“SMASH that like button,” the host shouts, and your eyes roll so hard you’re practically staring at your own medulla. “And don’t forget to subscribe!” If you make videos, podcasts, or social content, you already know you’re supposed to push for engagement. But if doing it the usual way makes you feel like you need a long shower, this story is for you. In it, the producer of My First Million explains how they transformed cringey engagement tactics into an inside joke and shared language that their audience happily spreads — helping them land 200k subscribers along the way. They call it “The Gentlemen’s Agreement.” And you should seriously consider your own version. Gentlemen, observe.
Entrepreneurs Sam Parr and Shaan Puri never set out to become podcasters or YouTubers. “They were operating with the mindset of, ‘We’re making this for us, and if people watch, awesome,’” says Arie Desormeaux. “They didn’t see themselves as content creators.” So when the show started gaining traction on its own, they had to decide whether to lean into all the things content creators are “supposed” to do: ad reads, engagement hacks, pleading for subscribers.
Desormeaux is a senior producer at HubSpot Media and one of the key people behind the continued growth of My First Million, which now has nearly 900,000 followers. But it wasn’t always that way, and she walks me through the thinking behind one of their earliest breakout growth moments. “Instead of just doing what we were ‘supposed’ to do by default, we chose to make it a funny bit, and then turn…”