YouTube-based DevRel  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: YouTube-based DevRel - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [youtube-strategy, developer-relations, content-creation, devrel] author: Greg Baugues source: DevRel Conference reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY date created: 2024-12-19 08:30 --- # 🏷️ Title: YouTube-based DevRel ## 🧰 Action Inbox - [H1] Study YouTube best practices — read YouTube Secrets and YouTube Formula books #learning - [H2] Create weekly publishing schedule — commit to consistent shipping cadence #process - [H3] Start with packaging first — develop title and thumbnail before recording #strategy ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - [Plushcap.com Dev Tool Company Stats](https://plushcap.com) - [YouTube Secrets Book](URL) ## 📝 Summary - Greg Baugues shares lessons from growing a developer-focused YouTube channel from 0 to 8,500 subscribers in under a year - Traditional DevRel tactics (events, technical blogs) are losing effectiveness due to AI replacing search behavior - YouTube offers unique advantages for developers: low production barriers, engaged audience, comprehensive metrics - Success requires studying YouTube as a distinct platform with its own rules and best practices - Key challenges include time investment (50-60 hours per video), psychological barriers, and maintaining consistent shipping schedule ## 📖 Main Content Greg Baugues presents a compelling case for YouTube as the next evolution of developer relations. After nine years at Twilio's developer evangelism team, he pivoted to building a personal YouTube channel focused on developer content, achieving nearly 8,500 subscribers by focusing on AI development tools and coding tutorials. The traditional DevRel playbook centered on conference speaking and technical blog writing is losing effectiveness. AI assistants now solve coding problems directly in IDEs, reducing developers' reliance on Google searches that would lead to company blogs. This shift requires new approaches to reach and engage developer audiences. YouTube offers several advantages for developer content creators: minimal production requirements (just a computer and screen recording), access to a high-value audience with disposable income, and comprehensive analytics. The barrier to entry is relatively low since the combination of coding skills, speaking ability, and basic video production knowledge is rare. Success on YouTube requires understanding it as a distinct platform with unique best practices. The "packaging" of content—titles and thumbnails—determines whether anyone will watch, making it crucial to develop these elements before creating content. Adapting successful YouTube formats (like "X vs Y" comparisons) to developer tools can drive significant viewership. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=0) — [H1] Personal Story and Goal Setting - Key idea: Transitioned from 9 years at Twilio to independent YouTube creator - Evidence: "Set a goal of trying to grow that YouTube channel from zero to 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2025" #### ⏱️ [02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=150) — [H2] Traditional DevRel Playbook Breakdown - Key idea: Events and technical blog posts are losing effectiveness - Evidence: "When developers run into problems, they tend to solve that problem in the IDE via AI" #### ⏱️ [05:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=315) — [H2] YouTube Market Opportunity - Key idea: Most dev tool companies have small YouTube presence - Evidence: "Of 500 companies tracked, only 230 have more than 1,000 subscribers, only 80 have 10,000+" #### ⏱️ [07:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=465) — [H2] Developer YouTube Advantages - Key idea: Low technical barriers compared to other YouTube niches - Evidence: "You basically need a computer and a screen... Jeff doesn't even put his face on it" #### ⏱️ [09:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=570) — [H1] Studying YouTube as Platform - Key idea: YouTube requires learning distinct content creation principles - Evidence: "I felt like I crushed it... when the video came out, this is terrible video content" #### ⏱️ [12:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=720) — [H1] Packaging Strategy - Key idea: Title and thumbnail determine video success more than content quality - Evidence: "YouTube is a click and watch platform... spend 30% of time on concepts and titles" #### ⏱️ [15:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=920) — [H2] Adapting Successful Formats - Key idea: Borrowed "X vs Y" format from mainstream YouTube for developer tools - Evidence: "Cursor vs Claude Code... first video that gets 10,000 views... at 75,000 views" #### ⏱️ [18:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=1125) — [H2] Respecting Viewer Time - Key idea: Violating YouTube retention tactics to serve developer audience better - Evidence: "I'll spoil it in the beginning... got comments saying 'thank you for respecting my time'" #### ⏱️ [21:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=1290) — [H2] Time Investment Strategy - Key idea: Heavy time investment creates multiplied value through reach - Evidence: "60 hours... internet has engaged with that content for over 6,000 hours" #### ⏱️ [24:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=1455) — [H2] Process Optimization - Key idea: Delegate learning through expert interviews and existing content adaptation - Evidence: "Anthropic post... didn't have to come up with content from scratch" #### ⏱️ [27:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=1620) — [H2] Psychology and Consistency - Key idea: Publishing schedule crucial for overcoming perfectionism and isolation - Evidence: "My goal is to ship one video a week... do not miss two weeks in a row" #### ⏱️ [30:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=1845) — [H2] Career Advantages - Key idea: YouTube creates unfair advantage in job market - Evidence: "Instead of being one of thousand resumes... 