Use YouTube to help grow pre-alpha?
So I wasn't totally sure which category to post this in. But I have always had fears talking about my product because I don't want people to "steal" my idea.
I got some wonderful advice on here basically saying without validation I could very well be wasting my time completely. That being said, based on me asking around it seems like there's a market for what I'm building.
So to get my idea out there other than traditional places. I am debating on creating a youtube channel basically archiving my journey of bootstrapping this app. There are some definite pros and cons here.
Pros:
- I can potentially get an audience and some good feedback while making this app from potential end users.
- This will keep me honest and help me work on this daily. I put alot of time into this already but the accountability would be nice.
Cons:
- Those youtube viewers will more than likely be app builders and not specifically people looking for the use of my app (Even though app devs are definitely within my target audience, I'm building a health and fitness app)
- If I'm also posting videos of me coding there's a possibility of a viewer seeing a weakness in my code and trying to exploit it.
At this very moment, I'm still in the pre-alpha phase so other than development there's not too much that i can do for videos.
I'd be interested to hear your opinions. Good or bad.
Biggest con, that you didn't even list, is using time to make videos instead of the product and potentially not getting any views or input from anyone in return.
Your second weakness will not be a big risk if you do videos, maybe if you are streaming and even then it's probably negligable.
I was considering making some kind of progress updates (also considered Youtube) but for now (after 1,5 years of development) I still think my time is better spent on making the product good rather than producing videos. Videos will only be watched if the production and content quality is good. I watch some coding and game development channels, their production quality and story telling is insanely good and still most of them have a max of a few ten thousand subs. And it takes a lot of time to get that many even.