How a Solopreneur Should Think About Building a Youtube Channel

A prominent difference between how my parent's generation and my generation builds business is how an entrepreneur builds and uses their personal brand on different social media platforms. And among all the platforms, Youtube is clearly the most impactful. But it's not a new realisation, people are building content for Youtube all the time. So what does a small business owner do to use this platform? I'm giving myself a Youtube challenge (and it's not to post every day).

Hello, I'm Prashant - an engineer turned HR turned PM turned Solopreneur. I'm trying to build a one person tech business and doing multiple experiments to find the repeatable systems that can help me build any business. Today it's about building a Youtube channel.

It's no secret to anyone, there's so much said about content building these days that you can almost never miss it, but I'll still say it - you need a strong personal brand that boosts your business growth. And youtube is clearly the most important platform at that - there are very specific needs of all the other platforms: instagram is more visual appeal for personal use, X is more about sharing your life with others, but youtube is most versatile - it can act as you want it to act - it can be a daily vlog, it can be an occasional travel journal, it can be a knowledge sharing system, it can be an online course, or even a news platform. And hence, naturally it has the most audience.

So I realised that for my business, I need a youtube presence. But that's pretty much where the tough part starts.

As a consumer, I'm a youtube fan - I'm always hooked to it and I love how it flexes itself to find the right content for your exact needs. But that's the biggest challenge for someone starting a personal brand - what can they give to youtube that hasn't been taken already. Because it's not that every topic is taken, but every topic's sub-sub-topic has been taken too. Every content format seems to be taken too. And among all the delusions I have about myself, there is one honest realisation: I'm not creative enough to discover something radically different. So I looked up what the possible ways are that people use youtube for and of course I landed on the path of build in public. A widely talked about method of sharing what you're doing in your life and business, as you're doing it, so people become part of your journey.

Build in public is very popular, I've seen people get a lot of success with it, but more on X than on youtube. At the same time, build in public is also overly done. People are sharing parts of their journey almost all the time, however if your path is different, then it does work well - since there can't be many from that path. But you need that edge to make build in public work!

As I was thinking about it, I went back to the most fundamental question - what am I looking for from Youtube? There could be multiple things one could be searching for from Youtube:

• Being a content creator for a living - YT monetization is top notch

• Building a reliable personal brand by putting content about yourself and business

• Drive traffic to your products by talking about how they solve user problems

• Sharing your craft and life with the world (not linked to business)

This is different from other platforms - writing for me is a way of self-expression and sharing what I know and think. It helps me feel that I might have shared something others could like. But youtube leads to direct business impact and this will only grow. More and more people want visual solutions, not reading about them. More people use YT as a means to explore their options.

So youtube has become more than just a content platform - it's a product discovery and trust-building platform.

With this in mind, I reflected on my goals from Youtube, and they lie somewhere between building a personal brand and driving traffic to the product.

The most obvious route would have been to take the Build in Public route. But my content creation related experiments so far tell me that there's more to it. Content is a long term game, and it needs to be both systemic and fun. It's not a one time push, so I need to find my niche, and what format gives me most energy in creating the content. So instead of picking one path and running with it, I'm challenging myself to test out things a bit. So I've created a mini challenge for me here.

The Youtube discovery challenge:

Over the next 3 weeks, I'll create content in three different mediums:

• Build in public (of course): I'll be creating content about my journey, what I'm learning - what's working and what isn't. Goal is to see reach of the videos and my comfort level in sharing my work.

• Answering: I'll be mining my idea listening system (link to see how I built the full listening system for idea creation, same principle goes here too) to find user questions which can be solved by my existing pool of products, and create videos around that. The goal will be to see how much traffic gets to my products.

• Identity: I'll be creating a series of videos about how a non-tech person (like myself) learns the building blocks of the tech world to safeguard themselves from what might be coming at them in their corporate roles. The goal is to see the reach of the video.

The third one is more of an experiment in terms of the format since it's not clear whether or not it works for people usually - while the other two have some sort of reference. Overall, this is an experiment too to see which formats do well in general and where I find my energy the most. I'm learning content editing in parallel so it'll be quite interesting to see where this goes.

There's value in trying an experimental approach for all solopreneurs. Youtube is very quick in locking your persona, and if you try something once that persona has been picked then you will surely have big drops in views, and not a fair comparison. So the experimental approach seems to be the way to go.

Follow along as I build and experiment in public - @lifedesignshare on X.