Your First 10 YouTube Videos: What to Make When You're Starting From Zero

Your first videos don't need to prove that your channel will work. They need to help you discover what might.

Starting a YouTube channel creates an unusual problem: you're expected to make decisions about an audience you haven't met yet.

You don't know what they'll click. You don't know which ideas they'll respond to, which format they'll prefer, or whether the video you're convinced will perform well will disappear with 37 views while something you almost didn't upload quietly becomes your most successful video.

And yet, before any of that information exists, you're supposed to decide what to make.

So naturally, many new creators do what seems sensible. They research successful channels, study thumbnails, look for popular topics, and try to make their first ten videos look as though they've already figured everything out.

I think there's another way to approach it.

Instead of treating your first ten videos like the beginning of a portfolio, treat them like the beginning of your research. Each video can answer a slightly different question. By the time you reach number ten, you won't have solved YouTube—and you certainly won't have enough data to make sweeping conclusions—but you'll know more than you did when you started.

That's the point.

Video 1: Make the Video That Best Represents Your Channel

Don't worry too much about finding the perfect keyword or chasing the biggest possible topic. Make the video that most clearly explains, through the content itself, why your channel exists.

Ask yourself: If someone watched only this video, would they understand what kind of channel they had found?

Your first video doesn't need to introduce you, explain your plans, or announce that this is your first video. The viewer is much more interested in what you can give them than in the fact that you've just arrived.

Make something that represents the promise. Then publish it.

Now you have something you didn't have yesterday: a real video on a real channel.

Video 2: Solve One Specific Problem

For the second video, become useful. Think about a specific question someone in your intended audience might type into YouTube.

• Not: "How to Take Better Photos" 

• Try: "How to Take Sharp Indoor Photos Without a Flash"

• Not: "How to Be More Productive" 

• Try: "How to Focus When You Keep Checking Your Phone"

Specific problems have boundaries. Those boundaries force you to decide exactly who the video is for and what you want them to get from it.

Underneath most successful videos is some kind of exchange: the viewer gives you attention, and you give them something worth that attention. Video two starts teaching you what your side of that exchange might be.

Video 3: Go Narrower Than Feels Comfortable

New creators are often afraid of making a topic too specific because specificity appears to shrink the potential audience. Sometimes it does.

But a smaller potential audience and a more interested audience are not the same thing.

Take one idea and narrow it. Instead of making a video for everyone who wants to learn Excel, make one for freelancers tracking invoices. You aren't committing your entire channel to that corner of the subject—you're testing what happens when the viewer can immediately think:

"That's for me."

This is one of the advantages of being new. You can experiment without thousands of existing viewers wondering why you've suddenly changed direction. Use that freedom.

Video 4: Now Go Broader

After deliberately narrowing an idea, move in the other direction. Take something central to your niche and make it accessible to someone who doesn't already know much about the subject.

This isn't about becoming generic. It's about discovering how far your ideas can travel.

• A narrow video might attract fewer, more interested people.

• A broader video might attract more people who are less familiar with you or the subject.

Neither outcome is automatically better. You're beginning to explore the relationship between reach and relevance, and at this stage, exploration is more valuable than certainty.

Video 5: Make Something You Would Click

By now, you've spent a fair amount of time thinking about viewers. For one video, bring yourself back into the equation.

Browse YouTube as though you weren't a creator researching YouTube. What makes you stop? What kind of title makes you curious? Which ideas make you wish someone had already made the video?

Then make something you would genuinely want to watch.

This isn't an argument for ignoring your audience. It's a reminder that your own taste is part of the channel too.

Algorithms can tell you what received impressions. Analytics can tell you what people clicked. Competitor research can show you what has worked elsewhere. None of those things can decide what you find interesting.

A channel built entirely around what appears strategically correct can become surprisingly lifeless. Your taste needs a vote.

Videos 6–7: Find a Pattern, Then Test the Packaging

Look back at your first five videos and choose one idea, format, or approach worth repeating.

Maybe one received more interest. Maybe someone asked for another. Maybe it was simply enjoyable to make. Or perhaps you finished it and immediately thought of three more versions.

Make a sibling to that video. Not a copy—a continuation.

This is where you start discovering repeatability. One successful video is useful. A successful idea that can become ten videos is much more interesting. Channels aren't built entirely from isolated hits; they often grow from recognizable patterns viewers learn they can come back for.

Then, for the next video, don't completely reinvent the idea—experiment with how it's presented:

• Try a different thumbnail approach

• Write the title differently

• Make the promise more specific

• Simplify the image

• Change the way you open the video

Creators sometimes assume that when a video underperforms, the idea itself must have been bad. But viewers don't encounter your idea directly. They encounter a title and thumbnail first.

