15 YouTube Shorts, 2,674 views, 1 subscriber: promoting a dev tool without showing my face
I build a free, open-source desktop app on my own. I don't want to show my face or record my voice, so when it was time to find users, YouTube Shorts looked perfect: a screen recording, some music, one line of text on top. No camera.
I made 15 of them in two weeks. Here are the real numbers from YouTube Studio and GitHub, because I think a flop with numbers is more useful than another "how I hit 10k" post.
The numbers (last 28 days)
- 2,674 Shorts views
- 70 % swiped away almost immediately
- 32 likes
- +1 subscriber from Shorts. One.
- GitHub: 21 unique visitors in 14 days, 5 of them from YouTube
- GitHub stars: 0
Roughly 3,000 views turned into about five people looking at the code.
What I tried
Fast and flashy. Quick cuts, zooms, 15 seconds, glowing UI. Between 19 % and 25 % of viewers stayed. When I watched them back, even I couldn't tell what was happening.
Slow and simple. One idea per Short, a big crop of the app instead of the whole window, a text line you can read twice. No retention data yet, but the view count landed exactly where the fast ones did.
A plain "it just does the thing". My best Short was 26 seconds of typing "sort my windows" and watching it happen. 42 % stayed. No effects. Just something you'd want.
What I learned
1. The view count barely depends on the video
Every Short landed between 50 and 370 views. YouTube Studio says my Shorts "usually get 140–220". Fast, slow, funny, technical: same band. As far as I can tell the feed shows each Short to a small test group, and if that group swipes, that's it.
2. The Shorts feed is the wrong room
81 % of the views came from the Shorts feed: people scrolling for fun, not people with the problem my app solves. And even someone who likes it can't click a link in a Short. A like costs them nothing. Installing a Windows app from a GitHub release page costs them a lot.
3. A 75-second video beat all 15 Shorts
My one longer video, a 1:15 teaser, got 332 views. People watched 51 % of it on average, and 80 % of the views came from the YouTube home page, so YouTube showed it to people who watch similar things. It also brought one subscriber, as many as all the Shorts together.
4. One honest post here beat everything
Two weeks ago I wrote a short post here: I kept missing Claude Code's permission prompts, so I built a desktop around it. No polish. It got 15 comments, two feature requests (both shipped in the next release) and real conversations.
My more "useful" technical posts after that got zero or one comment each.
5. The real funnel is after the click
Getting someone to the repo is step one. Then there's a release page, an .exe, and a SmartScreen warning because the installer isn't signed. Every step loses people. I spent hours on video edits and almost no time on that path.
What this doesn't prove
It's one small channel, one niche tool, four weeks. Shorts clearly work for some people. Maybe my hooks were just bad. But "make more Shorts" was the advice I kept hearing, and for a dev tool with no face behind it, it was the most expensive way I found to get almost nobody.
What I'm changing
- Two Shorts a week at most, instead of one a day.
- Longer, calm videos that answer something people actually search for.
- More posts like the first one: a real problem, what I tried, what broke.
- A shorter download path: one page, one button, SmartScreen explained before it shows up.
Your turn
If you build something alone: what brought you your first 10 real users?
A) a post somewhere like this
B) Reddit / Hacker News
C) video
D) something I haven't thought of
I'd really like to know, especially the things that looked promising and didn't work.
(The app is VibeDesk, a free Windows desktop for running several Claude Code sessions. But this post is about the numbers, not the app.)