He published eleven videos in four months, all about shooting video. Then someone sent him a message with a simple question: who are you making these for? And he answered: anyone interested in filming.
That answer explains the state of his channel. His videos were accurate, well organised and nicely shot, and they belonged to nobody in particular. A beginner found them too detailed, a professional found them obvious, and the people in the middle had no idea the channel was for them.
"Anyone interested" means, in practice, nobody. And this is not a marketing problem but a decision problem: if you do not know who you are talking to, you cannot settle anything in the script, the title, or the length.
The mistake: describing a bracket instead of a person
Most people who try to define their audience write something like this: men and women aged 18 to 35, interested in travel and filming, in Egypt and the Gulf.
That is a statistical description and it gives you nothing. Read it again and ask yourself: does this help me choose my next video's subject? Does it tell me how many minutes it should run? Does it tell me which word to open with? No.
The useful description is of one person in one situation. For example: someone who bought a camera two months ago, has used it four times, found the picture worse than he expected, cannot tell whether the problem is him or the camera, and searches at night for an answer before he accepts that he wasted his money.
That description settles decisions immediately. It tells you the video opens by naming the problem rather than with an introduction, that the jargon gets explained, and that a comparison between camera models is not what he needs right now.
Three questions that write the description for you
Sit for twenty minutes and answer in full sentences:
1. What is he trying to do? Not what he likes, but what he wants to get done: publish a first video, get clean audio, travel and come back with a film.
2. What is stopping him? The real obstacle: missing knowledge, fear, disorganisation, or too many options. That obstacle is the subject of your videos.
3. Where is he looking now? What does he type into the search box, in his own words? This question connects your audience to what we covered in How do people find your videos in search?.
Then compress all three into one sentence in this shape: I make videos that help someone who wants (this) to do (that) without (the obstacle).
One sentence that settles five decisions
The sentence you wrote is not a slogan to hang on a wall. It is a tool you use on every video:
| The decision | How the sentence settles it |
|---|---|
| The video's subject | Does this bring that person closer to his goal? If not, the idea waits, however entertaining it is |
| The first ten seconds | You open with the obstacle you know he is in, not by introducing yourself |
| The level of explanation | What this person knows, you do not explain; what he does not know, you do not skip |
| The length | As long as he needs to be able to do the thing, and no longer |
| Title and thumbnail | In his words, not in the professional's term |
That is the practical reason to define an audience: not to please an algorithm, but to save yourself hours of hesitation on every one of those decisions.
The real fear: not boxing yourself in
What stops most beginners from narrowing down is a reasonable fear: if I say I make videos for beginners in filming, am I stuck there forever?
No, for two reasons. The first is that narrowing down early is an openly temporary choice: your sentence holds for ten videos, then you revise it. The second is that a channel widens naturally along with the people watching it, so whoever started with you as a beginner will be at another level a year later, and your videos travel with him.
Widening has two routes: widening the level with the same audience, or widening the subject to a different audience. The second route is the one that needs calculation, and that is what we covered in A second channel: when do you start one?.
How to test the description across ten videos
The description you wrote on paper is a hypothesis, and the videos are the test. The plan in Your first ten videos is the natural place to run that test.
After ten videos, read three things:
- The comments and the questions. Questions that repeat tell you who actually reached you, and at what level. You may find you are writing for a beginner while people halfway along are the ones arriving.
- The videos that held up. Two of the ten will outperform the rest. Ask: what do those two have in common in terms of the person they served?
- The videos that found nobody. Before blaming the idea, go through Why is nobody watching your videos?, because sometimes the idea is right and the problem is in the title or the first minute.
Then rewrite the sentence with what you learned, and run another ten videos.
Four signs your description is still vague
- You use phrases like "everyone who loves" or "anybody interested".
- You cannot tell one specific story about this person.
- Your ideas would fit any channel in your field.
- When someone asks what you make, you answer with the subject alone: "videos about filming", with no mention of who you serve.
The opposite sign is that you have started turning ideas down, saying: that is a good idea, but it is not for the person I am talking to. Refusal is the proof of clarity.
What none of this requires
You do not need a survey, or market research, or to wait until you have an audience to ask. In the beginning the person closest to your description is you, one or two years ago, and whatever you were looking for and could not find explained in your own language. That is the most honest source you have right now.
The things you actually need to start are few, and we set them out in What do you actually need to start a channel?. This sentence, written in twenty minutes, is one of them, the cheapest of them, and the one with the most effect on everything that comes after.