ICanStudy YouTube Thumbnail Growth Hack: Borrowing What Works

The most effective content creators understand a fundamental truth: strategic imitation beats untested innovation.

This principle explains why Justin Sung of ICanStudy directly copied The Diary Of A CEO's YouTube thumbnail style to generate more clicks and views.

These creators recognize what works and implement it without hesitation. They focus their energy on content creation while using design frameworks that have demonstrated success.

The Diary Of A CEO's YouTube Thumbnails Are Data-Tested Marketing Assets

Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary of a CEO, uses a specific thumbnail style that combines red and black colors with a single impactful quote. This design choice stems from concrete data, not mere preference.

Steven Bartlett tests these thumbnails through Facebook ads to determine which captions generate the highest click-through rates. The winning designs then transfer to YouTube, where they continue to perform well.

This method transforms thumbnails from simple images into psychology-backed marketing assets with proven conversion potential.

ICanStudy's Channel Surged After Adopting Proven Formats

Justin Sung made a critical decision for his ICanStudy channel. Instead of creating unique thumbnail designs, he recognized the effectiveness of Bartlett's approach and implemented it for his own content.

The results speak for themselves. His channel performance improved because the format already resonated with viewers. He bypassed the trial-and-error phase that most creators endure and jumped straight to what works.

Visual Patterns Create Viewer Recognition Across Industries

This pattern of strategic imitation extends far beyond YouTube. Look at movie marketing, where entire genres maintain consistent visual identities.

Horror movies use similar dark color schemes that signal their content to potential viewers while action movies stick to a reliable palette of orange and blue that triggers recognition and sets expectations.

These visual patterns create immediate recognition in the mind.

Proven Formats Beat Creative Experimentation for New Creators

For content creators just starting out, the message is clear: build upon what works. Instead of spending time and resources developing unique visual styles that may fail to connect, use established frameworks as your foundation.

This approach allows you to focus on creating quality content while benefiting from design patterns that already trigger positive responses from audiences. Once you establish a following, you can gradually develop your own distinctive style.

The smartest move for growth isn't always the most creative one—it's the one backed by evidence and results.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Open AI recently launched a TTS model cheaper than ElevenLabs. And its going to result in explosion of apps.

At just $0.015 per minute, OpenAI's TTS is ~85% cheaper than ElevenLabs—meaning you could get ~11K minutes of audio for ~$165 instead of paying ElevenLabs ~$1K+ for the same amount.

2/

This isn't 100% accurate as I tested but you can get a watermark removed by learning how to prompt and get a close enough output image.

3/

The more accounts you have, the more you can test your ideas.

There is no correlation between number of accounts and your MRR. More accounts just make it easier to test different variations of content.

This is only because all social media platforms throttle your reach if you post 100s of videos per day as the impressions get divided. It all depends on social media.

Previously, Twitter (now X) used to allow you to post infinite times. Now, X throttles your reach if you post too much after it copied TikTok algorithm.

Rabbit Holes

1. How to Reduce SaaS Churn to 0% (flow revealed) by Vasco Monteiro

2. Building a $2M Cold Outreach System in 30 minutes by Alex Peñuñuri

3. The pricing of GPT-4.5 and O1 Pro seems absurd. That's the point. by Ivelin Kozarev

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3. Josh Richards TikTok Growth Strategy (LINK)

4. ChapterMe's Smart YouTube Chapter Play (LINK)