The content matters enormously once they click. Before they click, they have to understand why they should. Making the video and presenting the video are two different creative jobs, and it's worth learning to tell them apart early.

Video 8: Make the Easy One

Not every experiment needs to be ambitious.

Deliberately make something simpler—less editing, a quicker format, a shorter script, or a production process that requires fewer moving parts.

Then pay attention to something creators often overlook: How much did this video cost you?

Not necessarily in money. In time, energy, and attention.

A format that gets 20 percent more views but requires five times the work isn't automatically the better format. The answer depends on your goals and whether you can imagine repeating the process without eventually dreading it.

Creators talk constantly about what audiences want. A sustainable channel also has to account for what the creator can continue to produce.

That's not laziness. It's design.

Video 9: Test One Edge of the Niche

By now, you've begun establishing boundaries around the channel, mostly without meaning to. This video asks a different question:

Where does the audience's interest actually end?

Make something slightly outside what you thought you'd create when you started. Explore an adjacent topic or try a format you're unsure about.

The important word is adjacent. If you've spent eight videos teaching watercolor painting, this probably isn't the moment to upload an unboxing of your new toaster.

But you don't yet know exactly where the edges of your channel are. Sometimes you discover them by testing one—and occasionally, the thing that felt slightly outside your channel turns out to be the direction it wanted to go.

Video 10: Use What You've Learned

Now stop. Not forever—just long enough to look back.

You have nine pieces of evidence that didn't exist when you started. That's still a very small amount of data, so don't turn every difference in views into a rule about your channel. But you can begin looking for clues:

• Which video attracted the most attention?

• Which held attention?

• Did anyone comment?

• Which thumbnail or title felt clearer?

• Which video was easiest to make—and which did you actually enjoy making?

• What surprised you?

Now make video ten using something you've learned.

Maybe you revisit a promising format. Maybe you take another shot at a topic with better packaging. Maybe you make the second installment of something that feels like a series.

Video ten should be slightly less theoretical than video one because you're no longer working entirely from assumptions. The audience has entered the conversation.

Don't Turn Ten Videos Into Ten Conclusions

There's one danger in treating your early videos as experiments: you can start treating every result as proof.

• "Video three got twice the views, so narrow topics must be the answer."

• "Video five had a higher click-through rate, so every thumbnail should look like that one."

• "Video eight underperformed, so simple videos don't work."

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Ten videos is still ten videos.

A new channel may have little traffic, uneven distribution, and an audience that's still forming. One result can be interesting without being meaningful enough to build an entire strategy around.

Look for signals, not commandments. You're gathering information, not writing laws. The goal of your first ten videos isn't to discover a formula you'll repeat for the rest of your YouTube career. It's to become a little less wrong about what you thought you knew before you started.

What You're Really Testing

On the surface, you're testing topics, titles, thumbnails, formats, and audiences. Underneath all of that, you're testing yourself as a creator.

You may discover that the videos you thought would be easy take forever. You may find that you're unexpectedly good at explaining complicated things. You may realize that the niche you carefully researched doesn't interest you nearly as much once you have to make something about it every week.

Or you may finish one video and immediately think:

"I could make a hundred of these."

That information matters because a good YouTube idea doesn't exist only at the intersection of what viewers want and what the algorithm can distribute. It also has to exist somewhere near what you can make repeatedly without losing interest in the process.

You can't learn all of that from research. Some of it requires publishing.

Your First Ten Videos Aren't Your Portfolio

There's a tendency to look at established creators and forget that we're seeing the result of years of iteration.

Their current thumbnails aren't their first thumbnails. Their current format may not resemble the one they started with. Their confidence on camera was learned on camera. Their understanding of their audience came from having an audience.

New creators sometimes try to reverse that order. They want the clarity that comes from experience before they're willing to have the experience.

But your first ten videos aren't supposed to prove that you know what you're doing. They're how you begin finding out.

• Make one that represents the channel

• Make one that's useful

• Go narrow

• Go broad

• Follow your taste

• Find a pattern and test the packaging

• Make something sustainable

• Test an edge

Then look back.

You probably won't reach video ten with a perfect strategy. But if you've been paying attention, you'll reach it knowing something about your audience, your ideas, and yourself as a creator that you couldn't have known before video one.

And that's enough to make video eleven a little smarter.

Your first ten videos aren't your portfolio. They're your research.

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Until our next interval—

Keep creating. Keep learning. Keep growing.