Building a Product Live on YouTube

Recently, I created a premium iOS and Android starter kit named Elements. The design is from Sketch Elements and the development was done with React Native. And most of it was done live on YouTube. Below is how the finished product looks like.

It started with a simple premise: even if no one watches the video, it would still be more productive to write code in a focused environment, explaining thoughts out loud, not checking Facebook. As it turns out, this experiment had some unexpected benefits as well.

The videos available on my YouTube channel are live streams from the coding sessions that went into building the product. This is why the production quality is so low, these video were made with no extra cost in the development process.

Not everything was recorded live. Some tasks were requiring some research as well as trial and error. Other tasks felt simply too boring to be shared, for instance when writing sample datasets. I would usually do these things offline and then share the solution at the beginning of the next video or write a medium story on that topic. For example, building Instagram-like photo filters required some investigation and learning. Once the feature was built offline, I published a wrap-up video and a Medium story on that topic.

Surprisingly, people started subscribing to the channel and made comments that showed an astonishing level of attention to the content that was published.

Pre and post-sales benefits

These videos have helped promote the finished product. In fact, people started to ask how they could buy the kit even before it was finished. Forty copies were sold before the first release. This wouldn’t have happened with an opaque development process.

Many developers have mistrust for templates and starter kits, as they should: I have a lot of mistrust for them too. By making the internals of the products transparent via video, people can get a good feel for what they are actually buying. They also get to see the thoughts that went into some of the architectural decisions around the codebase.

Another unforeseen side-effect is how much these videos have helped with support. I quickly realized that half of the support questions could be simply answered by pointing to the right video at the right part.

Giving back

Building this product was only possible because of an incredibly rich ecosystem. Technologies like React and Expo have vibrant communities around them and have absolutely changed the economics of building and publishing mobile apps. These innovations are exciting and beg the question: how do you contribute back?

Based on the feedback received, these videos seem to also help developers that aren’t customers of the UI kit. Amazingly enough, this small contribution to the community has a cost of zero: the work needs to be done whether you record it or not. I also try to contribute back via open source packages and Medium stories but the YouTube channel absolutely requires no effort.

Doing it internally?

Live coding sessions don’t necessarily need to be done on YouTube. These recordings are an interesting type of documentation and can be done privately within an organization. You can go back in time and get a sense of what the developer was thinking when he wrote a particular piece of code. There might be great value for an engineering team to live-stream their work. For instance, recordings can be used later on by a new team member to understand the codebase of the project. I’ve never heard about such practice in software engineering teams, has it been done already?

The first step is the hardest

Looking back, I should have adopted this practice much earlier. It’s very hard to put yourself out there and it took a lot of time to dare to do it. It’s especially hard when the production quality is low. I am looking to provide a better experience to my subscribers in the future. However, I don’t want to use this as an excuse to not publish anything.

I’m looking forward to read your thoughts on this.