🔴 From 16K to 118K YouTube subscribers in one year

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Today’s guest works in a niche we’ve never covered.

Sydney Graham makes a living selling sewing patterns to her audience of over 600,000 social media followers.

Her sewing patterns generate 85% of her income. She initially built her following on TikTok and Instagram, but we were most interested to learn how she nearly octupled her YouTube audience in the last year (it’s at 118k as I write).

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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In November 2023, while working as a social media coordinator for a women’s hat brand, Sydney Graham launched her first digital product — a beginner-friendly sewing pattern. Three weeks later, helped along by one short-form video posted to both Instagram and TikTok, it had generated enough income for her to justify quitting her full-time job.

Instead of spending years building an audience and then monetizing, she focused both her content and product creation on filling a gap. This is especially evident in her YouTube growth, which came from videos engineered to meet specific viewer needs — we explore this down in today’s “Steal This Tactic” section.

Today, 85% of her revenue comes from digital sewing pattern sales, not views or brand deals. Her success traces back to her time at Gigi PIP, the women’s hat brand where she worked on a small, scrappy team for 3.5 years. Her role gave her visibility across all departments — from administration and customer experience to marketing, content strategy, and social media. It was a ground-up education in how lean, product-led brands operate.

This isn’t Sydney’s first entrepreneurial experience. She’d run a made-to-order children’s clothing business of her own, years earlier, which eventually became unsustainable and led to burnout. “I was sewing 18 hours a day,” she recalls.

By the summer of 2023, she picked up sewing again for the first time in years. This time it was purely for her own enjoyment: tracing Pinterest outfits, improvising without patterns, and casually documenting it on TikTok. The response was immediate, and she spent the next several months teaching herself how to translate her intuitive process into scalable digital patterns.

Today, Sydney runs what she calls a “deliberately sustainable business.” She cycles between intense pattern development periods and content-focused phases, matching her workflow to her creative energy rather than arbitrary publishing schedules.

With an audience of over 600,000 across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, she applies the same operational rigor gleaned from her former job to her launches, mapping out every campaign in a color-coded calendar, complete with cross-platform strategy, timing, and engagement goals. She tracks drop-off points on Instagram Stories and selectively uses TikTok trends only when they align with her content.

Each platform serves a distinct function in her business ecosystem.

I joined this episode as a co-host! A few things that stuck with me from this week’s conversation:

Connect with Sydney on Instagram and YouTube.
Learn more about Syd Graham Patterns.

Sydney's YouTube growth from 16,000 to over 118,000 subscribers (she’s added 8,000 in the three weeks since we spoke since we spoke!) came in four distinct monthly spikes that demonstrate how product-focused creators can leverage algorithmic opportunities.

The video that drove her first major growth month now has 95,000 views. “Sydney's Ganni Tie Top Dupe Tutorial” capitalized on peak search demand for the trending $200+ designer piece.

Sydney made the video because knew people wanted and thus would be searching for the dupe, but instead of simply teaching the it, she positioned her own “Syd Tie Top” pattern as the superior solution, with multiple variations.

The strategy worked because she identified the gap between what people were searching for (how to recreate one specific top) and what they actually needed (a versatile pattern system). This approach captures immediate search traffic while converting viewers into customers for her core product.

Sydney’s "attempting to sew my fall wardrobe in one day" video exploded to 323,000 views — still her most popular video, by 40,000 views. The title created what Sydney calls a "no way, is she going to pull this off?" reaction.

"I almost didn't film it," she said. But the authentic challenge combined with the compelling hook drove massive engagement, framing a genuinely ambitious project as unmissable content. Viewers are invested in seeing whether or not you'll succeed.

Sydney’s "Trying on my entire me-made wardrobe" video generated 103,000 views and served multiple business functions; the hour-long video works as portfolio and evergreen sales asset that continues driving pattern sales months after posting.

Sydney explains that the video also works a reference tool, an introduction to new and existing users of the work she does, the details on certain patterns and fabrics, and almost anything else viewers would initially be curious about.

It’s a video that only she could make; the clothing she makes is uniquely hers, whether because it’s a pattern she created, a specific fabric, or both. Audiences want creators to produce content they can’t find anywhere else!

A recent Maine travel vlog marked a shift toward sustainable growth. Unlike previous spikes driven by specific viral videos, this growth came from a broader audience connection beyond just sewing instruction.

By this point, Sydney had built enough content and community capital to afford prioritizing audience relationships over algorithmic performance, which reveals a crucial insight for niche creators: once you’ve built enough authority with your audience in your niche, you can experiment with expanding into adjacent lifestyle content that maintains growth without constant viral moments.