I treated a hobby creator project like a One-Man SaaS startup and it was super fun and still is.

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.