100,000 people watched it" #### ⏱️ [32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY&t=1950) — [H2] Market Timing - Key idea: Constant new technology creates endless content opportunities - Evidence: "All videos I've made this year are about technologies that did not exist 12 months ago" ## 📚 References - [Plushcap.com Developer Tool Stats](https://plushcap.com) - [YouTube Secrets by Sean Cannell](https://www.youtube.com/secrets) - [YouTube Formula by Derral Eves](https://www.youtube.com/formula) - [Jay Clouse Learn YouTube Playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist) - [Patty Galloway Interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase - Traditional developer relations through conferences and blogs is becoming less effective as AI tools replace search-driven problem solving - YouTube offers unique advantages for developer content creators due to low production barriers and engaged audience - Success requires treating YouTube as its own platform with distinct rules, emphasizing packaging and consistent publishing schedules ## 📰 Newsletter **YouTube: The New DevRel Frontier** Developer relations is evolving rapidly. As AI assistants replace Google searches for solving coding problems, traditional tactics like technical blog posts are losing their reach. Greg Baugues shares compelling insights from growing a developer YouTube channel to 8,500 subscribers in under a year. The opportunity is significant: of 500 dev tool companies tracked, only 80 have more than 10,000 YouTube subscribers. For developers with speaking skills, learning basic video prod - Document Tags: [[devrel]] [[learning]] [[process]] [[strategy]] [[youtube]] - Summary: YouTube-based DevRel - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QA3xWesY Hello everybody. Uh my name is Greg. Uh oh man, it's so I'm just now looking out at all y'all. Uh it's amazing to see so many friendly faces and uh thank you all for coming here. Um so let me share a little bit about my story. Uh I had the privilege of joining Twilio's developer evangelism team in 2014. Uh Rob Spectre who's sitting right here hired me. Uh, I got to serve at Twilio uh for nine years and a couple days after my nine-year anniversary, I got laid off. Uh, that was about two years ago. Incredible. And Twilio was incredibly generous and it was an incredible time and I had this opportunity to try to instead of like just hopping back in the next thing, take some time and figure out, okay, I just did nine years of Debril. What do I want the next chapter to look like? Um, and I decided at the beginning of this year that I was going to start a YouTube channel and really focus on a personal YouTube channel. And I set a goal of trying to grow that YouTube channel from zero to 10,000 subscribers by the end of 2025. Uh, as of this morning, I'm right around 8,500 subscribers. So, I'm on pace probably to to hit the goal in the next few weeks. Um, and what I wanted to share uh is just some of the lessons learned there. I am so incredibly not an expert on YouTube. Uh I am an expert on starting from scratch on YouTube and trying to get to 8,500 subscribers at least because that's been my primary focus. So this talk is for anyone who's looking to get started either with your personal brand or starting up a YouTube channel. Um and in fact I am so confident in this I recently just changed my uh my title on LinkedIn to vibe coding YouTuber. Uh I don't know if you all saw the post by Thomas Tacic uh is like all my AI skeptic friends are nuts. And there's this line in there where he's talking about uh he says, you know, the a common objection is I don't understand the code. And he's like, are you a vibe coding YouTuber? I'm like, actually, I think that might actually be what I am today. It's been hard to figure out titles recently. Um, so I want to break this up into two parts. First is why YouTube? Like what is the opportunity here to do Devril over YouTube? And then second, I want to talk about how do you do YouTube? How do you get started on this? And just some lessons and tips I've learned along the way. Um, so first, why YouTube? Let me talk a little bit about the Devril playbook that we were doing at Twilio when I started, let's say 11 years ago. And I think I'll hit this pretty fast because I think this theme is going to be echoed a lot over the uh these next couple days. I would broadly describe the playbook that we ran uh on the evangelism team when I joined uh as being two primary tactics. The first was events. We traveled to a lot a lot of events. We spoke at we sponsored a lot of events. Um, you know, I think one just setting aside corporate budgets and zero interest rates and COVID and travel and all that stuff. Just personally, I just don't want to travel that much anymore. I have two girls. They're young. I don't have a ton of time with them. Like, they actually like spending time with me. I want to like soak that up while I have it. I I don't