Backstab Club x Nil Ojeda
Content Production
Turning another creator’s viral challenge into a growth engine for our own channel
How we 10x a channel by collabing with one of Spain's biggest creators without him ever knowing.
CONTEXT
Backstab Club is an entertainment channel in Spanish we started as a side project. We wanted to see how fast we could monetize and grow a channel from scratch. After 12 videos and testing 3–4 different formats, we weren’t seeing the growth we expected. At just 400 subscribers, we needed to get creative and find a way to scale the channel fast.
BRIEF
Instead of inventing a completely new format, we looked for an opportunity to interact with an existing story already happening online.
[ DETAILS ]
SERVICE
Content Creation
INDUSTRY
Entertainment
LANGUAGE
Spanish
CHALLENGE
After publishing the first 12 videos, nothing was working
Backstab Club started as an experimental YouTube project to explore new formats for social games, reality shows and competitive challenges.
We tested four different formats, producing three videos for each. None of them managed to break through. The channel was only a few months old, with around 400 subscribers, and our videos were averaging between 500 and 800 views.
At that point, we realized we needed a stronger hook.
OPPORTUNITY
Instead of trying to generate attention, we decided to capture it
At the time, Spanish YouTuber Nil Ojeda was running a large-scale challenge series where he was travelling across Spain with €100,000, daring people to find him and win the money. Very similar to one of our formats, "Urban Hunters".
Midway through the series, Nil mentioned on Instagram that the format was not performing as expected. The main issue was narrative: people were trying to find him". But what we realized is that the actual problem was no real antagonist driving the story forward. That observation sparked an idea.
What if we made a series trying to steal his money and become their antagonist?
"This guys are really smart at making content"
Nil Ojeda
5M Followers (Youtube)
Quote
STRATEGY
A script designed to get Nil's attention and be featured in their own show
The plan was simple: track Nil across Spain and intercept the prize money before anyone else could. To make it entertaining, we wrote a series of increasingly ambitious attempts to steal the cash, each one more difficult than the last.
In a previous episode, Nil had mentioned he was searching for a specific Spider-Man VHS tape. We realized that if we managed to find it and hand-deliver it to him, he’d almost certainly include us in his video—it was simply too good of a story to ignore. So we added one final twist: we hid a GPS tracker inside the VHS tape.
The plan worked perfectly. We made it into Nil’s video, and by the time our own video was released a few days later, his audience was already waiting to see our side of the story.
Instead of waiting for the YouTube video to gain traction on its own, we amplified the launch with three short-form videos across multiple platforms. We moved so quickly that the first clip showing us hiding the GPS tracker inside the VHS tape was published before Nil’s episode had even been released.
Key Insight
RESULTS
What started as an experimental channel got monetized overnight.
The short-form clips quickly went viral, generating several million views across platforms.
On Instagram Reels, the three videos reached roughly:
4 million views
700,000 views
300,000 views
On TikTok, the account grew from 9 followers to almost 5,000 followers, with videos reaching:
2.7 million views
800,000 views
700,000 views
When the 15-minute YouTube video was finally released, the audience was already invested in the story. The video reached around 60,000 views, becoming by far the most successful video on the channel.
The impact on the channel was immediate:
Subscribers grew from roughly 400 to around 2,000
The channel reached monetization largely thanks to this single video
