I’m running a YouTube channel and social media persona as a one-person media startup.
The absurd part: I built the infrastructure first, and the audience never really showed up (yet).
I currently have ~170 subscribers. The stack looks like something meant for 100,000.
What I built anyway:
- Multiple Self-hosted websites ( Landing Page, Creator Hub, Meme Blog, Merch Shop )
- Automated meme + content pipelines
- Social media auto-posting infrastructure
- Ad tracking + funnel prep
- SEO, analytics, search indexing
- structured workflows
- Video production automation (ffmpeg pipelines, overlays, batch processing)
Most creators scale tools after growth.
I did it backwards:
I treated this like a startup from day one and built for scale with basically no demand.
That sounds irrational. It probably is. But it was a lot of fun.
The Youtube Automation Pipeline:
I built a Youtube Automation Pipeline with shell scripts and python scripts,
which is all baked into my Linux ZSH environment.
Basically my Linux machine is a Youtube Creator Environment now.
It’s super bad code, it’s extremely personalized stuff and I can’t publish it on github or people will laugh.
But I will tell you what I did maybe some people will get some inspiration what’s possible.
But here’s the breakdown of the workflow:
- Starting a new video
I run a shell command that initialized the next video,
It opens a META Data File in vim and I fill out stuff like
title, video number, playlist and some other variables.
then it immediatly populates my environment with templates and directories
for the new video.
- Photoshop Thumbnail templates
- Promo material templates
- Several other graphic assets I need
- a text file with keywords
- a text file with hashtags
- a text file with the video description
- a text file with SEO optimized text that describes the video
- Directories for everything I need: Raw Video, Rendered Files, Graphics, Sounds, Effects, etc
- A bunch of symlinks that all point directly to the assets for fast access and reduced friction in the workflow
- a Whatsapp bot sends me information about the new project
- a status on top of my linux terminal always shows me at which step of the pipeline I am
- Filming the video
- After I filmed my video I plug in my SD card and run a command which copies the files over
( When I film the intro I always press pause and record again so the pre-intro will be a seperate file )
- A cronjob at night checks the directory if it finds files in there it starts the pre-edit phase
- then the automation creates an automatic backup and starts working on the video files
- PRE-EDIT
- Pre-Edit runs at night so it does not make my Workstation slow during the day
- first it converts dual-mono into stereo ( just in case I messed up mic settings again )
- Then it forces CFR and conforms the file for editing so all video files have the same specs
- Then it removes all silences ( I do talking videos – so longer silences are mostly footage I don’t need )
- Then a script checks for audio peaks in the file
- I can cahnge variables for how many peaks per minute and the peak threshold if it needs adjustment
- the timestamps for the peaks get written into a text file
- then a script takes the timestamps of the peaks and adds crash zooms and slowly zooms back in
- then drops some stuff like RTMD Streams of the file
- then it adds a corner logo and watermark
- the video file is really only re-encoded once to avoid quality loss
- This will be done to every file in the directory
- After that all the files will be merged
- Pre-Intro -> Intro -> Video Footage -> Outro
- Then it will create a proxy file, copies everything and symlinks stuff for me
- Whatsapp Bot notfies me if the pre-edit worked or failed
- Editing
- Now comes the manual labour
- POST-EDIT
- Post-Edit works the same as Pre-Edit
- Files in directory? go for it!
- At this point this just upscales the video for upload
- And then prepares all the assets and meta data
- Publishing
- I run the publish command
- Now some checks get executed if I haven’t forgot anything
- Now a script collects everything from the environment and files
- hashtags, keywords, thumbnail, playlist, video description, etc
- Upload is done via the youtube API -> everything is automatically added
- Video gets published on my blog and on my creator hub with SEO optimized text
- Video gets published on all social media channels with hashtags
- Again Whatsapp bot notfying me and giving me links and hashtags for manual posting
Everything is done with python, zsh scripts and a lot of ffmpeg.
I also have a meme blog where I automate my shitposts but that’s another story.
Even though I totally know that I am over-engineering this like a crazy nerd,
I will still continue to improve and iterate and add to it.
Because this is super fun and it makes work super low friction.
I can make videos faster and I am still improving and I have fun doing it,
because so much of the process is automated.
Anyway I though you might be interested.
