Welcome to Creators on the Rise, where—in partnership with global creator company Jellysmack—we find and profile breakout creators who are in the midst of extraordinary growth.
It tells you right there in the banner for Jorge Soto‘s YouTube channel: “this guy has infinite stories.”
And, while we’re all used to a little internet hyperbole, with Soto, his roster of stories from surviving school and retail hell truly seems endless.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
Like a few other Creators on the Rise featurees, Soto got his start on social media during the pandemic. It was “quarantine boredom,” he says, that inspired him to download TikTok. He started with bite-size stories, and his first videos would get 50, maybe 100 views. That was already a lot by his standards, he says, but soon those 50 to 100 views per video became 5,000 to 10,000 views, and then they crept into the hundreds of thousands, and eventually into the millions.
At that point, Soto–who’s 21 now–decided, “I absolutely love every single moment of this, so you know what? Let me go all in.”
Soto spent about 18 months solely building his TikTok account. Then a (very wise, in our opinion) creator friend told him to start putting his stuff on YouTube Shorts. In April 2021, he did just that–and since then, he’s grown his channel Horchata Soto to over 2 million subscribers and 100+ million views per month.
Monthly view and subscriber count data from Gospel Stats.
Soto grew his TikTok account and the early days of his YouTube channel off short content, but over the past year, he’s been expanding. He’s now doing longer-form content, so people can be treated to multiple minutes of his wisdom about things like working at Walmart, school cafeteries, every single Dunkin’ in his state, and much much more. He’s also started streaming on Twitch, where he has 10,000 followers.
Going into 2023, Soto wants to expand even more and lean into the vlog style he’s been taste-testing. He has ideas about returning to his old elementary school, the setting of many of his stories.
Above all, he says, “We want this year to be bigger than last year.”
Check out our chat with him below.
Tubefilter: Pretend somebody’s reading this and they’ve never seen any of your videos, they don’t know anything about you. Can you give me a little bit of background on where you’re from and how you ended up on YouTube?
Jorge Soto: Yes! I’m born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, and I’m still here currently. My parents are both of Guatemalan descent, and I’m a first-gen here. My content is skits and storytimes primarily, where I tell a story about everyday life. For example, I used to work in retail, at Walmart specifically. I talk about all of those experiences, the good, the bad, the ugly, and also my going to public school here in Rhode Island, a lot of stuff happened here. A lot of crazy things. I talk about that whole experience as well.
Now recently, we’ve been trying to explore a little newer things. Now we vlog, now I stream on Twitch, and a bunch of other things as well, and we’ve been switching to long format as well.
Tubefilter: How did you originally end up starting a channel?
Jorge Soto: I started literally in March 2020, quarantine boredom. That’s why I started. I started on TikTok first, and I had no following, no connections, nothing. When I was first starting, some of my videos were getting 50 to 100 views, which is a lot for me. It was a lot for me back then. It was kind of fun, and then it just snowballed little by little to 500, 1,000, 10,000, up in the millions and I was like, “Oh, not only is it getting a good reception, I absolutely love this. I absolutely love every single moment of this, so you know what, let me go all in.”
I was on TikTok for about a year and a half. Then one of my buddies, a good creator friend, was popping on YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts is like the TikTok clone of YouTube. He showed me how crazy his views are and the money, everything, how much he was making, just the success he had on YouTube Shorts. So I was like, “Okay, let me just repurpose my TikToks and post those on YouTube.” I was doing that for six months, and honestly, I really only saw a little bit of growth. Then, this was back in November 2021, that was where my first Short really took off.
Tubefilter: Do you remember which video that was?
Jorge Soto: Yes, I remember which video it was, it was called Group Projects. It was a video I posted back in August and it didn’t blow up until November, so it was roughly three or four months after.
Ever since that, I was just studying the algorithm, studying the analytics, and seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t work, and just having fun with it throughout the whole time. In November I had 14,000 subscribers, and a year and a couple of months later, almost 2.5 million.
Tubefilter: What’s your growth been like on YouTube? Has it been just steady?
