The hardest part of starting a devtool channel isn't filming. It's the blank page where the topic list goes.
Most teams solve it by brainstorming, which produces a list of things the team finds interesting. That list is almost never the list of things developers are searching for. Here's where we look instead, in the order we look.
your own drop-off data
Before we film anything for a client, we spend a week reading their docs, building with the product ourselves, and going through their analytics for the pages where people arrive and then leave.
That drop-off is a topic list. Every page with a bad exit rate is a page where a developer got stuck, gave up, and went to do something else. A video that unsticks that exact moment has a guaranteed audience, because you already know people are hitting it.
your support queue
The question a human being had to answer twice this month is a video. The question they've answered nine times is a video you should have made in the spring.
Support tickets are better than keyword tools for this, because the phrasing is real. People don't search the way documentation is written. They search "why is my image not showing" rather than "media library configuration." Use their words in the title.
the setup that everyone gets wrong
Every product has one. The environment variable that isn't in the quickstart. The version mismatch that produces a useless error. The step that works on Mac and not on Linux.
These make excellent short videos because the intent behind the search is desperate. Somebody with a broken build will watch a two-minute video to the end.
the integration your users keep asking for
Not "here's our product." Rather, "here's our product plus the thing they're already using." On Strapi we shipped full builds pairing it with other tools in the stack, and those work because the developer isn't evaluating you in the abstract. They're trying to finish something.
what we shipped, as a shape
Across seven months on one channel the mix ran roughly like this: full builds that take a project from nothing to deployed, short troubleshooting videos aimed at one error, and short walkthroughs of a single feature that the docs cover badly.
That came out at about 13 videos a month. The long builds bring people who are evaluating. The shorts catch people who are already using the product and are stuck. You want both, because they're different people at different moments, and only one of them is ready to hear about your roadmap.
the test for any topic
Would somebody type this into a search box at 11pm with a deploy failing? If yes, film it. If it only makes sense to somebody who already knows what your company does, put it in the newsletter instead.