stefan drury

This evening, I watched my YouTube subscriber count tick over 20,000.

I remember at the start of this year I had just over 3,000 people subscribed to my channel. That number was huge to me, I couldn’t comprehend that 3,000 people would want to not only watch the videos I’d posted so far, but click a button to say they wanted to watch more videos from me in the future too.

I considered every one of you as someone with similar interests to me, an online friend, but someone who had chosen to invest their time in my creative work. And considering that time is the single most important asset we have in life, I didn’t take it lightly.

So I decided to set myself a target for 2018 – to produce two quality videos per week that would entertain, inform, or motivate viewers to have their own adventures. I told my wife I was doing this, and she said “oh, are you going for 10,000 subscribers by Christmas” and I said “nope, I think I can get 20,000”. We both laughed, had a cup of tea, and thought little more of it.

Fast forward to today (which happens to be Halloween) and spookily the total is now over 20,000 and still continues to rise.

Thank you

Therefore I wanted to write this post to say – thank you. Thank you to each and every one of you 20,000 amazing people who have invested your time in watching my content. Thank you for watching my videos, if you’ve ever clicked (or ‘smashed’, depending on what channels you watch) the like button, left a comment, reached out to me via social media, or have met me in person on our travels.

This YouTube journey has been the most humbling, challenging, but rewarding creative undertaking of my life so far. It’s encouraged me to wake up at 5.30am every morning to edit videos, transcribe subtitles, organise adventures or plan content. To spend my spare moments creating graphics, or replying to comments. It’s encouraged me to get up off the couch and go make content to put into the videos, but most of all it’s challenged me to push myself, to not settle, to keep on moving and to keep thinking of ways I can have more adventures every single day, because now I get to share it all with you.

So, thanks again.

I’m planning a big giveaway for reaching this milestone to say thanks. Stay tuned for that.

I also have to say that I love the YouTube platform, without it I wouldn’t be in this position and I’m convinced I wouldn’t have the same levels of motivation to plan, execute and share my adventures in the same way. Sure the system could improve in some areas, but every platform or system in the world could improve in some ways, but I love creating and sharing content via YouTube. So if anyone from YT is reading this, thanks to you too.

What’s next?

This is just the start. I have so many aviation and travel plans, some I can share but some are not quite ready to reveal just yet. (Not trying to be mysterious or clickbaity, but honestly I can’t talk about some adventures yet as they involve other people). But in the pipeline are flying adventures in New Zealand, travelling to South East Asia to check out air travel and holiday destinations over there, adventures in Tasmania and the East Coast of Australia in the Cirrus SR22, and a huge adventure next year that involves flying, mountains, glaciers, and some very different types of aircraft (such a tease, sorry).

So thanks for helping being part of the journey so far. I can’t wait to share the next phase with you as well.

Your flying friend,
Stef