The story behind my record YT video

My most viewed YouTube video (1.1M views) completely defies short-form video logic. Here’s how I successfully hacked the algo:

While the video was made in April ’25, the journey started in September 2024 when I nervously walked into a local pizza shop barely able to get a word out. I’ll get back to this point after.

Everyone says that YouTube shorts should be 30-35 seconds MAX. So much content on the platform happens to land at that length.

But just like TikTok and Instagram, YouTube (or “YT”) has recently expanded max shorts length to 3 minutes.

In April when I started going all out on how food is made on YT shorts — I thought there was an unbelievable opportunity to tell a story that sits between the 1-2 minute range. So I started to focus on these exact videos. I’d literally door-to-door restaurants in Williamsburg asking them to do free videos in exchange for nothing except being able to post on my channel.

I got more no’s and saw more dirty kitchens than you could ever imagine.

But if you look closely, this 1.1M view video is for a restaurant in Syosset, NY.

The restaurant is Phil’s Pizza - and the owner Anthony Laurino has made a push to redefine his pizza shop’s online presence and now has amassed 128k followers.

In September, the owner of my favorite LI coffee shop (Mongo’s) told me that Phils Pizza was blowing up on Instagram. They had about 70k(?) followers at that point. As someone interested in growing out food-related content, I thought he’d be a great guy to connect with.

What I didn’t expect was when I pulled into Phil’s Pizza, I actually got nervous. No joke I have a high threshold for nervous moments but for some reason I was for this one. The key was to just order a slice of pizza (and throw it away outside).

And interestingly enough, the customer in front of me engaged in conversation with the owner that allowed me to chime in and break the ice.

For some reason, the owner and I connected and after exchanging contact info, we ended up doing some small projects together.

But nothing related to video!

So now you’re thinking “oh he just leveraged a high-follower count”… no you can’t do that on YouTube. Also read through the comments and you’ll realize most viewers had no idea who that guy is.

Here’s where the hack comes in.

I didn’t actually manipulate the algo. I took a concept that proved to work as a small scale and supercharged it.

If I can VoiceOver a how bagel is made video and get 20k views, music over a random Chicken Tandoori video and get 14k views, what happens when the video subject does the talking? (AND HE’S GOOD AT IT).

Magic. Anthony was unbelievable.

Despite this, this video was really, really close to tanking. Until I took a risk that paid off tremendously.

See if you look at the first 5-7 seconds of this video, you’ll see that I introduce the concept (via VO) and then hop into Anthony’s skit. This was initially not the plan. If you check Instagram, you’ll see the video has < 100k views. Anthony has a hook to his videos that works decently well. Been crushing it for his type of content, but this video is different than most of his content. The hook on Instagram was the original video according to plan, but I kept thinking there was too much drop-off in the concept.

Remember, I know this video will still do well anyway but I wanted to make it better

So I removed the Fluff in the beginning and hopped right into explaining why this video MUST be watched. It worked. (86% Hook retention is a record for me). I’ll also thank my the recent Resolve Fusion instructor Casey Faris (500k) for that basic animation in the beginning which I think was super helpful.

The rest is history.

-Jack

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FwJ2eZekayc