Six months, zero views: How Darrel Wilson kept showing up until it paid off

Before the professional edits, the polished thumbnails, and the 800,000+ YouTube subscribers, Darrel Wilson was broke.

He was renting a room, filming tutorials no one watched, and waking up every day to the same number staring back at him: zero. 

For six straight months, that’s what he got. No views, no comments, no signs anyone was watching. Most people quit somewhere in that stretch. Darrel didn’t.

His story isn’t flashy. Far from it. It’s a reminder to keep showing up when nothing is working yet, and trusting that the effort will eventually find the people it’s meant for. 

If you’re staring at your own version of that zero right now, this one’s for you.

It started with a hiking blog

Darrel didn’t set out to become a WordPress authority with a YouTube channel that kept growing over 10 years. He set out to share his hikes.

Living in California and spending weekends on the trails, he wanted a place to keep all his photos and routes in one spot. 

So he built a website, uploaded everything, and started blogging about where he’d been. That was the whole plan. A personal archive of his hikes.

But building the site pulled him into the mechanics of how websites actually work, and that’s where things shifted. 

He was using an old WordPress theme called Freak, which at the time he thought was great (now he looks back on it with a wince), but he kept running into opinions online he flat-out disagreed with. 

Instead of arguing in the comment sections, he saw another opportunity to share his experience, this time about what worked best for blogging and ecommerce. 

The format was different – video instead of a written post, web building instead of hiking trails – but the same instinct underneath.

That instinct, to share what he knew rather than just consume what others said, became the foundation of everything.

Six months of silence

But having something worth sharing and having people show up to hear it are two very different things.

For the first six months, nobody watched. He wasn’t sitting on savings or coasting on a side income. He was broke, filming in a rented room, with no evidence that any of this was worth it.

What kept him going was a simple goal. 

“Nobody watched my content, but I really wanted the opportunity for at least some people to hear me out,” he says. 

So he stayed consistent, uploading multiple videos a week. And they weren’t polished. By his own account, the early ones were a mess. But he believed what he was teaching had value, so he kept going. 

He published, refined, and showed up on a schedule, even when the audience didn’t exist yet. Until one video finally broke through.

He’d made something simple, a tutorial on building an ecommerce website, nothing he considered special. 

“I woke up and I looked at my phone and I had about 200 views. And that was a lot,” he says. 

People were leaving comments. They were asking questions. After six months of silence, 200 people felt enormous. And that was all the proof of concept he needed.

If you want to see the kind of tutorial he’s known for now, here’s his walkthrough on how to create an ecommerce website:

“I have a whole business now, all because of your video”

A decade and more than 60 million views later, Darrel has the numbers most creators chase. But the ones he’s most proud of are the messages he gets.

Scroll through his comments, and you’ll see people thanking him for being so helpful. How his videos helped them create their first website, solve a critical problem with a client site, or finally launch the online store they’d been putting off for years.

Some go further. As Darrel tells it, people write to say things like: “Because of your video, I started an agency. I have a whole business now. I’ve got my wife, my kids, everything is set, all because of your video. Thank you.” His reaction is simple. It’s a lot to take in.

When someone tells you a free video is the reason their family is taken care of, the view count stops being the point.

Think big and don’t limit yourself

If there’s one idea Darrel repeats more than any other, it’s to not limit yourself. 

“Anyone can pick up a camera, start a TikTok or YouTube channel, talk about what they want, put their link, and make money. And it’s actually easier now than ever,” he says.

It’s the type of mindset that propelled Darrel forward. 

Beyond his English channel, his content now runs on separate channels in seven other languages, with thumbnails and full videos produced in each language by his team. 

Across all eight, he’s built an audience of more than 800,000 subscribers, turning one creator’s body of work into something a global audience can actually learn from in their own language.

The same approach (start, build, and stay consistent) applies whether you’re a creator, a freelancer, or a small business owner testing an idea for the first time.

Darrel never planned any of it. He built a website about his hikes, got curious about how it worked, and started sharing what he learned. 

The business came later, on the back of just beginning. 

You don’t need the full plan, the audience, or the proof that it’ll work. You need a starting point and the willingness to keep going past the quiet stretch.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to build the thing you keep thinking about, Hostinger Horizons lets you start by simply describing the website or web app you have in mind. 

No code, no setup headaches, just your idea taking shape. It’s the simplest way to get off zero, the same place Darrel started.