@bentossell It was a major time investment. It was challenging due to my busy work schedule. I wrote this over a period of months, writing parts of it late at night after work, and even while waiting between flights at the airport as we headed to conventions. I found that as I met with YouTube channel owners, they often had identical problems and much of it was due to a flawed process in the business planning stage. I was constantly having near identical conversations with folks as I consulted for them so I figured I should write a book to make life a little easier on myself because I could now point people to a guidebook.
On the other side of the coin there are many non-creative type people who want to use YouTube for marketing purposes, and they don't understand the audio-visual medium of story-telling very well or what is involved in the production of video content, so I included some basic information on story structure and production techniques as a crash course. Lastly there is a lot of technical stuff, such as how to do keyword research and optimize your videos for discovery, and although these techniques are intuitive to me now it takes a long time to write it out in a way that is straight-forward and easy to understand.
I actually ended up cutting information from the book because it was getting too long. I put the information about applying SCRUM to video production into its own book, and I also put the information about landing sponsorship deals into another. I've also published more comprehensive books on using specific social media platforms for audience building. But 'The Lean Channel' has a lot of the core information for planning the channel and how you are going to grow it into a business.
Makerpad
The Lean Channel: YouTube for Entrepreneurs