9 Things You Need for a Successful YouTube Channel in 2026

If you want to have a successful YouTube channel in a 2026, there are nine things you need to have. Now, this list was put together with the help of one of our favorite YouTube channels right now, and that channel hit 2 million subscribers in a little over a year and got 80 million views on their first 60 uploads, which is something that is incredibly hard to do, especially considering 20 million YouTube videos are now uploaded every

single day. [music] It has become increasingly harder to stand out, and that's what this list will help you do. That's a really good list. Those are nine things I've never heard about starting YouTube channel. >> Same. If you're into cars, then you probably already know who James is. He spent just about 10 years building the really popular YouTube channel Donut Media. But after Donut took on investment and scaled and grew really quickly, James ended up feeling

super uninspired creatively. So, he took a big risk and he left the stable job to start something entirely new from scratch. Welcome to Speed. Useful [music] is one of the coolest things that a guy can be. Speed is the YouTube channel that I always wanted to watch and that, selfishly, I always wanted to have myself, but that I didn't think was even possible because of how YouTube >> [music] >> works. I thought you had to stay

in a certain lane. You should make one format and stick to it. If it works, don't stray from that. James and his team, they don't do that at all. They think of Speed as the men's magazine reimagined for YouTube. So, they make videos about cars, but they also make videos about fitness and fashion and breakdowns on brands and camping. They break so many of the rules of YouTube and somehow it's worth it. So, for that reason,

we wanted to talk to James, and we asked him and the president of Speed, Jesse Wood, to prep the rules that made them successful so quickly while doing so many things we didn't think you should be doing. There's a list of nine things that you need to have if you're going to start a YouTube channel and have some success. A POV, a point of view. Every video has been made, every subject has been covered. You can

still make a video about it. You just have to make it yours and give people a reason to watch yours. Not even instead of someone else's, but in addition to somebody else's. I used to be able to just make a video on the history of a thing. Just like, here's what happened. >> Yeah. And with Speed, we've had to pivot it to like, Volkswagen is turning their back on us. And like, Carhartt, we were talking about

the history of Carhartt, but through the lens of like, are you allowed to wear Carhartt? And so, I think like right now, it's 100% more important to have a POV than like ever. There's so much stuff. Also, my ability to get just the information, even from just typing it into ChatGPT or Gemini, is like, I can get the history of Carhartt in like a second. Totally. >> So, I I I don't want the efficient version. I

want the perspective version. Why are people watching your thing? >> Yeah. I love that. Partners. Oh, partners. Partner up. Especially with Speed, where we like kind of do give like advice or like perspective, the five of us together kind of make one really good guy. And we can keep each other honest and bounce things off of each other. So, I can like very confidently deliver the things that I'm about to say, which sometimes are like very

vulnerable things, and I am putting myself in a position where like I could look like a dumbass. >> I've never made a video this personal, [music] and I hope you don't think I'm a [ __ ] dork. >> [laughter] >> I like that. Yeah, like if a POV takes risk and takes courage, you want to mitigate the risk by having good people around you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It keeps it from being like, "What did I What? Come on."

Number three. Oh, references. I love certain things about Casey Neistat and the way he shot stuff. I love things about Van Neistat and the way he shot stuff. I love stuff about Will Tennyson um and the way that he writes. I love stuff about Emma Chamberlain, the way that she shoots, the way that she's built her career, the way that she's like 100% herself and how she talks to her audience is a huge influence with how

I talk to my audience with Speed. If you're going to work in a medium or an art form, you have to be a fan of the medium and the art form, and therefore, you have to like have favorites, you know, cuz then you can like you steal like 16 things, then that's your style. Videos you actually want to make. This seems like an obvious thing that is overlooked quite a bit. So often, the conversation with YouTube,

especially, is "Well, what's going to perform well? Like, what can I do that's going to perform well?" And I think like in a lot of ways, with YouTube, it's like self-inflicted all the bad things you've heard about Hollywood. >> [laughter] >> Or like, you only want to make a blockbuster. Like, you can upload it for free and like make it for nothing, but like, "I only want to make the hits." So, is your recommendation there that

like before going into launching a channel or something, you should you should write down like you should have a certain amount of videos you absolutely really want to make? >> Can't wait to make. >> wait to make. You can't wait to make them. And like some of them you can't afford to make, and you're making other videos, saving up for like the money or the equipment or like the support to like one day, yeah, dude, one

day I'm going to make this video. >> That's really good. >> All right, number five. >> [laughter] >> Oh, a camera and a computer. If you can figure out how to do it without them, good. I would argue there's some people who could do this with a phone, but a phone is a camera and a computer. Ah, I see. It's self-contained. [laughter] Okay. Jesse brought that up. That's fair. I'm not going to push back on that.

