52 Weeks of Video Tutorials: What I Learned About Content Creation, Community, and Developer Relations

Just over a year ago, I had no real experience in recording video tutorials, or in the editing or distribution process. I had experimented with a few, but never consistently, and I had no idea what I was doing on the editing side. After some encouragement from my supervisor at the time (thanks Ron!), I decided to start a weekly series, and challenge myself to produce one video a week for a full year. So at the beginning of 2024, the Appsmith Friday Tech Workshop series was born. #AppsmithFTW 😉

Last month marked a full year of weekly videos, with #52 added to the series! There were weeks were I barely finished recording in time, and few videos that definitely felt rushed, and not by best quality. But forcing myself to stick to one video a week helped me gain a deep understanding of the entire process in a short time. Below are my top learnings from the experience.

Plan Script Before Recording 📝

At first I was just winging it, and not writing out an actual script. I’d have some notes, and a finished copy of the app I was going to build, and then start recording. This led to a lot of retakes, which meant more editing to stitch it together later— and I was super-slow at editing at first. For most of these videos, I’d end up publishing a written version on our community portal anyway, so I just moved that to the first step. The tutorials became my script, and actually came in handy during recording for copying code snippets!

Once I started writing the tutorial version first, recording went SO much smoother, and I had way less editing to do. This one change saved me more time than anything else, and also improved the quality of the video content.

Capture Quality Matters 🎥

There’s only so much you can do in editing to improve the audio and video quality. At first I was just using the built-in camera and mic on my laptop, and you can see a huge difference in quality between those earlier videos and the newer ones. Additionally, having a separate camera enables me to do different shots and angles that I couldn’t do with the laptop camera. I started doing a centered camera shot for the intros, and then move the camera to a side shot while coding.

I don’t want to make this a post about recommending specific gear, so I’ll just say that I went with a newer USB-C mic, instead of the XLR ones that often require a preamp. The camera is an HD webcam made for streaming, and is also UBS-C. If you’re really interested, ask in the comments and I’d be glad to recommend them.

Along with capture quality, is good lighting, regardless of the camera. This can make a huge difference on its own. I’m no expert here, but I know someone who is:

Video Light: Go from AMATEUR to PRO with this Simple Setup Under $200

Editing: Learn the Keyboard Shortcuts! ⌨

Ok, I avoided promoting anything specific when talking about hardware, but the editing software I use is free! DaVinci Resolve is an excellent video editor, and learning my way around the keyboard shortcuts has made the process much more efficient.

The majority of the editing I do is just trimming out certain sections. It’s a lot of repetition, especially when only using the mouse. Often I have to zoom in/out on the audio to find exactly where I want to split the clip, then select it and click split. It’s way faster using keyboard shortcuts to zoom, and then another shortcut to split a clip at the current position. Then the mouse is only used to select the position, and everything else is keyboard shortcuts. I cut my editing time by 2-3x just by learning these keyboard shortcuts!

Structure Videos for More Engagement 👀

Start at the End

Most viewers drop within the first 30 seconds of a video. Nobody is going to wait until the end of the video to see if they might be interested in the end result. Hook more viewers by demonstrating the value of your video from the start, and then backup and show how you got there. Like a Tarantino movie!

“Tell, Show, Tell” Loops

For longer videos, it helps to break the topics up into “Tell, Show, Tell” loops. This is a technique used to reinforce learning and retention by outlining what will be taught, teaching it, and then restating what was presented. Not only does this help your audience learn, but it provides useful breakpoints in the video that can work as stand alone clips later.

The Results ✅

Subscribers

Fifty-two weeks later, and this one playlist has gained 3500 subscribers, and nearly 40k views! The videos with the highest subscriber rate tended to be JavaScript heavy. Additionally, 3 of the top 5 are on best practices and in-depth videos on Appsmith features. Some of these have relatively low viewership, but extremely high subscriber-to-viewer ratios. The top one here had only 289 views, but 203 of them subscribed! That’s 70 percent of viewers who subscribed on that one video!

Viewership

On the view count, the top performing videos all included technical content around some other tech, in addition to Appsmith: Zendesk, Leaflet.js, Google Sheets, and JSPDF. These range in skill level from beginner to advanced, and in duration from 30 to 60 minutes. The main commonality is that they aren’t just showing the Appsmith product, but an actual use case and solution that integrates with another product. This is a complete 180 from the high subscriber videos, which tend to be purely Appsmith focused.

What I’ve learned here is that these are two totally different types of content, and for viewers at different stages of their Appsmith journey. There’s no one type of video that consistently does well on both metrics. Each type supports a different goal for the viewer, and if that content meets the goal, a different metric is affected. Now that I’ve seen this distinction, I decide on the audience ahead of time and focus on the metric I want to affect most with a certain video.

Learn Through Repetition, Grow Through Collaboration

A lot of what I learned was through trail and error, and repetition. But all along the way, I had an expert video producer and DevRel wizard at my side to pick his brain. Huge shoutout and thank you to Kevin Blanco for pointing me in the right direction on the many occasions when I was lost! If you want to learn from a true expert, check out his newsletter on DevRel Videos (DevReel 🎬) and his YouTube channel.

What’s Next?

With the full year of videos complete, I’ve decided to take a break, and change up the format for the next series. Producing a weekly video was great for quickly learning all of the new skills involved, but it’s also very demanding and makes it hard to travel. This year I’ll be focusing more on quality, and applying everything I’ve learned over the last year to provide more valuable content for the Appsmith community.

What kind of content would you like to see more of? Drop a comment below and let us know!