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Comment by bsnnkv | Hacker News Reader

My credentials: I just got my 50th individual commercial use license subscription last night, and including sponsorship for personal use of the software, I have 90 people contributing financially towards the project.

My advice: Make YouTube videos sharing how you use the product and sharing updates about the product in a structured format. Places like HackerNews, Reddit, pretty much any text-based network, are extremely hostile towards people sharing the outcomes of their individual creativity, whereas video-based networks are surprisingly open to it.

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How did you get people to know about your Youtube channel and start watching the videos? Getting into "the algorithm" seems to involve quite a bit of luck of the draw these days.

Honestly, it was all the algorithm - I started with very shoddy[1] live programming videos, and slowly I got better[2] by listening to feedback from the early users who gave my videos a chance

There is an element of luck involved (i.e. for extremely viral videos), but most of it is iteration - learning how to record and mix audio properly, learning how to make the best of the lighting you have available, learning that if you want to make live coding videos you need to increase your text size to an uncomfortably large size so that viewers have a more pleasant viewing experience, etc.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ece_NCcgiMY - one of my earliest videos

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1yECfF7Qyg - my latest video

You’re a big fat liar. While your new videos are slicker, that first one is not at all shoddy. It’s actually pretty good.

You are too kind, or maybe I am too harsh on myself, or maybe some combination of the two :)

As self appointed arbiter, they actually aren’t too different from one another. Looks like a little bit prettier PIP effects, the multiple window navigation, are main visual differences that look better but don’t actually changes the experience imo. The introduction of title screen transitions was nice, videos like these the best thing you can do is organize by topic to make it somewhat scannable. People finding the videos from search or whatever aren’t wanting to watch a 25 minute video, they’re looking for the part that solves their problem or discusses it at least. If you can, and maybe you have and it’s not showing up on mobile for me, is adding descriptive chapter names to the videos

Analysis: true

You have to make a video.

Then another.

Etc.

The algorithm will try to find an audience for them if they are sonewhat something some people might want.

But without actually making videos there’s no point in thinking about the algorithm. It is entirely empirical.

Thank you for the great insight. I just subscribed to your channel — I’ll be studying your videos. I really appreciate you sharing your experience.

By the way, are you also using blogging or any other channels for traffic?

I do blog, but not really about the software

Besides the channel, there is a Discord community associated with the project which has ~2500 members at the moment, but other than that I sometimes post in the comment sections of various forums whenever I see someone is looking to solve a problem that the software could help with

How long did it take you to get to 90 people through YouTube videos?

I've been selling licenses[1] for less than 5 months, which is how long it took me to get to 50 active licenses

I've had GitHub sponsors enabled for about 2-3 years now I think, and I currently have 40 recurring sponsors

I've been making YouTube videos for about the same time and it took just over a year to get my channel monetized (1k subscribers + watch hours)

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi - there is a live active subscription counter here

thanks for this insight

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