In 2018, a new Chinese-language YouTube channel started filming with a lean team, no content calendar, and subscriber numbers that would not impress anyone. I know its founder, Bernard Hiew, personally, and I have been advising him on and off ever since. By 2019 the Musang King Channel had passed 100,000 subscribers, all of it organic. By 2021 it had passed 200,000, and today it is past 300,000. None of that happened by accident.
The quality argument
My first contribution was not a growth hack. It was an argument about quality. I pointed the team at creators like MKBHD and made the case that in the long run, quality filming drives viewership, and that equipment has to match what you intend to film. For a lean team this meant real investment and real sacrifice up front, before a single number moved. They made it. It is the same bet on quality I made building OpenMinds from two tables.
Then the boring things
Quality does not survive on enthusiasm. So we built the unglamorous machinery around it: a content calendar, production timelines, and proper SOPs covering everything from planning to shooting. After the shoots came the part most teams skip. Everyone sat through the rough cuts to the final cut, giving and taking feedback, improving with every pass. That review habit ran as a norm for the first year or so, and it is what made the quality consistent rather than occasional.
Out of this came the framework the team still uses today: Consult, Conceptualise, Create. It proved something to Musang King Group and to the brands watching. With proper strategy, a channel can grow without buying its audience.
The opposite bet
Here is the part I consider the real lesson. At the time, and honestly still today, the Chinese-language content market rewarded pranks and loud, obnoxious formats. That was the proven route to viewership. Musang King Channel bet the other way: real content, real storytelling, a grounded team filming the daily lives and reality in front of them.
The bet extended to money. When branded content arrived, the team insisted on driving the storytelling narrative themselves rather than handing the pen to the client. Plenty of channels say that. Very few hold the line when the invoice is large.
The audience repaid it with something rarer than subscribers: attention. Videos running past twenty minutes sustain over 40 percent retention, which anyone who works in YouTube will tell you is not normal.
What growth bought them
The business grew in step with the channel, and the COVID period proved the brand was real. While others went quiet, the team went out and filmed local businesses that were struggling, giving them free highlights and honest advice. Their largest production to date is at the other end of the scale: coordinating a team of KOLs on a multi-day excursion and shoot on a destination island for Sunplay.
One footnote
Nothing flopped outright, but one pattern repeats. Every time the channel drifts back towards the market norm of prank-style content, the numbers never match what the true-to-brand work achieves. The audience they built came for the real thing, and they can tell the difference. That, more than any single tactic, is the case study.
If you are trying to grow a channel or a brand and want an honest read on where you stand, start a conversation.