>> [laughter] >> A vision. Know where you want to go. You're not going to know how you get there if with Speed, I know what I want it to be. I want to be respected by certain groups of people. I want to work with certain types of brands. I I can see what Speed can be and I and like in 5 years, I think like there is this like very aura-based like green-tinted idea of what I

think this thing is. At the very beginning of the channel, Zach said like, "You know what? Like, we'll just cross the river by feeling the stones, you know?" That's cool. And so, it's like an old Chinese proverb, I think. And so, like we know that we want to get across the river. We don't know how we're going to do it, but like we'll take a step and okay, this is pretty sound footing right here. We take

a step. This is pretty sound footing right here. Um and so, like you know where you're going, but you don't know how you're going to get [snorts] there. The only thing I would add to this one, I love this one. I think this is super important, is that the vision has to be outside of views. Yeah. Cuz I do think there's a lot of vision going into YouTube channels like, "I'm going to make a YouTube channel

and get a lot of views." Totally. You have to also look back at your work and go, "Is this Is this painting the picture of that vision or not?" And I do it a lot. Like, I'll look at I'll go to like YouTube Studio and look at all of our videos and I'm like, Yeah. Those fit pretty good together, >> [laughter] >> you know? Um Yeah. Which is like an active thing that we're trying to do

with this channel. Like, I want it to feel like a a thing. Balanced {slash} nuanced quality standards. Like put stuff out. Like, it's never going to be ready. Like, you're never going to be 100% happy with it. I think you should also be honest with yourself about how good you are at it. Cuz I think I hear a lot, especially like with YouTube, where it's like, "I'm making like really good [ __ ] Nobody's watching it." It's like

impossible. That's impossible. Like, if you were making really good [ __ ] a lot of people would be watching it. It could be like good a good short film or like a good little movie or something, but it's not a good YouTube video because if it were a good YouTube video, people would find it and they would watch it. Every time one of our videos doesn't perform well, or if it does, we always do like extensive postmortems. Like,

we know why stuff isn't doing well. And I think that's an asset for us to like improve constantly. Number eight. Loose {slash} optimistic. Oh, yeah. >> [laughter] >> Loose {slash} optimistic bookkeeping. Yeah. Talk to me about this. Um It's a fresh take. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> But yeah, we just kind of we look at the account balance >> [laughter] >> and we say like, "All right, this next video is going to cost about this much. How

do you feel about that?" And we're like, [laughter] "Yeah, I feel pretty good about it." And sometimes there's been big videos that made us a little bit uncomfortable with how much they were going to cost. The camping video was way more expensive than I thought it was going to be. Like, what's what's expensive for you guys? To invest in a video. Um >> just with all the products, it was like over 20 grand. Like, especially whenever

you're in like a new channel phase, uh it's like important to not get caught up in optimization because like you need to be able to play and like make misses, break things. Um and I think, you know, getting too caught up in the weeds of like, is this going to like make an exact return? And, you know, there's so many cool features in like QuickBooks and stuff now that uh is easy to be loose. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. It's easy to get loose. Yeah, QuickBooks. Okay, before we get to the final rule from Jesse and James, I want to ask you to [music] put a piece of advice in the comments about growing a successful YouTube channel. Something that you've either heard from someone else about growing a successful YouTube channel or something you've experienced yourself. I think it's important that we all get to share and learn from each other because none of us are

following the same playbook. James and Jesse and the team at Speed did something totally different that no one had ever done before [music] and it worked and we get to learn from that. We asked Jesse and James a lot of questions. This is just one specific segment of that conversation. You can listen to the full conversation in the description you'll find the link to Spotify and Apple pods. Maybe we'll put it out on YouTube but in

an effort to be more like Jesse and James we're trying something new. All right, without further ado the final rule. A desire to entertain. I think there's so much discussion about analytics and packaging and niches audience and all this stuff that I think sometimes people overlook that YouTube is an entertainment platform. It's TV. And so if you don't want to entertain people then you don't want to do this job and you should go do something else

because I think like YouTube can be an educational platform but like you said a book is better. Chad GPT is more educational. It can be news but like it's entertainment news. You are trying to make things that people want to watch and you cannot do any of this other stuff if you can just figure out that one thing. All of these are to get to that thing. Make something that other people want to spend time watching.

You're an entertainer and I think remembering that I think is the most important thing about all of this. Like this is entertainment. And like don't get lost in the sauce. Like this is entertainment. It's TV. The show business. Show biz baby. What are the three E's? E E E. Um Zach made this up after we came up with this. Yeah, after the fact. So number one is entertaining. Every video we make has to be entertaining. If

it is entertaining and it's also educational that's better. If it is entertaining and educational then we're allowed to be expressive. So like I'm allowed to express myself if I'm entertaining and educational because if I'm just expressing myself and it's not entertaining then like why did I upload it? You know? That one is incredibly important. Yeah. Uh we talked to the CEO of Twitch, Dan Clancy. >> Mhm. And we were asking him like what what makes like

a good streamer on Twitch. >> Yeah. And he was very blunt about just like yeah some people have it some people don't. Yeah. He was like you just can you control the camera or not? Mhm. >> Are you entertaining? Yeah. >> To watch. Mhm. He was like there's nothing there's no like Sure. Once once you're there you can come up with other things but like are you fun to watch or not? Totally. And I think people

have the longest conversations about like everything but that and it's like oh it's like authenticity and it's blah blah blah and all these things. It's like none of that matters if it's entertaining and people want to watch it. So like you can deconstruct what it means to want to watch something but like yeah make good TV and people will watch it. That's a really good list. Tho- Those are nine things I've never heard about starting YouTube

channels. [music] >> Same. Outside of the camera and computer. That one's objective. So thanks everybody for watching this video. Make sure to subscribe to Speed's channel. We put a link to the channel in the description as well as a link to the full episode with Jesse [music] and James.