mind getting on a plane occasionally, but I just don't want to do it like I used to. Um, the second tactic, when we weren't on the road, we would write a lot of technical content. And the idea here is that we wanted to write blog posts so that when a developer ran into a problem, they have an IDE open and they ran into a problem, they would Google that problem and they would land on the Twilio blog and we would help them solve that problem. That was one big chunk of the portfolio of content that we would write. Uh I think it's safe to say that today when developers run into problems, they tend to solve that problem in the IDE via AI and they're not going and searching. They're not going to end up on your blog. And so over the last couple years, I've been thinking like, okay, so we had these two big pillars. Like a lot of my career, my Devril career was spent doing events and writing technical content. If I'm not going to do that, what do I do? Right? And so I spent a lot of time building stuff for the last couple years. It was really great to be uh leaving right at the same time all the AI stuff came up and I just started building stuff with AI. It was the most fun I'd had coding in a long time. And I wasn't sure if I was going to like start something. And what I found, I think this is the nature of both me and my ADD and then also just AI, is I'd work on something for a couple weeks and then I'd be like uh really excited about it and then I'd move on to the next thing and then the next thing and I felt like after a couple years of just spending time with AI, I didn't have a lot to show for it. I thought maybe I'd start like a SAS or something. And then I really like Devil. I like doing this. I was like, well, what if I made videos? Like what if videos was the output? What if I spent a couple weeks working on a thing and I made a video about it and the video was the product and then I could go on to the next thing and feel good because I had this thing to show for it. Um, and so I started doing AI cons or I started doing consulting for some various AI firms and our friend Matt Mai uh built this great tool called plushcap.com and he tracks the stats of a bunch of dev tool companies about 500 uh dev tool companies and he has these leaderboards of all their content and I was really interested in his leaderboard for YouTube because of the 500 companies he tracks only 230 have more than a thousand subscribers and of the 500 he tracks only 80 have 10,000 or more subscribers. And this was interesting to me because I was getting paid by some AI companies to create content for their YouTube channel, but a lot of them, the companies I working with, had fewer than 10,000 subscribers. And I thought, well, if I could grow my own channel to the place where I had more than 10,000 subscribers, then it would make more sense for them to publish content on my channel than on their own. And then now I'm building an asset as opposed to just like trading cash for for videos and whatnot. And so that's where I came up with this goal at the beginning of the year of I'm just going to focus on YouTube. The asset is going to be the YouTube channel. The thing, the product is going to be the YouTube channel and we'll see if we can grow this. Um, so let's talk a little bit about why you specifically as someone who's in Devril might want to consider doing YouTube and why I think we have a bit of an unfair advantage compared to other YouTubers, right? And because I think if you all have younger kids, uh, these days YouTuber is the most popular job. Uh it's what all the kids it's like how I wanted to be a baseball player when I was a kid, right? Like it is what the kids want to be when they grow up. But being a YouTuber is so hard. If you were to look at uh say uh Peter McKinnon is one of my favorite YouTubers. Uh uh he has multiple camera angles, all these cinematic shots. I spent a lot of time like studying other niches like woodworking. Uh these folks are are doing, you know, they got whole builds. They've got all these different amazing like film setups and whatnot. Uh this is probably the best developer YouTuber uh uh out there. This is Jeff from Fireship. He has we'll talk about him more in a little bit, but he has about five million subscribers. This is his setup. This is what's required like right in front of him to be the best developer YouTuber. Um you don't need a whole bunch of fancy camera equipment. You basically need uh a computer and a screen. Jeff actually doesn't even put his face on it. For folks who do, you need a single camera. you need some way to record your screen and you're good. Like that's how you can make content for this audience. Also, this audience happens to be like the audience that probably has the uh you know most disposable income, right? Like it is it is also in order to make content for this audience, you need to be a developer, right? You need to know how to write code. And so I've always enjoyed Devril because I don't feel like I'm a great developer. I don't feel like I'm a like a world-class public speaker, but I'm pretty good at both. And that gets you in this realm. To be successful in YouTube and in Devril YouTube, you need to be pretty good at code, pretty good at speaking, and you need to be like competent at video production. And that combination is just not something that a lot of people have. And so, I think YouTube, like you can take just a few months, learn enough video production, and be very successful in this realm, and all of a