A 1000 mile journey starts with a single step
Sorry to open with a cliche but this is ultimately the quote that fired up my motivation and pushed me over the edge to get started on YouTube.
When you look at it, YouTube is an intimidating beast. Go and have a search for “React Tutorials” or something similar, and you’ll find millions of results. Literally millions. Amongst the endless waves of videos you have awesome creators channels like Academind, Dev Ed, and Traversy Media.
So to sit back and think “wow, making YouTube is a lot of work as it is, why would anyone bother to watch my videos?” Isn’t entirely unreasonable in my opinion. To give you an idea of how long it takes to create a video, my first video, Getting Started with React, is 1 hour long. If we break it down a bit further:
- Planning and coding the app: 15 hours
- Recording: 3 hours
- Editing + uploading: 8 hours
Thats over a full day of work, for something that might sit on the last page of the search results.
But I figured, “Hey, even if no-one watches this, I will have learned something and would have something to show to future employers, clients, or coders trying to learn React”. So I put in the work and uploaded it anyway.
I tweeted about it, emailed my subscribers about it, and the response was surprisingly good - I received loads of messages of support, and even 1-2 positive comments on the video:
And I even got a few views:
Now, to be honest, I have no idea if these stats are good for a new YouTube channel. On the face of it, I’m thinking, “264 views for over 24 hours work LOL”. But seeing some of the comments, and what I learned making the videos, makes it worth it.I think it’s been a successful first week. The first step of a 1000 mile journey!