15 YouTube Shorts, 2,674 views, 1 subscriber: promoting a dev tool without showing my face

Description and use

Fifteen YouTube Shorts yielded 2,674 views and 1 subscriber, yet conversion was minimal. A longer 1:15 video and an honest community post performed better.

Problem

A solo developer wanted to acquire users for a free, open‑source Windows desktop app without showing their face or voice, relying on YouTube Shorts as a low‑cost promotion channel.

Outcome

Shorts generated modest view counts but negligible conversion; the longer 1:15 teaser outperformed all Shorts in view count and retention, and a single honest post on the dev community forum drove the most engagement and feature requests.

Workflow

• Create 15 Shorts (fast, slow, plain) over two weeks
• Upload to YouTube, monitor YouTube Studio metrics
• Track GitHub traffic and subscriber changes
• Analyze retention and view distribution
• Adjust future content strategy based on insights

Evidence

2,674 Shorts views

Source

+1 subscriber from Shorts. One.

Source

GitHub: 21 unique visitors in 14 days, 5 of them from YouTube

Source

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

Source

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.

Source