How to get 100k YouTube subscribers in 3 hours (The Complete Guide)
Our YouTube channel has 125k subscribers and we've never made or uploaded a single video ourselves. This is a completely automated system.
It is this very same strategy that made us the first app founders in the world to get a YouTube Play Button from a total of 3 hours of work.
Doing this is essentially free and one of the only proven automated marketing strategies. All it requires are two things:
Claude and Post Bridge
You literally don't need anything else. Claude will help you make the videos and Post Bridge will schedule them for you.
(We've never tried any other scheduling tool aside from this one. Scheduling can be tricky because of shadow bans so it's best to go with the proven tool that we used)
To clarify, this should not be your main distribution strategy. We run multiple forms of marketing on top of our YouTube channel.
But the videos are so easy to make and the upside so good that it would be stupid not to have this strategy running. We probably get around 100 downloads/day just from our YouTube automation.
The system consists of just 3 simple steps:
1. Find your viral hooks and scrape them
Don't overthink it, only consider channels with more than 20 million subscribers because you need an audience big enough that your users are subscribed to them as well or will at least find the videos interesting.
Great examples are: ZackD Films and MrBeast Shorts
I love using ZackD videos as hooks, he consistently gets millions of views per post and chances are your users are watching them.
Whoever the creator is you have to make sure the video feels like brainrot to the user. This is part of the shock that makes these videos effective.
Once you have your channel you are going to scrape the videos with Claude, at the end of this article there's a video that goes step by step but here is the prompt you are going to use:
I need you to write a Python script that downloads the first 3 seconds from the most recent 300 videos on a YouTube Shorts channel.
Important
- Use `yt-dlp` from Python.
- Use `ffmpeg` to trim each video to only the first 3 seconds.
- Do not download the full video if there is a way to avoid it. If full download is unavoidable, delete the full file after creating the 3-second clip.
- Save all clips into a folder called `hooks`.
- Name the files in order: `hook_001.mp4`, `hook_002.mp4`, `hook_003.mp4`, etc.
- The output clips should be vertical MP4 files if possible.
- The script should handle errors gracefully. If one video fails, skip it and continue.
- Create a `failed_downloads.txt` file with the URLs that failed.
- Create a `downloaded_urls.txt` file with every URL that was successfully processed.
- Avoid downloading duplicates.
- Print progress in the terminal, for example: `Downloading 34/300`.
Input:
I will provide the URL of the YouTube Shorts channel or the first video from the channel.
Task:
1. If I provide a video URL, detect the channel from that video.
2. Get the most recent 300 video URLs from that channel.
3. Download only the first 3 seconds of each video.
4. Save the clips to the `hooks` folder.
5. Make the script easy to run from the terminal.
Before writing the script, tell me what dependencies I need to install and the exact install commands.
Then write the complete Python script and run it.
This prompt will scrape the last 300 videos of the channel and save the first 3 seconds of the videos to a folder.
2. Edit a quick 7 second video and stitch it to every hook you scraped
Using the editor of your choice (I recommend CapCut) you are going to create a little CTA clip which claude will stitch to the hook.
In our case we just grabbed some images from Pinterest and added some transitions and effects.
Make sure you are using a recognizable viral song that goes with your CTA clip.
Don't overcomplicate it, we've used the exact same CTA since the beginning of our channel and we've gotten over 10M total views.
Here's how our CTA looks:
Once you've created your video now it's time to go back to Claude Code and tell it to stitch the same CTA to each clip
Here is the prompt that I used:
I need you to write a Python script that takes one CTA video and attaches it to the end of every hook video inside a folder.
Input:
- Hook videos folder path: [PASTE HOOK VIDEOS FOLDER PATH HERE]
- CTA video path: [PASTE CTA VIDEO PATH HERE]
- Output folder path: [PASTE OUTPUT FOLDER PATH HERE]
Task:
For every video inside the hook videos folder:
1. Take the hook video.
2. Attach the CTA video immediately after it.
3. Export the stitched video into the output folder.
4. Keep the videos in the same order as the input folder.
5. Use clear sequential naming for the final exports.
Example:
- First hook video + CTA video → `final_001.mp4`
- Second hook video + CTA video → `final_002.mp4`
- Third hook video + CTA video → `final_003.mp4`
Important requirements:
- Use Python and `ffmpeg`.
- Make sure all final videos are valid MP4 files.
- Make the final videos vertical format, ideally 1080x1920.
- Make sure the hook and CTA video are compatible before stitching.
- If needed, re-encode both videos so they have the same:
- resolution
- frame rate
- audio sample rate
- video codec
- audio codec
- Preserve the audio from both the hook and the CTA.
- Do not add any pause, gap, fade, transition, watermark, or extra edit between the hook and CTA.
- If one hook fails, skip it and continue with the rest.
- Create a failure log with any hook videos that failed.
- Create a success log with every final video that was created.
- Print progress in the terminal, for example: `Processing 34/300`.
- Avoid overwriting existing final videos unless I explicitly set an overwrite option to true.
- Make the script easy to run from the terminal with command-line arguments.
Before writing the script:
1. Tell me the dependencies I need.
2. Give me the exact install commands.
3. Then write the complete Python script.
4. Finally, run the script yourself when everything is ready.
3. Schedule the content
As I mentioned before, we've used Post Bridge since the beginning of our YouTube channel.
You can either choose to schedule the content through the dashboard, or you just grab an API key and then give it to Claude and let it schedule it.
Post Bridge will actually let you bulk schedule which is what we used for much of the history of our channel, but for the latest 700 videos we scheduled we actually just used the API and let it run overnight.
The warm up period for YouTube can be a little tricky so I would advise against scheduling from day one. Here's what you need to do instead:
If during this process you find that YouTube shadow banned you, keep posting for at least 10 more days. We were actually shadow banned for almost a month, but since we forgot about the channel we never noticed until the views were already back to normal.
If you also want to upload content to ig and tt I recommend sending them as drafts and then uploading them manually. Most of our automated accounts in those platforms have gotten shadow banned
Step by step tutorial:
This is the exact system that got us a YouTube Play Button with only 3 hours of total work.
Remember to treat this only as part of your distribution strategy, but given how easy the videos are to make it's worth it to have this running in the background.