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Reached 20k subscribers on YouTube

My YouTube channel about React Native just reached 20k subscribers. Below are the three phases of the channel lifecycle that led to this milestone.

Simple live coding sessions on YouTube.

Dec 17 / Sep 18 (0 to 2k subs)

The original premise of my channel was simple. Even if no one watches the video, it would still be more productive to write code in a focused environment, explaining my thoughts out loud, not checking Facebook.

The “Can it be done in React Native?” series

Sep 18 / Aug 19 (2k to 10k subs)

After finishing a contracting job during the summer, I started to look at the apps on my phone in a very different way. For every delightful user experience, I would wonder: can we implement the same user experience using primitives from the React Native world? This is how the “Can it be done in React Native?” YouTube series was born. This series found its audience somewhat quickly.

Teaching the fundamentals

Sep 19 / Feb 20 (10k to 20k subs)

While I’m having a lot of fun challenging myself with the “Can it be done in React Native?” videos, people have often asked to build videos to teach the fundamentals of gestures and animations in React Native. And at the end of August 2019, Start React Native was born.

Production Tips Anyone?

I have a lot of ideas for the content of the channel, and I’m having a blast implementing them. I am also trying to learn how to improve the quality of production of the videos.

My audio recording setup is quite rough as I live up to a busy road, and my flat doesn’t have much isolation. I manage to remove the background noise by setting a low gain on the mic and by doing some post-processing with Audacity. Now that the background noise removal situation is more or less under control, I am wondering which other post-processing could be applied for the audio to “sound better”?

Since most of my videos are screencasts, the filming of my face is not so important, but I am also trying to improve things there. It’s a slow process. Which YouTubers doing coding screencasts on YouTube inspire you the most?

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    Some pointers for voice recording to consider. You want to improve the signal to noise ratio so talking as if your listener is about 8 feet from you will strike a good balance of energy and volume but not yelling. If you are listening to your self in headphones you may want to turn them way down or stop completely since many people don’t like to hear their own voice and talk quietly as a consequence.

    Your mic should be pretty close to your face maybe 3 to 6 inches.

    Apply “normalization” to your audio clips. This makes sure your audio uses the full dynamic range and makes your audio sound a similar valume compared to other audio clips on the web. You don’t want your listener to turn up the volume all the way and you’re still not loud enough. Normalization helps.

    This is a bit advanced but applying a light compression helps keep your volume the same between softer and louder speech. I don’t mean file compression. Audio compression turns down loud parts some. If you use audio compression. Apply it before normalization.

    If you venture into EQ to try to cut a persistent noise or something you generally only want to cut with EQ and maybe only cut 3 to 6 dB. A lot of you tubers boost low EQ to sound more masculine but they just sound more muffled.

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      Justin, this is incredible valuable, thank you. I might ping you again regarding this details. It's interesting because I do feel like I got the noise removal and normalization under control but I would love to get that low boost poping radio host voice.

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    Haha I knew it was you after reading the title! Congratulations William. Specializing in React Native, the team and I are all fans of your work. Keep it up!

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      Woah thanks. I love that you guys are doing and I've been following you on Medium & Twitter since the first weeks I got started with RN. Keep up the good work!

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    I too am interested in this topic; I record screencasts about Vue.js on my site vuejs-course.com and am having trouble with getting a good sound recording. I use the Blue Yeti mic which has been recommended by many podcasters but I think the problem is my wooden flat has bad acoustics.

    You have impressive monthly revenue - where is most of this coming from? Your course? YT ads? Do you find the YT channel drives most of your sales? Should I post on YT over Vimeo?

    I’m planning to do a course soon too - I’ll go over your milestones and learn as much as I can.

    Awesome milestone, you are an inspiration!

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      Congrats on http://vuejs-course.com/! What led you to choose Vimeo over YouTube?

      So far the revenue is 100% generated through YouTube. I don't have any paid ads, don't blog and as you can tell my website doesn't say much. Only people coming from the YouTube channel have enough context to convert when landing on the website. It's sometime that I plan to fix over time: opening my platform to people coming outside from YouTube.

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        Thanks for the reply? By "100% through YT" you mean you have done no other marketing outside YT, and your website ($9 subscription) generates $6.3k/mo (around 700 active subscribers?)

        I chose Vimeo since I had the idea to distribute my course via my own website; Vimeo offers an option only serve videos on a certain url, that's how I thought I might distribute the course - you sign up on my website, and consume the video through it. I also plan to allow paying users to download the content.

        So to clarify, your path so far was

        • post YT videos, show you are the "real deal"
        • people gain confidence from your content, so they are happy to pay $9 a month for additional, more detailed videos

        Did you try any other monetization models before arriving at $9 / mo?

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          No marketing outside youtube has been done. And your math is correct. And I didn't try any monetisation model before.

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    Production Tips Anyone?

    You are not serious. If YT has anything then it's the best resources on doing video productions. Just google a bit and you will find goldmines on the right cameras/micros/lights/cutting/...

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      Absolutely and I do spend time watching these resources. It's just that sometimes it's really a lot to take in.

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        Not to mention it doesn't hurt to ask!

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    @wcandillon Congrats mate! :D What about react native shop? What's the revenue like on that startup? Are you focusing fully on tutorials now?

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    Great news, good content gives good result over time and it seems to grow faster as time passes.

    We should chat someday about your marketing, I'm sure you can do a lot better on other platforms as well, and could give you some hints on LinkedIn 😉

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    Congrats on the 20k subscribers!

    I'm sitting short of 2k now (1.8k), but I haven't put out a video in a couple of years (we had a baby and life got busy).

    Planning on getting back into it soon!
    I think I need to expand to more popular topics though. I mostly covered WebGL + 3D Math (roughly 200 videos between the two) and a long while back had covered other things. Unfortunately, these are just too niche. I was hoping to avoid the JS circus (React, Vue, Angular) and do things that aren't so popular.

    Anywho, keep up the good work!

    (my channel, if interested: https://www.youtube.com/user/iamdavidwparker)

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      You still pulling in 2k / month with absolutely no marketing since 2 years? That's amazing!

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        No no no. I wish! I have just short of 2k subscribers total!

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    Congratulations on 20k! And thanks for sharing some of the things that helped you along the way.

    It's been an ongoing goal of mine to 10x my subscriber count each year. I ended 2017 with ~20 subs, had ~200 at the end of 2018, ~2,000 at the end of 2019. So for 2020, my goal is to reach 20,000 as well 😊

    Here is an example of one of my coding tutorials, where I capture both the desktop and my face using a webcam... in some instances I do have to hide the webcam in post-production if it covers something important on screen, but thankfully that doesn't happen too much.

    https://youtu.be/KwwHvH3GZsQ

    Cheers!

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      This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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      What's the price of this? It doesnt show on Amazon
      Do you have any recording made with this mic?

      I bought the Purple Panda recently.. and I am a bit disappointed, sounds a bit muffled. Here is a recording I made with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlt62foEWVQ

      I have read that RODE smartLav+ is better, might be interesting to have feedback.

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    This comment was deleted 8 months ago.

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      Aleksandar you have made my day: thank you! I was looking for something exactly like auphonic.com. This was really the missing piece for me at the moment.

      Looking forward to check out the YouTuber you mentioned. That's one of the thing I love about YouTube: how much we inspire each other.

      Good luck with your project on YouTube and let me know if I can help.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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      Woah this is very valuable thank you. Great job!

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