Lessons learned from my first month of building in public on YouTube!
I've been thinking about starting a YouTube channel for quite some time now, but I never really had enough time and motivation to actually do it.
This month I made it one of my goals to start a channel, upload at least one video and get 50 subscribers. In this post, I want to share with you what I learned and all the things I struggled with a lot within the last few weeks.
Getting started
March began and I got started with working on my first video.
And very fast I realized that it will be much more challenging than I thought it would be. Looking back it makes perfect sense that it was since I had to figure out countless things like
- Which videos do I even want to create?
- What's my goal with these videos?
- What equipment do I need to make videos?
- How do I edit my videos?
- Where do I get background music from?
- Where can I share my videos?
- and much more...
To be honest, after the first few days I got a bit overwhelmed by all the things that I still had to learn. But I wanted to reach the goal I set for myself this month so I continued.
My goal of publishing at least one video this month and getting 50 subscribers turned out to be very helpful. It forced me to get something out fast, much like an MVP in the SaaS world. Finding 50 subscribers also made it impossible to take the whole month to create the video, since I also needed some time to share my video and grow my channel.
Shooting my first video
After watching countless videos on how to record videos and audio I started with my first video. I already had a rough script prepared and began to shoot it. And again I got a bit overwhelmed because as it turns out, it's super hard and very awkward to film yourself especially if you struggle a lot with perfectionism.
Nevertheless, I finished shooting what I wanted and started editing the video. During the editing, I noticed that
I hated the video idea and I didn't enjoy the process at all
One thing that I read all the time and that is resonating with me a lot is, that you have to enjoy the process and not just do things for the potential outcome, otherwise you will never stick to it during the harder times.
That left me with three choices:
- Finish it and publish something I don't like
- Dump it and give up
- Dump it and start over again
After some thinking, I decided to go with option 3 and just start over again.
Back to the beginning
This time I didn't want to do the same mistake again and took some time to actually figure out which kind of videos I would love to create. And that's how I came up with the idea of building in public on YouTube.
The inspiration for my videos came from some channels that I love to watch on YouTube: Indie Game Devlogs
I binge-watch these videos so I thought it would be a perfect format to create because I actually love watching them myself.
The question of what I want to build was not too hard to answer, since I anyway have a list of products I want to build in the future. So I picked one of my ideas that I think is exciting and I started building and filming.
Fast forward a few days I published my first video on the 10th of March!
Publishing my first video
I finally did it! I created a video that I liked and I published it on YouTube. My first goal for this month was reached.
Now I had to spread the word. Luckily the new video format fits perfectly with the communities I am anyway a lot in touch with. My Twitter followers (around 300 at that time) and IndieHackers!
After sharing my video on Twitter and on IndieHackers I was actually blown away by the result because I didn't really expect a lot from it. A few days after I published my first video I already hit my 50 subscribers goal, I think it was around 60-70 subscribers at that time. The video had around 300-400 views at that time. A huge success for me! :)
The future
Empowered by the success of the first video I even managed to publish a second video this month and again I received a lot of lovely comments on YouTube and Twitter about my video.
Today I have 127 subscribers at the end of my first month on YouTube and around 700 views on my videos. That's almost 3-times as much as I wanted to reach this month.
In April I want to continue what I am doing now and publish at least two more videos on my channel!
I am very excited about the future of this project and I have a lot of motivation to share more about my work on YouTube with you :)
If you haven't checked my channel out yet and you got curious, you can catch up with the last two videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPT88IiFOZRHBFFSRI5FQJw
Indie hackers selling to indie hackers?
The quality of your content is always so high. Really impressed! 👍
And I love the pointer to indie game devlogs. I didn't know that existed. I'll have to check it out.
I highly recommend checking them out. But be careful, it's addictive 😄
An interesting idea of a video. I'm glad you didn't give up because you 'hated the process'. I just started making videos and it has been harder than I thought. But I'm learning.