founder of The Upload Club, a growth consultancy that helps YouTubers, podcasters, and brands sharpen their content strategies and grow audience and revenue. Before launching her firm, she spent a decade working at Google, including three years on YouTube’s Top Creator Acquisitions Team. In total, Hayley’s work has impacted 100 billion views across Shorts and long-form content.

In this episode: 

• 🎬 Five repeatable steps for successful YouTube videos

• 📈 How to affect a video’s success after an upload

• 📊 The psychology behind thumbnails and how to pre-test

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

• 00:00 Introducing Hayley Rose

• 03:00 The three services of The Upload Club

• 05:44 The actual purpose of a thumbnail — it’s not what you think 

• 08:05 YouTube's most important metrics to focus on

• 12:20 The five steps every creator must know 

• 15:22 Step 1: The Idea

• 19:14 Step 2: Pre-production

• 25:22 Step 3: Shoot day

• 28:35 Step 4: Edit 00:38:18

• 38:18 Step 5: Upload

• 43:37 Hayley's experience working at YouTube

• 50:55 Huge opportunities in the creator economy

• 57:32 What makes a creator?

• 59:55 Ex-YouTube employee's thoughts on the algorithm

• 1:01:50 Tactical advice for creators

🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in to your podcasts.

The psychology behind billions of YouTube views

Hayley Rose knows that packaging is the most critical piece of any YouTube video. After 12 years at Google, including three years on YouTube’s Top Creator Acquisitions Team, she guides creators with a simple philosophy: success begins before you hit record.

While at YouTube, Hayley helped bring major TikTokers and podcasters to the platform, scaling them from zero to hundreds of millions of views in a matter of weeks. In total, her work has influenced nearly 100 billion views across Shorts and long-form video.

Still, she wanted to offer creators more strategic support than the scope of her role allowed. A tech start-up person at heart, she was ready to return to her entrepreneurial roots, building alongside other builders. So in the spring of 2024, she launched The Upload Club, a boutique consultancy helping creators scale their audience and revenue through smarter systems and sharper packaging. By the end of the year, The Upload Club had reached full client capacity.

Today, Hayley’s client portfolio encompasses a diverse range of creators, including podcasters, Shorts-first creators, influencers, and brands, with audiences spanning hundreds of thousands to over 20 million subscribers. From one-off channel audits to video conceptualization, she offers sharp diagnostics and hands-on execution to guide them toward structured, repeatable processes, leading to consistent audience and revenue growth. 

Her five-step “anatomy of an upload” (see more under “Steal This Tactic”) alleviates creative guesswork and reduces launch anxiety. Thumbnail testing happens before scripts are written or shoots are scheduled. Every video goes live with alternate titles and thumbnails ready to deploy if the first version underperforms. The first seven days after a video goes live are crucial, so her team tracks impressions, click-through rates, and retention — not reactively, but strategically.

It’s a tried-and-true process — Hayley is currently driving approximately 200 million monthly views across The Upload Club’s client portfolio. And while it’s built on strategy, its success lies in something more personal: Hayley treats every upload as a vulnerable moment — a creative leap and a personal risk.

Nat’s notes ✍️

As I listened to this conversation, I appreciated how masterfully Hayley blends psychological insight with strategic rigor — recognizing that the things we can’t measure, like emotion and confidence, still shape performance outcomes.

• Uploading is emotional work. Creating requires psychological safety, especially with the people you work with. I loved Hayley’s sensitivity around this, and how she’s built “upload rituals” — repeatable rhythms that remove pressure and create a sense of detachment from the result — into her coaching.

  • This helps creators navigate the vulnerability of publishing, especially for those battling impostor syndrome, anxiety, or perfectionism. It’s a crucial, human part of the process that most strategy-focused professionals often ignore.

• Confidence is contagious. A lot of this interview was value-packed, tactical advice, but there was a moment when Hayley spoke about the magic in YouTube, saying that it mirrors a creator’s confidence — suggesting the platform’s algorithm might be reacting not just to viewer behavior but to subtle cues in the creator's relationship with their content.

Connect with Hayley on LinkedIn.
Learn more about The Upload Club or subscribe to their newsletter.

Hayley’s five-step “anatomy of an upload”

Hayley's approach is a systematic, repeatable process that demystifies YouTube success. She shared that almost all her clients miss step three (creators, take note), compromising the rest of their process.

1. Ideation: Is it worth making? Is it viable for YouTube?

Rather than starting with data, Hayley encourages a "yes, and" approach to brainstorming, removing limitations and generating as many ideas as possible.

Once ideas are collected, they're evaluated for viability: Will they perform well on YouTube? Will they provide value or entertainment in a format that works for the platform?

2. Pre-production: Draft the title, thumbnail, and script before you shoot

After identifying promising concepts through thumbnail testing, pre-production begins. This involves:

• Finalizing the thumbnail design

• Drafting title options

• Creating script outlines tailored to the talent's presentation style.

Pre-production includes planning strategic elements like "foreshadowing lines" that tease upcoming content and creating engagement mechanisms like comment calls-to-action that boost retention.

3. Shoot day: Make filming days sustainable and exciting

Many creators undervalue the importance of thorough pre-production, resulting in chaotic, inefficient shoot days. The goal is to remove as much friction as possible so creators can focus on performance.

4. Edit: Can you kill your darlings and “speak editor?”

For creators working with editors, Hayley recommends taking the raw footage, creating a rough cut, and providing detailed notes on creative direction, branding guidelines, and suggested edits.

"It's impossible for an editor to just nail it the first time out of the gates," she explains. The goal is to systematically transfer your creative vision to another person through detailed feedback and explanation.

She emphasizes that editors need to understand YouTube-specific elements, particularly the crucial first few seconds of a video. "If you're scrolling on your phone or on desktop, your video is going to autoplay. So I almost consider the first few seconds or frames of the video to be a part of the thumbnail."

5. Upload: Do you have a plan B if the video flops in the first few hours?

For Hayley, the upload is a vulnerable moment that represents a creator standing up for what they believe in. Having contingency plans reduces anxiety.

1.5 million full-time creators

When the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) published its digital economy report in 2020, there were only 200,000 full-time creators. Their latest report, released last month, found that the industry has grown 7.5x since then. There are 1.5 million full-time creators in the U.S. today.

And more than 400,000 of them read Creator Spotlight.

Newsletter operators netting upwards of $1,000,000 in revenue each year. YouTube strategists behind the platform’s most performant content. Executives and founders building the tools and infrastructure powering it all.

Spotlight readers are the future of the creator economy. Get your message in front of them; partner with us.

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