I Created a Video Every Day for a Month as a Developer. Here‘s What Happened.

As a full-stack developer, my day job keeps me plenty busy. Between coding new features, fixing bugs, and coordinating with my team, there‘s not a lot of excess time or mental energy left over for side projects.

But I‘ve always been intrigued by the idea of starting a YouTube channel to share my knowledge, document my coding journey, and connect with other developers. I knew that consistency would be key to building an audience but I wasn‘t sure if I could realistically commit to regular uploads with everything else on my plate.

At the start of 2022, I decided to finally take the plunge and set a bold goal for myself: publish a new video every single day for the entire month of January. No excuses, no days off.

In this post, I‘ll break down how I planned out a month‘s worth of content as a busy developer, the results and key metrics from the experiment, and lessons learned along the way.

Planning and Preparation

The first step was to map out a content calendar for the month. I wanted a mix of different video formats to keep things interesting:

• Coding tutorials and walkthrough projects
• Day-in-the-life vlogs and behind-the-scenes footage
• Interviews with other developers and tech leaders
• Analysis and commentary on industry news
• Reviews and recommendations for tools and resources

I brainstormed dozens of potential topics and then narrowed it down based on what I could realistically tackle within the daily time constraints. The final lineup included:

• "Building a Full-Stack Twitter Clone with Node and React"
• "My Favorite VS Code Extensions for Productivity"
• "Coding a Snake Game from Scratch with JavaScript"
• "5 GitHub Repos Every Developer Should Know About"
• "Web3 Explained in 10 Minutes"
• "A Day in the Life of a Startup CTO"

For each video, I created a basic outline in Notion with key points, code snippets, and links to relevant resources. I also put together simple graphics and animations in Figma to help illustrate concepts.

To save time on editing, I created a set of custom ScreenFlow templates with my intro sequence, branded overlays, and default export settings. This allowed me to drag in clips, trim out mistakes, and have a finished video ready to upload in under an hour.

Results and Growth

Going into the experiment, my channel had just over 500 subscribers from the handful of videos I had previously published. I wasn‘t sure what to expect in terms of growth but I knew that daily uploads would give me a lot more data to work with.

Here were the final stats after 31 days of consecutive uploads:

Metric	Before	After	% Change
Subscribers	512	8,694	+1,598%
Total Views	18,473	538,291	+2,814%
Watch Time (hours)	643	19,458	+2,928%
Average View Duration	2:38	5:42	+116%
Likes	1,294	37,628	+2,809%
Comments	189	4,372	+2,213%

To say I was shocked by the results would be an understatement. In just one month, my channel had grown from a few hundred casual viewers to a highly engaged community of nearly 9,000 subscribers.

The top 5 videos in terms of views were:

1. "I Tried Coding 24 Hours Straight" (128K views)
2. "Building a Full-Stack Twitter Clone with Node and React" (96K views)
3. "Coding a Snake Game from Scratch with JavaScript" (74K views)
4. "Web3 Explained in 10 Minutes" (58K views)
5. "5 GitHub Repos Every Developer Should Know About" (41K views)

Clearly, the algorithmic gods were smiling upon me. But it wasn‘t just luck – I had unknowingly tapped into several key principles for growing a YouTube channel:

Consistency: By posting every single day, I trained the algorithm to surface my videos more frequently and recommend them to a wider audience. This virtuous cycle led to more views, which led to more subscribers, which led to even more views.

Keyword Optimization: For each video, I researched relevant keywords and phrases that people were searching for and included them in the title, tags, and description. This helped my videos rank higher in search results and pull in viewers who were specifically interested in those topics.

Engaging Thumbnails: I experimented with different thumbnail styles – screenshots, graphic text, emojis, faces – and paid attention to which ones got the most clicks. By the end of the month, I had settled on a consistent template that was eye-catching and clickable.

Audience Retention: YouTube rewards videos that keep viewers watching for a longer duration. The more engaging the content, the better the retention. I made sure to edit out any boring or irrelevant sections to keep viewers hooked from start to finish.

