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What is Scrimba?

Scrimba (YC S20) is a coding course platform with over 120K monthly active students. It's based on a new video format that makes the screencasts fully interactive for students, and easier to create for teachers.

What makes Scrimba special is their mission to offer a bootcamp-like coding experience for the monthly price of a gym membership.

What is the Scrimba YouTube?

On the Scrimba YouTube, I plan, write, record, and sometimes edit videos to help viewers learn to code and get their first job in tech.

Apart from producing my own videos (you can watch some linked below!) my role is to support the team to be modern video creators as well. For example, by offering advice on scripts and thumbnails, provisioning recording equipment, and facilitating professional video editing.

As a team effort, the Scrimba channel generated just shy of 1m views and 21K subscribers in the last 12 months!

Here are some of my videos with the most views (and one personal favourite on the rise at the bottom!) to give you a sense of my work and what the Scrimba channel is all about:

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Key accomplishments & responsibilities

Here are my key accomplishments to date,

  • 🏆 Write, record, and produce 30 videos, generating 360K views and 5.6K subscribers in the last 12 months
  • 🏆 Create videos that help developers get jobs, fufilling Scrimba's mission to offer a bootcamp-like experience and strengthening PMF
  • 🏆 ​​Collaborate with the design team to establish a distinct and eye-catching brand identity for the Scrimba YouTube
  • 🏆 Overhaul thumbnails and increase CTR from 1.2% to 3.5%
  • 🏆 Identify live streams as a successful medium to engage and attract new students
  • 🏆 Collaborate with teachers to write and edit compelling intros for their courses. Courses exported to the FreeCodeCamp YouTube channel have been viewed 5m times in 12 months
  • 🏆 Hire and collaborate with a senior-level video editor
  • 🏆 Develop reusable assets like animations and music beds we use to produce branded videos more efficiently

In my role as Content Lead, it’s my responsibility to:

  • Support team to produce quality videos of their own. For example, by setting them up with recording equipment, facilitating the editing, coaching them to feel confident on camera, and offering my expertise on how to drive engagement on YouTube
  • Efficiently adapt research from the Scrimba blog and transcripts from the Scrimba pod to produce new videos
  • Remix videos into short-form social media content (e.g. YouTube shorts) when appropiate
  • Report on business impact to the founders monthly

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The business problem

Scrimba offers an interactive code screencast format that encourages learners to get hands-on. This format is superior to traditional videos in every way, but not everyone has heard about the power of Scrimba yet.

To reach new students and spread the word, we have to meet them where they’re at and that's YouTube!

Chances are, if someone is learning on YouTube, they enjoy learning with videos and will get along with Scrimba. This made YouTube a promising acquisiton channel from the beginning.

Further, Scrimba’s overarching mission is to offer the same experience as a $15K bootcamp for $30 a month. A bold mission by any measure! This is because, at a bootcamp, you don’t "just” get the educational materials. You get access to teaching assistants/career coaches as well. This isn't something Scrimba can reasonably offer while only charging a few bucks a month. To fulfil this mission and strengthen product-market fit, Scrimba and I would have to find a different way to offer students support at scale.

To help students achieve the same career sucess they could find at a bootcamp, I set out to produce top-tier videos that support existing students while also acquiring new ones with compelling title, thumbnails, and hooks.

Technologies I use

  • Adobe Premiere Video editing
  • OBS Streaming
  • Stream Yard Streaming with guest
  • Figma YouTube thumbnails
  • SocialBlade Analytics
  • TubeBuddy Analytics
  • YouTube Studio Analaytics

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  • Everything I know about designing clickable thumbnails
  • Reviewing Ali Abdaal's YouTube Academy