Jorge Soto: It, fortunately, has been steady. Of course, you have your amazing months. November through January of last year, those were the best months. I’d say we were literally gaining 100,000 subscribers every week. Just insane growth. Now it has gone down, if that’s what you want to call it, it’s now it’s 150,000 to 100,000 every month.
It’s still amazing, it’s still steady growth, it’s phenomenal growth. The main goal, of course, we want to grow, but the main goal that we had for a long period of time was getting all the Shorts viewers–because all of my subscribers are coming from my Shorts–I wanted to transition to a long format. The main objective was getting those Shorts viewers to transition to long-form viewers, which was very, very hard, but fortunately, I think we’ve been solely doing that.
Tubefilter: Can you talk a little bit about that, going from short-form to long-form? I feel like that’s something a lot of people are struggling with.
Jorge Soto: Yes. I definitely see a lot of people struggling with it, and I’ve seen a lot of people have amazing success with it. I would just learn from the people who really succeeded. Again, my mentor, his name was BrentTV, and he has an insane YouTube channel as well. Popped on YouTube Shorts and did the long format successfully. I saw what he was doing.
For me, I do storytimes, and it’s 30 seconds, 40 second storytimes on Shorts, and then two to three minutes in long-form. It’s the same content, just longer, if that makes sens. Because I know, I’ve seen a lot of people do the complete opposite. They pop on Shorts and they do one thing and then their long format is a completely other thing and they won’t get the same viewership, which it makes sense. There’s a reason why that happens. What I was doing was I was getting a 30-second Short and could turn into a two-minute storytime. Also, I was using my Shorts success to my advantage by saying, “Hey, so this happened to me, and if you want to hear the rest, the full video is on my YouTube.” I still do that. I still do that, and we see a correlation with that.
If the Short does really, really good, then the video will do just as good or would do really good as well. It’s a correlation. You see the jumps in Shorts and the jumps in long videos and it’s just because of the way that we were strategizing this by being like leaving Shorts viewers with a taste of the long video by a little cliffhanger and telling them, “Hey, click this video.” I would also leave the link in the comments by pinning it in the comments and saying, “Hey, I’m herding all of the comments, by the way,” which we do, trying to engage in the long format and making sure people have a purpose to watching it and making sure you stick around.
Tubefilter: I feel like along with expanding the actual content of your Shorts videos to long-form, you carry over the same quick editing style and framing. How do you pull off that consistency of style?
Jorge Soto: I’d say I was very, very fortunate the style that I enjoyed making and that I enjoyed doing was easier to transition from short-form to long-form, because storytimes have always been a thing on YouTube. Skits have always been a thing on YouTube. Just getting that chemistry and then just combining it with the success and the retention that Shorts can have–combining those two things, I feel like, is what really made the long-form succeed. Because, for example, I still keep subtitles in the long-form. I still do the same, all that stuff, so it’s literally just a horizontal Short. That’s what I’d say. That’s what I call it.
Tubefilter: Yeah, subtitles are a huge part of that style consistency.
Jorge Soto: Subtitles and also the storytimes. In the long format, it’s a five-minute video for example, but there’s certain chunks…It can be three to four storytimes in one. It’s not just one long five-minute one, because I’ve noticed that’s just how my brain works. I just like writing little chunks of stories and just combining them in one long video, which can actually be divided into four separate Shorts. I think that has really succeeded in terms of [long-form] retention because retention is a big thing as well. You can see the retention of the long videos, how people don’t click off, which is really, really amazing. We’ve been really fortunate to find ways to succeed and play with the algorithm.
Tubefilter: You keep saying “we,” can you tell me about your team?
Jorge Soto: I just like saying “we” because…I don’t know! It’s a very small team. It’s just me and my editor Cisco. He’s been editing with me since February, but full-time since June or July. I take care of all the writing, I take care of all of the filming and everything. He takes care of the editing side and I review the video before it goes up, review the editing, and re-edit anything that I want to. It’s just really cool having that person by your side throughout this whole time, because it does avoid certain things like burnout, and also helps out with some brainstorming. Just having that little backbone support really helps out a lot. It helps out a lot.
We also have hired another editor. It’s a good friend of mine as well and since I stream on Twitch now, we get the highlights and we get the best parts, turn them into videos, and upload them on a separate channel, which has been very successful as well. That’s what my buddy does now.