sudden, you're not facing a lot of competition. Like it's not like you know other YouTuber if you want to be really good at video games you just need to learn how to play video games right so you all have the prerequisite skills here plus a little bit of video editing and you can be a successful YouTuber uh and do this job that so many folks want to do uh the last part I think is really interesting about de YouTube sort of the perennial question of this conference how do you measure the impact uh YouTube has metrics like they have so many metrics you can tell exactly who's watching this you can tell where they are you can tell how long they engage with your content You can tell when they dropped off your video. You can tell uh all sorts of uh you know whatever data you want. This is probably the best uh tactic in terms of measurement for dero. All right, so let's talk about if you want to get started on YouTube, how do you get started? Uh first, you got to study YouTube. And I think the mistake that I made was not appreciating that YouTube is its own thing. There are so for instance, I've been giving talks at technical conferences for a long time. Uh and I feel good at storytelling and speaking to developer audiences. I gave this talk of the business software a couple years ago and I remember getting off stage and feeling like I crushed it, right? Like I just felt like like the room was with me and everything. When the video came out and I went and watched the video online, I was like, man, this is terrible video content. Like it was slow to get started. Uh that it just like I was trying to like do things with the room that didn't come across online. And the there are specific tactics that work on YouTube videos that you need to learn. And so at the beginning of this year, I started off and I was like, I'm just going to study this game. And so there's a couple books that I would recommend. You could take screenshots of or take pictures of this. Uh YouTube Secrets was great. There's another one called YouTube Formula. Uh there is, of course, you know, this is a whole field of folks who are trying to sell you on how to do this professionally. So there is hype. You got to like sort through that stuff. But I think reading a couple books on like how professional YouTubers do this stuff uh will get you very very far. They'll also help you understand more about the opportunity and the growth of YouTube and especially the growth amongst the younger demographics. Um I have a playlist called learn YouTube. Uh there are lots of folks who are teaching how to you uh learn YouTube. I really like Jayl Klouse is one of the guys that I study and he brings a lot of YouTubers on his channel. I just keep a playlist and when I'm working out or when I'm doing the dishes or whatnot, I'm just always listening to this. you can really learn some really great techniques and you what you want to do as a developer is go learn from the professional YouTubers and then bring that into the work that you're doing. Um if there's one person I'd recommend like just going like or even just if you just want to rewatch one video just to get started, I really like this interview from between Jay Klouse and Patty Galloway. Uh Patty Galloway is a consultant who's worked with Mr. Beast. uh really great uh just strategy and helping you figure out like how do you get started and what are the main things you want to uh think about. So let me show you one one of the first big lessons I had from YouTube and that is around packaging. Uh when I started doing work with clients, I would often have this mistakes. We come up with an idea for a video and say, "Okay, yeah, we're going to ship the video. I'll have it done on Friday." I do find estimating to be very very difficult here because uh uh videos about developer stuff has all of the estimation problems of software development plus all of the estimation problems of writing plus all the estimation problems of video editing. Uh and so what always happens to me is like yeah we'll have it done Friday. And then I get to like Friday. Uh and I'm like okay all right I have the video done. You know maybe I dropped in Slack. They previewed it. And so then I I go to YouTube and I upload the video and YouTube's like, "What's the title?" And I'm like, "Oh yeah, yeah, I need a title, don't I?" Well, it's a really it's a really good video, you know? So I was like, it's like, I don't know, Pyantic tutorial, Pyantic AI tutorial, whatever. And it's like, oh, you need a thumbnail. I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, I guess I need one of those, too. Like uh I I'll go to uh I'll go to Canva and I guess I'll I'll throw some words on the screen and use one of their templates. And one of the first things that I really learned from like Patty Galloway was the importance of packaging. And he says that when most folks get started on YouTube, they think, I'm just going to make a really great video and if I make it, people will watch. And he says, actually YouTube is a click and watch platform. You can make the best video in the world, but if nobody clicks on it, no one's going to see it. And so the title and the thumbnail are actually uh he says most folks do it at the end. He encourages his clients to spend like 30% of their time coming up with concepts and titles and thumbnails and to not do any video recording, to not do any writing until you have a title and a thumbnail that you are confident in, right? And so how do you come up with ideas for titles