6000 Subscribers and Counting...

Growing my Channel

I recently hit 6000 subscribers and I wanted to talk a little bit about how my channel is doing and what steps I’m taking towards growing it.

While I started out making tutorials on how to build Python GUI applications, my IB Computer Science tutorials have clearly been the main growth engine behind my channel. On average, they bring in more views, and have significantly higher engagement in terms of subscriber growth, watch time, likes, and comments than any of my programming tutorials. They also provide a venue for me to market my study guides and other digital products, which earn me far more money than ads alone.

One of my most engaged with videos

However, I’ve made nearly all the videos I can to help students prepare for the IB Computer Science exam and new videos, while getting a lot engagement in terms of views, don’t really grow my audience. So, I’ve had to think about new niches that I can pursue to continue growing my channel and creating a new audience for whom I can develop digital products.

At first, I wanted to produce more general videos on Computer Science-related news and concepts that would be accessible to anyone with an interest in technology and Computer Science in general. However, I quickly realized that this was way too broad a niche with fierce competition from Youtubers who have been in this space for 5 to 10 years. It would most likely take a year of consistently creating content before I would even know whether I could be successful in this space - the Youtube feedback loop is not as quick as you might think.

So, I decided to niche down to what I’m good at - helping students prepare for Computer Science-based tests. I decided to expand beyond just the IB Computer Science exam to the Cambridge A-Level Computer Science exam. I got the idea from some A-Level students who commented on my IB videos asking for content. I’ve found that the best strategy in creating content is to listen to my audience.

Entering a new niche, from my estimation, requires 6 to 9 months. It takes time for the algorithm to pick up your first videos, for those videos to get enough views to have credibility, and for this in turn to drive more viewers of that niche to your channel. I created my first A-Level Computer Science video in October of 2023, and only now do I feel like I’m starting to build up a reasonably-sized audience of A-Level viewers.

One of my first A-Level videos

There have been a lot of challenges. Firstly, I haven’t taught A-Level Computer Science before, so I had to create all my materials from scratch and learn about and analyze a new curriculum. The A-Level curriculum also has much more content than the IB Computer Science curriculum, so every video I have made has taken substantially longer to produce. Finally, in the initial stages, I had to balance a job teaching English at a local Ukrainian school, working on a freelance project creating an online Computer Science course for a Canadian school district, tutoring IB students on the weekend, and running my Youtube channel.

Teaching English at a Ukrainian school

However, things have worked out. I’ve slowly seen views, likes, comments, and subscribers grow for my A-Level content. It helps that my A-Level videos are an order of magnitude more professional and polished than my first IB Computer Science videos. Quality really does matter on Youtube and I’m proud of how far I’ve come.

Stats for one of my A-Level videos

I still have a number of videos to create to cover the entirety of the curriculum, but I’m already thinking about digital products I can sell to A-Level students. I’m planning on creating an online course this summer to teach the programming parts of the A-Level curriculum, which are some of the most challenging both for students and for me to produce. My strategy of creating study guides doesn’t exactly work because there’s so much more content and it doesn’t really make sense to create a study guide until I’ve covered the entirety of the curriculum.

I have a few other plans as well. At the moment, I’m working on creating a web application that allows students to practice pseudocode-based coding problems for the IB exam. It’s almost more of a passion project, but I plan on offering it at a price point that is extremely competitive with other options like Revision Village. Really, I would like to take down any competitors while providing a huge amount of value to my students. Ideally the platform will be a springboard for helping students prepare for other types of questions and other Computer Science exams, but that’s more a long-term aspiration.

Hard at work on “CS-Kit”, my new test prep platform

One limiting factor in my ability to grow my channel will be a new teaching position that I will be starting this August. I’m moving to Kyiv to teach full-time at an international school and that’s going to be my priority. I’ve also found that teaching isn’t a job I can do well without focusing fully on it and Youtube takes an astonishing amount of time. Accordingly, I want to create the most significant and time-consuming content for the A-Level Exam this summer, so that when the school year starts, I’ll mainly be in maintenance mode.

It’s been a long, hard road to get to this point, but I love creating content on Youtube, and “playing the game” that is building an audience on a social platform. I hope my content continues to improve and evolve as time goes.

Thanks for reading and if you would like to follow my journey, please consider subscribing to this blog.