Even Through Humble Beginnings, Persistence Wins Over All, Says Gary Vaynerchuk The VaynerMedia co-founder and CEO goes back to his start in a heartfelt blog post.
By Nina Zipkin
While watching the people you admire at the top of their game, it can be easy to forget that they had to start from somewhere too. With that in mind, this week, VaynerMedia CEO and co-founder Gary Vaynerchuk took some time to celebrate 12 years of creating long-form video content and reflect on how much has changed since then.
Though today Vaynerchuk has a giant, devoted audience of more than 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, 3 million Instagram followers and 1.68 million Twitter followers, his first video project was as casual as they come.
Related: What Gary Vaynerchuk Learned by Experimenting on Himself"I asked somebody on my team at Wine Library to run to Best Buy, pick up a little Canon camera, set it up and hit record. I picked three bottles of wine and put them on a table. I reviewed the wines and I filmed it," he recalls in a blog post.
Vaynerchuk attributed the success of not just his video projects but all of his endeavors to consistency, patience and always stopping to appreciate every milestone along the way. Even if they were seemingly modest achievements, they were important because they were signifiers of progress.
"I think people underestimate those small wins. They're so focused on getting to a million views, or a million followers, that they forget about how special it is to have 500 followers," Vaynerchuk explains.
Related: Gary Vaynerchuk Explains the Difference Between Entrepreneurs and Wantrepreneurs
He writes in the post about how much joy it brought him in the beginning, when a customer would come into the store and talk with him about an episode. He had a million subscribers but it showed that he was making an impact -- and that inspired him to keep going and work to engage his audience every day.
"I think perspective is what gave me the ability to keep moving. To be consistent and persevere and always try to provide value," Vaynerchuk writes. "I just understood that I had something and I felt that I could fight through. I was enjoying the process, I wasn't doing it to become rich, so I was never impatient. I built my reputation brick by brick by brick by brick, and 12 years later I looked up, and I've got a building."