and thumbnails that are you confident in? And again, I would say go study YouTube. So for instance, if you were to look at Mr. Beast, uh Mr. Beast has a common theme. You'll see these all across different channels, right? Uh X versus Y, right? So you'll see it one versus a hund00 million car. Uh $1 versus hund00 million house. Uh $1 versus $250 million private island. And so for me, I started thinking like, okay, how do I adapt these themes that I know work other places into our realm? The first video I ever did where I had this idea and I had like a really clear picture of the concept before I did any work on the video was this one. is uh cursor versus claw code and and this came from just like studying and then like I had been playing with both these tools and this concept came to me before I sat down to record anything at all. Uh and this video I remember telling my wife I was like I was like I just had the idea for the video this is going to be my first video that gets 10,000 views. All right. And that video to date is at 75,000 views. And uh and so that is something I would not have come up for the concept of this video had it not been for going out outside of the developer world looking to see what's working on the rest of YouTube and then trying to bring those concepts in. Uh next I want to talk about time. Time is weird when it comes to YouTube and I've been thinking about this a ton. Um so I'm going share this video here. I'll say I landed on this concept of X versus Y, right? And so then I was like I'll make another video like that. And so OpenAI came out with a codeex and I went I was going to do the same thing and there's all these kind of like YouTube best practices that you want to like open these curiosity loops where you pose a question but then you don't like reveal the answer to the question at the end so you maintain like retention. I don't really love it and on this video uh I did not like uh OpenAI's uh codeex CLI and so it felt disingenuous to make a video where I was dragging out the suspension. So, I'll see if I have >> tried both Cloud Code and OpenAI's Codeex out head-to-head on a couple different projects. Uh, I'll kind of go against YouTube best practices here and just spoil it. Uh, Codeex fell pretty short and it was disappointing. >> Uh, so so I I basically just like spoil it in the beginning and I was like, "Oh, this probably won't do well." It was really interesting to me to see the comments. Uh because the comments I got so many comments from folks saying, "Hey, thank you for respecting my time." Uh and as a developer, I'm like, "Yeah, actually that's what I want." Like I I want people to respect my time. So it's like there are these YouTube best practices, but then when do you violate those best practices for the sake of your audience? And I started just thinking like, okay, what would it look like if I just took respecting my viewers time to the extreme? In fact, what would it look like if if I were to invest so much of my time in order to give them more of their time back? So, Anthropic released this paper, Claude Code, best practices for agentic coding. And it was uh just I mean, it had so many great tips for using claude code. And I had this idea of like, okay, what would a YouTube native version of this uh of this piece of content look like? And so I made this video and and the video is called I think it's 47 pro tips in 9 minutes. And so I'll play you just a short clip just so you can get a feel of what the video feels like. These uh pro tips pretty quickly. First tip, cloud code as a CLI. So all the things that you're used to doing with other bashbased CLIs, you can probably do with cloud code. For instance, you can pass in command line arguments which will be run on startup. You can use -p to run it in headless mode. You can chain it with other command line tools. You can pipe data into it. You can run multiple instances of it at once. So th this thing goes on for about nine minutes. And and my thought there is I'm going to spend one to two sentences on each tip and I'm just going to deliver as much value as possible. Uh, this video probably was 50 hours of work, maybe 60 hours of work between learning everything, trying to recreate all the tips myself, taking screenshots of them, editing. I probably filmed for well over an hour to get nine minutes of content and then came back over and put all of the the bits on there. And so in my mind I'm like, man, I am taking 60 hours of my time and I'm trying to compress that and give it as a gift to a developer of like here's 60 hours and nine minutes, right? But the really cool thing uh that I I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around is I 60 hours is a lot. I I took a lot of that time, but now the internet has engaged with that piece of content for over 6,000 hours. And that's a been an interesting way for me to think about the this work is how do you take your time invest a lot of your time to compress that down for a single developer. But you do that then in a way where so many developers engage with your content that you know I'm getting let's just say like 100x uh delivering 100x of value to the term like the world has gotten 100x more time out of this piece of content than I invested into it. And that feels really cool. Like it feels cool to create that much value for folks. Um, so I've been thinking a lot just about time. Like how do I use this channel to respect time? How do I like both know the YouTube techniques, but also just be really