Self-doubt is a part of every life, career and business. And boy, is it one that exists within myself and Zandland.
A year ago today, we launched the trailer for Human. The idea was a show built on understanding people and complex topics, giving them the time they deserve, in a world that was more divisive than ever. I wanted it to be a place for people to actually hear others out. A platform to challenge people, challenge yourself, the way we think. And I wanted it to be made the way me and the Zandland team wanted, in the style we wanted. It was going to be fully self-funded with complete independence…
I remember hovering over the publish button feeling pretty riddled with self-doubt and anxiety. Which, to be fair, is not an uncommon feeling.
I’m a guy who doesn’t come from money. I grew up in Liverpool, the son of a beautiful Scouse mum and a slightly crazy Iranian father. I went to a school nobody would call great, and genuinely didn’t even know what a documentary was until I was about 19 years old. I played video games instead! Films like the ones we make now were just not part of my world. So I always doubted my ability to be good at anything, never mind being one of the people who made a career making documentary films.
Then, after kind of getting over that fear and deciding to give it a go, I moved on to doubting I could ever get a job, or survive at the BBC, where I spent nearly a decade surrounded by people who seemed born for it in a way I was sure I wasn’t. Once I’d got past that, I upgraded to doubting I could set up a company. An actual documentary business, with my name on the risk. That seemed nuts. It was nuts.
And once I’d moved past that one, I took on the fun task of doubting whether I could be a YouTuber. Fully funding an original content business with my team, on our own terms. One where we make the final calls, carry the risks, and carry the mistakes. When we decided to go ham on creating our own documentary universe, I didn’t really know if it would work… or what working even meant. The first episode of Human came out two months after that trailer, in October 2025. In less than a year, we’ve now got over 100k subs on YouTube (105k and counting), had our first 1 million video, and are now pulling in millions of views a month on YouTube alone. So I thought this was a good time to look back, and smell the bacon.
Also side point: I’ve realised the doubt never actually goes away. It just continually evolves into more terrifying self-doubts as life gets increasingly full of responsibility.
The Results
Since the first video (below), the show has massively overperformed my expectations, and we’ve built a community of millions of people who have watched our films, engaged in genuinely profound conversations, and treated people who are different to them with respect.
From a standing start, in ten months, just on YouTube (ignoring our other social media wins): we’ve made 14 original documentaries, more than the one a month, every month, we promised. Over 100k subscribers (now 105k). Monthly views up 9x, from 127k in our first month to well over a million in July, August is going to be even bigger. Our first original just crossed a million views (link above), and our long form films now average about a quarter of a million views on YouTube alone within their first two months.
And the thing that is great isn’t the views… It’s the watch time.
People don’t just click on our films. They stay. Over 725,000 hours of watch time on YouTube alone at well over 10 minutes per view per session on our channel… And a third of it is people watching on their actual TVs. So people are seeing a real bit of premiumness with our films, watching them, with their family (maybe not gooning) on the sofa. Which is exactly where I always hoped they’d end up.
On a platform that used to be short and loud, people are choosing to sit with our long, careful films about complicated people. And then commenting on them, mostly with more thought and respect than on other places on the internet. That was what I hoped, had no idea if it would work, and now I’m VERY happy it is.
Which brings me to something also cool, I now really know who a Zandlander (hopefully you reading this right now) actually is.
You’re most likely American, then British, then Australian. Which is cool, I like all of those places. The single biggest group of you lives in one city (maybe the greatest of all): London. Almost all of you are between 18 and 44. Six in ten of you are men, four in ten women, and a random but cool fact is that the women watching stay with the films longer than anyone else. And the longer you’ve been here, the deeper you go: returning viewers who come back watch a full two minutes more per view than someone arriving for the first time.
So, I think, that is you. Curious, incredibly cool, people, all over the world. Who give complicated stories their full attention and get more invested the longer they stay. Which is honestly, exactly the type of person I was hoping would apply for Zandland citizenship when we started.
So if that’s you… thank you!! Genuinely. Every one of those hours is someone trusting us with their time, and that means a lot, to me and the team.
The team behind it
Now on to the team. As this for me is all bananas (and nuts. My two favourite things)... and I want to say thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to watch and support Zandland. I recently brought on another couple of editors to the team, so we can up the cadence from one film a month to two full documentaries and a long form podcast interview every month. And whilst doing so, I was kind of pinching myself. Thinking back to that self-doubt, back to the sense that you never know how things will work, but actually most grateful for the fact that I have a team of people around me who really give a shit, on this mission of telling stories we think are powerful. You just cannot do it with a group of like-minded people who really care.
Zandland, and Human, are made by people who literally give everything to tell these stories (Ben, Freddie, Ayaz, Josh, Grace, Carrick, Ben, the lawyers! etc etc). Long days, hard shoots, the constant ups and downs that come with an original content business, the constant pivoting of strategies, me saying different things every 5 minutes, the uncertainty of what the hell will work, what success even looks like. The need to make money. And from all of this, I’m so insanely proud of the Zandland team. Everyone, including myself, has grown with the company. They’ve learned and improved and looked out for each other, and treated each other, and our subjects, with respect.
It’s all I ever really wanted with a business.
On being good enough
And here’s some honesty, and the reason I wrote all this down rather than just posting the numbers.
If you’re someone carrying that same voice around, the one that says people like you don’t get to do things like this, the truth is that it never fully shuts up. But, as I get older, I realise that the evidence of life becomes the best antidote to self-doubt. By doing things, you can slowly start to tell your own self doubt to f*** off… And the best way to prove it wrong is to press publish anyway.
The Zandland documentaries are the exact type of content I always wanted to make. So I’m very grateful to be able to make the,. And one thing I feel very comfortable to say is that the Zandland team is definitely good enough.
Thank you for being part of it!
Thanks for reading, and if you still want to hear more of me I went on Jamie Liang’s Great Company podcast to talk about my life, and some of the other docs we have coming up soon. So please listen.
Thanks
Ben Z