Luck is obviously a factor along with survivorship bias but you'll notice if you've done any research that a very large portion of relatively successful to highly successful creators did not start out with wanting to grow their audience but focused on the content they wanted to make and were caught unawares by the reception to their work

To expand on this a bit (I know you mentioned you didn't want unsolicited advice, but I think this is fundamentally important), there is a glut of good marketers with not much product. Ideally, you'd want to be a good marketer with a good product, but barring that the goal is to have a good product first if that makes sense. Otherwise, you won't have something that will keep the audience coming back since they have an ocean to choose from.