really aware of how precious a developer's time is and respect it and use this channel to uh to uh to respect that and give them that. Uh let me talk a little bit about process because I do think the most complex part of YouTube or the most challenging part of YouTube is the time. It is so time intensive. When you look at the process of doing a video, firstly you got to build and learn. Then you got to write a script or an outline at least. You got to record, you got to edit, you got to ship. Those first three, those first two steps there are what you had to do to ship a blog post in the past, right? And so I felt like at Twilio when I'd write a blog post, I was looking at 20 or 30 hours just to do the blog post. And it's like okay congratulations now you have a script now the recording starts now the editing starts right and so the biggest challenge for me has been how do I ship more content uh and I think the way you do that is you have to start looking at how do you compress or how do you delegate some of these steps so for instance that can look like um how is it possible to delegate the learning so the enthropic post was one of the was an example of this I didn't have to come up with that content from scratch I could take content that already existed and I could create the YouTube native version of that. All right. Um, another example of that is I shipped my first uh interview video last week. Uh, and so there's this package called CC usage and I reached out to him and said, "Hey, do you want to hop on a call and we can talk about this thing that you built, right?" And so there I was talking to the expert and I understand now why so many YouTubers basically just have podcasts where they bring guests on the show. They are delegating the learning process to the expert that they bring on. Um, you can also, uh, I am not personally doing this yet, but talking to folks who run programs, uh, Devril programs, you can hire editors. I don't feel like I'm at the place yet where I understand my own taste and where I I know exactly what I want to be able to delegate that. But editing is a place like this is what one of my recent edits looks like. This is probably 12, 13 hours of editing into this interview video. Um, I need to figure out a way either through getting sharper with the tools or by delegating this out to figure out how I can shorten this up. But I also like this because in an age of AI slop, I feel like I put a lot into the videos to demonstrate that it's handcrafted. And I feel like folks are increasingly going to appreciate the things that they can tell a human created. Um, another technique on the editing I think in YouTube in the same way that the title and thumbnail is really important upfront. Uh, the beginning of your video needs to validate that they're getting what they thought they were getting when they clicked on the title and thumbnail. And once you have a viewer and they're watching and they're invested in that first minute, you can do less editing and less polish on the back half once they've engaged. But it's really important to invest as much editing in that first minute as possible and make that as sharp and as crisp as possible. And you can see in this video that I just recently published that in the back half or really the back like uh you know 80 90% of the video there was a lot less editing. All right, a little bit about psychology. Uh I I have found psychology to be one of the most difficult parts of this journey. Uh I am working alone. I very much miss working with a team. Uh it is very easy to fall prey to procrastination and perfectionism. In fact, I tried starting a YouTube channel when I first left Twilio, and I just didn't ship consistently. I couldn't figure out the style. I couldn't figure out how to get myself to do it. Uh my dad's a pastor, and my dad would always say, "Uh, my sermon is never finished. It's just eventually Sunday morning comes." Uh, and uh I I will say uh I stood up on the stage a few hours ago and I looked out and I knew I was going to be facing you all and that was great motivation to finish this talk. uh you don't get that same sort of push when you're staring at this setup, right? The internet doesn't care if you ship today or if you ship tomorrow or ship ever. There is so much more content for them to consume. And so so much of this challenge is figuring out how do you get yourself to ship without the pressures that you feel of giving a talk or whatnot. Um I was inspired by a magician who has a YouTube channel with 7 million followers named Chris Ramsay. And I read an article about him and it basically just said when he was making this transition, he just put himself on a publishing schedule. And so my publishing schedule is my goal is to ship one video a week. Candidly, I don't get there. Typically, I fall more like every 10 days, every once every two weeks. So sometimes I do, but having that schedule helps a lot. Like for instance, this video I shipped last night, make cloud code meow with hooks. Uh I'm not like thrilled with that video. like I kind of wanted to spend like another 10 hours editing that, but I knew I was going to be here for a couple days and if I didn't get it out last night, I wasn't going to get it. And so, if I hadn't made that commitment to ship, I I would have let that go. And honestly, if I would have let that go another week, I probably never would have shipped it. And so, that's what I has been most impactful for me in this journey is just to say, I'm going to do once