Impact on Skills and Career

Committing to daily videos on top of my regular development work was no easy feat. Most nights, I was up late slogging through edits and rendering files long after I would have normally called it quits.

But that extra effort ended up paying huge dividends – and not just in terms of YouTube growth. Forcing myself to explain complex topics on camera every day made me a better communicator and teacher.

I found myself diving deeper into subjects I thought I already knew well, only to realize there were gaps in my knowledge that I needed to fill in order to break things down for a beginner audience.

The video creation process also sharpened my project planning and time management skills. There was no room for procrastination or endless tinkering. Each day was a hard deadline that had to be met, no matter what.

As a result, I became much more efficient in my coding workflow. I learned to quickly prototype ideas, debug errors, and ship working solutions without getting bogged down in the details.

Those lessons carried over into my day job as well. I was able to take on more complex features and deliver them faster than before. My code reviews were more thorough and my pull requests were cleaner.

The channel also opened up new opportunities for collaborations and consulting gigs. I started getting emails from developers who had watched my tutorials and wanted to hire me to help them with their own projects.

One founder even reached out to offer me a part-time CTO role at his startup based on the strength of my videos. While I ultimately decided to stay put at my current company, it was a good problem to have.

Monetization and Revenue

As the channel continued to grow, I started to explore different monetization strategies. The most obvious was turning on ads through the YouTube Partner Program, which requires a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time.

Based on my stats, I was able to hit that milestone within the first 2-3 weeks of daily uploading. From there, I started earning a small trickle of passive income from ad views – nothing life-changing but enough to cover the cost of new equipment and justify spending more time on the channel.

A more lucrative opportunity came in the form of brand sponsorships. As my subscriber count grew, I started to get inbound requests from companies looking to promote their products or services to my audience.

Some of the deals I landed included:

• $500 for a 60-second shoutout in one of my coding tutorial videos
• $1,500 for a dedicated review video of a new IDE tool
• $200/month for a brand mention and link in my video descriptions

While I was careful to only work with brands that I genuinely believed in and used myself, it was still a bit of an ethical tightrope to walk. I had to make sure that the sponsored content didn‘t feel too forced or promotional and that I was still putting my audience‘s needs first.

Another monetization route was creating my own digital products to sell. This included things like:

• An e-book on "10 Tips for Landing Your First Developer Job"
• A set of premium VSCode themes and icon packs
• A video course on "Mastering React Hooks"

By packaging up my knowledge and experience into a more condensed format, I was able to generate some nice side income without a ton of extra effort. Plus, it was a way to provide even more value to my subscribers and build deeper relationships with my most engaged fans.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Creating a video every day for a month was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my developer career. It pushed me to level up my skills, taught me how to communicate more effectively, and connected me with an amazing community of coders from all over the world.

If you‘re a developer who‘s been thinking about starting a YouTube channel, here are a few key lessons I learned that might help you on your own journey:

1. Consistency is key. Pick a posting schedule and stick to it, even if that means starting small with one video per week. The algorithm rewards channels that publish on a regular basis.

2. Embrace imperfection. Your first few videos will probably suck and that‘s totally OK. The only way to get better is to keep creating and putting yourself out there.

3. Teach what you know. You don‘t need to be an expert on a topic to make a video about it. Share your unique perspective and experiences as you learn and grow.

4. Engage with your audience. Respond to comments, run live Q&A sessions, and collaborate with other creators in your niche. Building a community around your channel is just as important as the videos themselves.

5. Have fun! Don‘t put too much pressure on yourself to be perfect or to hit arbitrary metrics. Focus on creating content that you enjoy and that provides value to your viewers. The rest will follow.

If you‘d like to check out the videos from my daily uploading challenge, you can find them all on my channel here: [link to playlist]

And if you‘re inspired to start your own channel or take on a similar challenge, I‘d love to hear about it! Leave a comment below or connect with me on Twitter at [@yourusername].

Thanks for reading and happy coding!