Tubefilter: What made you want to start streaming? That’s like going from Shorts to long-form to the longest possible form.
Jorge Soto: I’m always just exploring, finding new things to do. I was evolving. I was doing new things, and streaming is really fun because for one. I get to show myself a little bit more. I feel like I would already do that with the storytimes, but streaming has a bit more of a raw feel.
Also, you want to have more and more content, and create more content, so again, you can get the highlights and create a whole new channel around that, which has been very successful as well. I was mainly looking at it and two routes: one, just having fun, and two, a business standpoint. “Hey, let’s make some more content, and let’s just do some things that we can’t do in a storytime.” Reactions, gaming. I also feel like this is a whole new realm where I can turn this whole streaming format into different channels.
We’re just testing the waters now by streaming. If I enjoy it and if the audience enjoys it, then hey, maybe we can do a gaming channel or reactions channel in the future.
Tubefilter: So obviously you’re tracking your audience crossover between your Shorts and your long-form on YouTube, but are you monitoring that on a broad scale? Do you see people coming from YouTube to Twitch? How is that working for you?
Jorge Soto: So YouTube Studio, which is where we can see the whole algorithm in all the numbers, that’s very helpful in terms of the success from Shorts to long-form. How many Shorts viewers are coming from long-form, how many are just natural long-form viewers that we have gotten that are brand new.
For streaming, it’s really hard to transition from one platform to another. Doesn’t matter what platform. TikTok to Instagram, TikTok to YouTube to Twitch, whatever, it’s very hard. Trying to get those viewers to watch is insanely difficult, but I feel like we have slowly gotten a good chunk of viewers to watch our streams. Because I’m very, very new to streaming, and I’m not prioritizing, it’s not like, “Oh, we need to hit a certain amount of viewers every stream.”
It’s more like, “Let me just make sure I have fun and get more comfortable.” Once I feel very, very comfortable, then we can promote it way more. I feel like I’m promoting it a lot now, but I also feel like I still haven’t reached that promotion potential, if that makes sense. That marketing potential for streaming. Once I really get that, then I’ll definitely start being like, “Oh, let’s do a stream!” Now we have to certain benchmarks for Twitch and everything, but I’m still just having fun with it.
Tubefilter: What’s your current schedule look like weekly? Your production schedule across all platforms? That’s a very complicated question.
Jorge Soto: No, no. It has changed in the past couple of weeks, but for a good chunk of time, it’s Monday through Friday. Mondays is our Shorts day, so that’s when we make our Shorts, that’s when we make all of our storytimes. I do six to seven in one day, in one sitting. That’s what I do with my editor. We figure it out, and those are all the Shorts that will go out throughout the whole week. Then Tuesday, we do a long video, so that’s when we do just a long storytime. We devote all of our day into writing it, editing it, filming it, and then we upload it.
Wednesday is more of a relaxed day. That’s when I stream. We also look at the schedule if we have to do anything, film certain things, or if there’s something that we have to do or upload certain Shorts, look at clips for Twitch. That’s when we do just more of just a backlog day.
Thursdays we do another long video, and it typically comes out that same day or that Friday. Friday is another one of those chill days. It’s just we either create more Shorts or promote the long videos. We promote long videos, we look at any clips, or maybe we can even do another long video if we want to if we have the energy and the time to do it. The schedule, at the end, it’s roughly seven Shorts and two to three long videos every week on top of streaming and those clips as well.
Tubefilter: Very busy schedule, to say the least.
Jorge Soto: Very intense, but hey, we try to rest Saturday and Sunday. Sunday definitely, I try to rest. Saturdays you notice typically, “Oh, something has to go up, so let me just make sure it looks good.”
Tubefilter: You said you write all your scripts yourself. Are you writing scripts this week for this week’s videos, or how long does it take you to go from conception of a video to actually producing it?
Jorge Soto: So everywhere I go, I always have sticky notes. If I have an idea, I’ll just write it down real quick. “All right, let’s write this down.” Then when it’s time for me to actually write a script, I go through all my sticky notes, all my ideas. “Okay, what can we write today?” Sometimes I have an idea in advance. For example, Christmastime. We’re going to do a Christmas storytime around that, around the holiday season, obviously. Other days will be like, “All right, what can we come up with? What can we do?”