a week. If I miss it, that's okay. I do not miss two weeks in a row. Like, I I just cannot let that happen. But you got to figure out what cadence can you ship on. Uh, another on the psychology, the comments can be pretty rough. Uh, this is actually the worst one I could find. Uh, because I just delete the bad ones. Uh, like I like I I I like as soon as it comes out, I'm like, "This is MySpace. I'm not dealing with this. I let this go." Uh, I do think the bad comments. Uh, and this was actually kind. I'm not even saying this is a bad comment. This is helpful because I did have a the typo and I appreciate the the criticism, but I would just say like you got to be on guard with the comments and just I'm just fine deleting them. I don't think you I always whenever someone leaves a negative comment, go look on their channel. It's funny. I almost never get bad comments from anyone who has shipped a video. Uh, so, uh, you know, take that for what it is. Um, and then finally, it just can be lonely. And I'm really thankful to Matt and Ricky and Rob and Andrew Baker and I have a number of group chats of folks who I just I send the videos to. I brainstorm ideas with, I talk about the stuff I'm working on. And I think it's just really really hard. I think the loneliness and working in isolation is the hardest part about doing this. Uh, I know a lot of folks here are looking for jobs. Candidly, I don't know what the next phase of my career looks like. I don't know if I'll end up doing this independently or if I'll I'll parlay this into doing this full-time for a company. Um, I will say I in the last couple years I applied for a job at Anthropic. Um, and I heard nothing back. And I'm not saying they should have hired me. I'm saying I was qualified for the position and I should have gotten a response. Uh, and I was like kind of offended by that and I was just like curious about the job. I was like, man, why did they write me back? And I remember seeing this interview with Casey Neistat who's a YouTuber and he had this very famous ad that he did for Nike and he got paid, you know, a bunch of money for this stuff. And he I saw this interview with him. He said, "Yeah, before we got paid to do that, we just made Nike ads for free." And I was like, "Man, if I want a job with Anthropic, like it's kind of silly to like just be one of a thousand resumes. Why don't I just do the thing that I would want to do for them?" And so a couple weeks later, I made this video. This video's now gotten like 115,000 uh views now. um it might be the most viewed technical tutorial on cloud code and a few weeks after this uh Anthropic reached out and and uh and you know I don't know what will happen here like this this conversation is still ongoing uh and I'm truly not really sure like what I want to do next but it's a huge difference if you're if you're job hunting from being one of a thousand resumes to just being like hey look I made a thing about your product and 100 thousand people watched it and if you want me to keep doing that you could bring me on and so I think this is an unfair advantage age for any of you who are looking for your next dev opportunity. Uh finally to wrap this up uh are you too late? I was inspired by Jay Klaus. Uh he has a channel with uh uh notion tutorials and he says in the tech world uh every single week new things are coming out and there's new new content to be made every single week. All of the videos that I've made on this channel this year are about technologies that did not exist 12 months ago. Right? And so so you are not too late. In fact, the opposite might be the bigger problem is that I'm not sure if any of these videos that I've created will still be relevant in 12 months. All right? And so, it does feel like a bit of a treadmill. And I and I do think there's a bit I understand how folks get burned out. But if you are looking at this and being like, "Oh man, there's already so many folks doing this." I would say you're not too late. I would also say I think there's so much opportunity here for you to find your style. Um, Jeff from FireShop, as I mentioned, this is what one of his videos looks like. Out of nowhere, Amazon released its own AI IDE named Kira. Yet another VS Code fork that will compete for the hearts and minds of programmers alongside editors like Cursor, Windsor, Firebase Studio, and Copilot, just to name a few. So Jeff does no face, highly highly highly edited, four, five minute videos, really funny, like sarcastic but not cynical as Ricky put it earlier. Um uh then you have like the Primigen they and Theo they do streaming and then they cut their videos from there. Uh Tina Hang uh makes really great technical tutorials has almost a million followers. Uh this guy Nate B Jones like basically like shoots from his webcam stream of consciousness has 50,000 followers. Uh you can do interviews, you can do technical tutorials, you can be funny, you can there is you could there's so much opportunity here and there are so few developers who have video production skills that there is like unlimited opportunity for you as a developer to go learn what's working in the rest of YouTube, learn a little bit of video production skills and then come do it your way here. Uh and the best advice that I read here is just from Mr. Beast and he said you the way you're going to get better at YouTube is just to ship a hundred videos and to get better each time. Thank you all very much. [Applause], YouTube-based DevRel, YouTube, 01k9x2ngpkpwnrpc2xfg9f552d.