100 videos later

My 100th YouTube video went live early this morning. I don’t feel like I have finished anything. It feels more like I have finally reached the starting line. (MrBeast said to make 100 videos first, and somehow I took that literally.)

The channel did not necessarily make me build things I would not have built otherwise. But I do think it made me update my apps more consistently. Since most of my videos are work-with-me recordings, filming also means sitting down and doing the work. In that sense, the channel has become both a record of the work and a system for doing it.

I also wonder if the channel has been quietly contributing to how people discover my apps. Not in any measurable way yet, but as part of the broader context around my work.

Still, it would not be honest to say that I am doing this only as a record. I do want the channel to grow. The strange thing is how quickly the meaning of numbers changes. In the beginning, even ten views felt exciting. Now I pay much less attention to views and mostly look at watch time.

When my total watch time increases by less than ten hours in a day, it feels like a slow day. That is probably not a very objective standard, but it is the one I have started using.

There are still things I could improve. The awkward part is that many of them require spending money: a better filming setup, better lighting, maybe a more intentional production process. So far, the only thing I have bought specifically because of YouTube is a keyboard. Naturally, neither YouTube nor the apps have brought in enough to cover the price of that keyboard yet.

This is where I run into one of my own patterns: I am much more willing to spend time on things that are not yet profitable than to spend money on them. Maybe that is partly because time is harder to count without making the whole thing feel worse. There is an obvious irony in that, because some things may never become profitable without at least some financial investment.

It is not only YouTube. The same feeling comes up with apps, tools, subscriptions, and all the small costs that gather around making things. AI subscriptions alone are already a real expense. When I add up the money I have spent on my apps and YouTube, I do wonder whether I will ever earn it back.

Maybe that is why the 100th video feels less like a celebration and more like a checkpoint. It gives me a place to look at the routine from the outside: what it has helped me do, what it costs to keep going, and what I am still reluctant to change.