We have a couple of series that we can rely on. For example, I have a Walmart series now with long videos, so I can always rely on that in terms of, this is something that people will watch, this is something I can write quickly. Other days, I want to do something brand new. Let’s just do a completely different storytime that I haven’t done yet. “Let’s vlog!” But we do have a calendar that is probably a week or two in advance of just ideas and videos.
Tubefilter: Gotcha. You told me you are moving to Los Angeles for six months. Is that for content purposes or is that just because you want to be in L.A.? Or both?
Jorge Soto: I never thought I would be going to L.A. I love being in Rhode Island. That’s why it’s only a six-month trip. It’s not like a whole move-out. All of my stuff is going to be in a storage unit, and we’re going to be at an Airbnb, the whole team, and we’re going to be there for six months.
The main reason why we decided to do that was, for one, just change up the content a little, because I feel it has been getting a little repetitive, frankly. I’ll be vlogging a little bit out there. Just coming up with new stories, collabing a little would be very helpful. Two, is just to get connections. I just want to get a couple of connections, because I do have a mentor, but he’s in Pittsburgh. No one’s really here in Rhode Island. Just getting all those connections and just coming back here with all that I’ve grown, I thought it would be very, very helpful. Just a little change of life.
When I do come back, I would love to buy a house here or just figure something out here. Just have more of…how to explain it? Not settle down, but more just, “Okay, let’s just lay back here and just continue growing here. Enjoy being here.”
Tubefilter: How old are you?
Jorge Soto: I’m 21. I just turned 21.
Tubefilter: Okay, so already looking at houses, that’s not bad at all.
Jorge Soto: Yes. Not too bad. [laughs]
Tubefilter: Do you have any other upcoming plans for things that you want to do content-wise in the next year or so?
Jorge Soto: Yes, definitely. I always love evolving. I love changing things up. Before, sometimes, I was doing skits, Hispanic skits, and before that I was doing a lot of other videos, so I always change up. I love the storytime format, which is why I’ve stuck around with it for a while. I really do want to change it up a little more vlogs, because that’s what we did in the summer. We did a lot of vlogs, and those are really good. Doing those again, just experimenting. I really want to go back to my old elementary school, funny enough, because all my story times were around that and just going back there, maybe talking with the kids or just creating a whole video around that by donating to the school. I would love to do that.
There’s a bunch of ideas that I’d say we have. We just really haven’t flourished them out yet, but just a lot of crazy things that we really want to do. We want this year to be bigger than last year.
Tubefilter: Okay, last question: If you could give one piece of advice to an up-and-coming creator, somebody who’s just starting out, what would it be?
Jorge Soto: Very cliche, but consistency. Consistency is key. I’ve seen creators who have had an amazing start, but then they just tend to stop. Or vice-versa, they have really slow starts and then they’re just like, “Oh, this is dumb, I’m not going to continue doing this.” They just stop. They’re a month in and I’m like, “Hey, what if you were still doing it? You never know where you’d be.”
I would always ask for advice from bigger creators, like, “Hey, what’s the secret to pop off on YouTube Shorts, on all these other platforms?” All they would say was, “Just continue posting. One of them is bound to blow up. One of them is bound to take off.”
I was posting on YouTube Shorts for six months with no success. I was just like, “Okay, let’s keep on going. I’m just going to keep on going, because you never know. It’ll take off.” Practice patience. Patience, I feel like, is the hardest thing in the world, honestly. Just waiting. There’s amazing rewards when it comes to patience and just waiting it out.
Jellysmack is the global creator company that powers multi-platform social media growth for video creators, media companies, brands, celebrities, and its own online communities (Beauty Studio, Oh My Goal, Gamology, House of Bounce and more). The company’s proprietary technology optimizes, distributes, and promotes video content, resulting in meaningful audience growth and increased revenue in record time. Jellysmack is currently partnered with hundreds of talented creators including MrBeast, PewDiePie, Like Nastya, and Bailey Sarian. Looking to Go Bigger on social? Visit jellysmack.com.
