My channel hit 500 subscribers last Tuesday and the video that did it was a total accident
I've been posting for 14 months and was sitting at 480 subs for weeks, then last Tuesday I uploaded a quick clip from my kitchen in Reno where I burned my hand on a pan and just kept talking about cooking. That one video got 22k views and pushed me to 500. I never planned it, I just didn't stop recording when things went wrong.
My cousin in Tucson had a similar thing happen when she dropped a whole tray of cookies on camera and just laughed it off instead of cutting. Seems like viewers can smell when something is real, even if real means a little bit of chaos. The stuff we plan to death never does as well as the stuff that just happens.