Dreamit’s YouTube channel grew 550% in 2020. See the top 5 videos

In 2019, Dreamit Ventures wanted to find a way to share our experience and expertise with even more startups globally beyond the 20 or so healthtech and securetech startups we work with and invest in each year.

We talk to thousands of startups every year and hear so many making the same mistakes with the same misunderstandings of what they need to do to make their startups successful. Another big problem is they don’t know how to best talk about and pitch their startup. Finally, we wanted to expose key topics we felt founders needed to know that only got talked about behind closed doors between investors. We wanted to focus not only on startups getting started, but startups going from seed to Series A and later rounds.

As our ideas gelled, we were thinking about what media we wanted to use. We heard from so many that we should “start a podcast like other investors” or “everyone is blogging so we need to ‘go big’ on blogging.”

Everyone said to stay away from video.

We heard so much of “don’t do video, it’s so hard to do well.” But like we tell startups — if everyone else is “zigging,” sometimes you need to “zag” to break through, be different, and bring a fresh and unique perspective.

We decided to go with video and that we needed to find the right person to head up these efforts. Where did the head of Dreamit Media come from? Anthony Bucci, founder of RevZilla is a really good friend. When I said Dreamit was going to launch a video series, Anthony said to talk to one of the former leaders of RevZilla content and media, Dustin Carpio. Anthony, Dustin and the early production team built RevZilla’s YouTube presence dominating the power sports vertical. Weeks later, Dustin was part of the Dreamit team.

We launched the Dreamit Dose, a new series focused on founders and startups. We took a no-BS approach by delivering highly pragmatic and actionable content in short bursts of around five minutes. From the beginning, Dustin was prescient and said, “When shooting this first Dreamit Dose, let’s make sure to put a number on it so people know this is part of a series.”

So in May 2019, Dreamit Dose 001 was released (“Assumptions Kill Startups — How To Quickly De-Risk Them”), and now, at the end of Q1 2021, we will pass our 50th Dose!

This last year also brought newfound collaborations with groups like Slidebean and the great productions that CEO Jose Cayasso (aka Caya) and his team put together on their Slidebean YouTube channel, a must-watch for startups. 2020 also brought new collaborations with Dreamit Dose guest hosts like Jason Calacanis talking about angel investing, Annie Duke (bestselling author of “Thinking in Bets“) on critical decision-making skills for startups, and more.

If you are wondering what our “magic ingredient” was to achieve our growth so far, it was relentlessly figuring out, week after week, what content we could produce always with a unique Dreamit twist, in our highly condensed format, and always with a pragmatic and actionable flair. Our collabs with other YouTube channels helped and we evolved to start including “guest Doses” which we plan to expand upon in 2021.

Two more fun facts and about the Dreamit Dose:

1. Where did the idea for five-minute Doses come from? If you watched “Saturday Night Live” decades ago, they used to have on Father Guido Sarducci. He had a skit about five-minute university. Watch it on YouTube, it’s awesome. You’ll see exactly where we got the idea for a five-minute Dose.
2. Always watch to the very end of a Dreamit Dose. Dustin always compiles the best host bloopers and integrates them into the last 20 seconds of every Dose. The bloopers are fairly embarrassing but really funny to watch.

Before I get to the list of the top 5 Dreamit Dose videos of 2020, here are some key 2020 stats from the Dreamit YouTube channel after we cold-started this effort in May 2019:

• 64 new videos added
• Over 5,800 new subscribers representing 550% organic subscriber growth
• More than 113,000 views (plus hundreds of thousands of views on LinkedIn)
• Over 8,200 hours of watch time

So without further ado, here are the top 5 Dreamit Dose videos of 2020:

If you have a chance, please check out the Dreamit Dose on YouTube, and if you have a topic you would like us to cover, tweet us @Dreamit.

Thanks for watching!