What I Learnt from My YouTube Channel

“What’s happening to you?” a friend exclaimed when I told them I was going to start my own YouTube channel. An astute observation: for someone who had a strong dislike to anything social in the “LOOK AT ME” category, it was a weird overture.

I ran my own YouTube channel in 2021. In this blog post I will tell you why I started it and what I learnt along the way – and why I stopped so ‘soon.’

I Don’t Know Where I’m Going – Why I started

If you’ve read my blog before, you might connect that heading to the tagline of this blog: Is this thing going somewhere? In the context of the blog, it’s meant in a humorous, train-of-thought kind of a way, but in 2021, “I don’t know where I’m going” was a serious and anxiety-inducing thought.

In February 2021, I was licking my wounds. I had gotten a new job and things were going well, but the months preceding had been a rejection letter after another. I mostly didn’t even get interviewed. My professional self-esteem was at rock bottom. In hindsight, I learnt a lot from that time and will explore those learnings in a later post. But in that moment, I was crushed. I didn’t ever want to be in a situation again where I would not be deemed worthy of an interview. I would most certainly never ever want to receive this piece of feedback on my application: “Only certain parts of her experience are relevant.” But that’s another story, too.

The other thing that bothered me at that time was not knowing what kind of professions are out there. I had moved from an internship in corporate strategy and culture to internal communications, and while I liked both and was good at what I was doing, I had no prior experience nor understanding of what the role might entail. I tried reaching out to a few people to chat and learn from them, and all but one turned me down. The one person who agreed to a remote coffee with me (back in early 2021, perhaps this ‘remote networking’ was still too weird) said at the end: “This was really nice. I thought it was really weird when you invited me, but actually it was nice.” Sure. My pleasure, bringing in the weird.

The combination of wanting to find out more about different jobs and people’s reluctance to meet one-to-one led to an assumption: if I want to learn more, then probably others do, too. That’s how I came up with the channel, named ‘When I Grow Up.’

It’s Okay to…All of It – What I Learnt

Define your target audience

I knew I wanted to reach young people, teenagers and adults who are thinking about secondary and tertiary education. My age range was 15-25 which I now think is too broad, and had I continued I would have either focused on high schoolers or fresh high school graduates instead. I also targeted Finnish-speaking people only, mostly because I was most familiar with the job market here. I also didn’t have much Finnish-language experience in my CV, so there was that self-serving angle, too.

Find your target audience

I started by promoting my content on LinkedIn and Facebook: LinkedIn because that was the most familiar social media platform for me and because I wanted to showcase that I in fact am worthy, despite the anguishing job search that still pained me. I turned to Facebook because there was a group of people perfectly placed to promote my channel to my target audience: teachers and career counselors. I had reached out to my own high school careers’ counselor to ask if any community existed for her and her peers, and she pointed me to both a Facebook group and one interviewee. I was invited to the closed group and got a lot of positive feedback on the videos, and I like to believe that some of the members ended up sharing the videos with their students.

During my summer break, I did something terribly hard. I joined TikTok. I disliked the idea with every fibre of my body. I have never liked being on camera, and I thought TikTok was going to be full of mindless rubbish and unhealthy comparison.

But instead, I fell head over feels for TikTok. I liked the algorithm. I liked the content. I liked that it was easy to use, both as a browser and as a content creator. So I started creating short videos relating to my YouTube channel. I started getting likes to my videos and more views.

Invest in Good Tools

My channel was completely free and a labour of love or some sort of desperation, so I never made any money out of it. But I decided to invest some in making it. I had not used any advanced editing tools previously, so I tried a few of them that offered free trials, and landed on a one-year subscription to Filmora. It worked fine for me (I was still working off an old laptop that could barely deal with video files but it did the trick).

The other thing I did was to invest in filming gear. I bought a tripod and a webcam. One friend commented that they thought my videos were good but my video quality was bad. I agreed: the remote interviews that I had done with my laptop weren’t terribly sharp in image (hopefully more so in content).

None of these were huge investments, but they were meaningful to me. It was a sign of believing in it, and in myself.

It’s Okay to Try

This may be a ridiculous learning to many, but the biggest one for me. I had never thought myself entrepreneurial. Hard-working, sure, quite imaginative, yes, but not a hustler on a mission. I suppose I grew up so law-abiding and task-oriented that doing something without anybody asking me to do it (or worse, giving me permission to do it) was just simply unimaginable to me.

There’s No Such Thing as a New Idea

Related to this lesson learnt is this: if you’ve got a good idea, someone else has probably got it, too. And maybe they’ve already acted on it. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, because it’s the people that make the difference. One angle investor once told me this; I asked them what they thought was the single most important thing when looking at a budding company to invest in. They said people, without missing a beat. I told them I would have assumed the idea. “Ideas can be good or bad,” they said. “But if you’ve got the right people, invest in them. When they find a good idea, there’s no holding back.”

There are others who’ve made career videos. Many big companies do them, of course only of their own employees. But the thing is, clearly there was a demand for what I did. Whether that was for my intended target audience or all the lovely people who without hesitation agreed to be interviewed by me (I like to think the interviews were good for their brands, too), there was some demand for it.

People Are Nice. And They Like Attention

Here’s what I never understood: in early 2021, when I reached out to people to have coffee with me and tell me about working on communications, they turned me down. And I wasn’t a stranger to them, either – I had worked with them before. But when I reached out to strangers, 95% of them said yes. I’m willing to bet that it’s the chance of publicity that sweetened the deal, but I always told my interviewees beforehand that mine was just a tiny channel.

I think that people generally like it when others take an interest in them. I am often complimented on my habit to ask people questions (“it felt like you actually wanted to get to know me!”), and that I cultivated whilst living abroad. I didn’t have any networks, I didn’t have any friends. I had to make them, and one of the best ways to get to know somebody is to ask them questions. For interviews, it’s the same. I think people like to share their knowledge. Everyone’s got so many stories in them, but only few of us get to share them with the world. So as my second-to-last learning, it’s that people are nice when you approach them about an opportunity, no matter how small, to talk about what they know. Even if they turn you down.

I Don’t Want to Do This on My Own – Why I Stopped (for Now!)

While running the channel and doing everything for it (finding interviewees, scheduling, preparing the questions, editing, and marketing), I also had a full-time job, was in a mentoring program, and for the last couple of month of the year, I was the team lead in a workshop program. I was exhausted. I had thought about hiring someone to do the editing for me, but I wanted to pay them a proper salary and that wasn’t a long-term option without monetizing the channel.

I had achieved what I set out to do: I had done something of my own, something no employer could lay claim to, something that could exist on the internet ad infinitum. I hadn’t even thought about making the channel my job or breaking the bank with it; I was happy to learn new skills and meet new people.

But the biggest reason for not continuing was that I didn’t want to do it on my own. For the first time in my life, I genuinely thought that I want to work with others (you know in cover letters when people say ‘I’m a team player but I am a self-starter?’ Yeah, that’s a person who tolerates a team around them but doesn’t really want them. I’ve most likely used that phrasing a couple times. Woops). This was something I wanted to grow, nourish, expand, and I didn’t want to do that alone. But I didn’t have anyone in mind to start working on it with me, and since I was quite tired, I didn’t act on that idea.

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Have you started your own project or company? What motivated you to do it? If you stopped with or put a pause on it, why?