🛠️ All The Tools You Need as a YouTuber

How to YouTube #22

Hey YouTubers,

This week I thought I’d share a simple list of all the YouTube tools that I use on a weekly basis.

There’s a lot of stuff available to YouTubers and creators out there, but I spend more time than most evaluating what’s worthwhile. Hopefully this will save you some time.

Some of it’s paid, but I’ll share a list of what I’d recommend using or buying as a smaller/solo YouTuber at the end.

Canva & Photoshop (Paid)

Canva and Photoshop are probably the highest ROI subscriptions that you could have as a YouTuber, because you need one of them to make thumbnails.

It can take a while to learn how to use either of them, but both are good. The benefit of Canva is that it’s more user friendly, $10 a month cheaper, and I actually think there’s a lot to be said for using it over Photoshop (as I touch on in this video).

Photoshop is obviously more of a power tool and is necessary for extensive photo manipulation, but Canva can get you a lot of the way there.

Notion (Free)

Notion is the other no brainer tool for YouTubers. If not Notion, some kind of project management tool that’s similar to help you have a system for video creation.

Ali outlined his Notion workflow in this YouTube video 4 years ago, and it’s basically the same process we use today.

Notion is much better now and has some new features, but most of the functionality comes from those features that he talks about in that video.

Frame.io (Paid)

Frame.io is the tool we use to review videos that have been edited before uploading them to YouTube.

Our editors will upload it there first and then we’ll leave comments on Frame for things that need changing. It still seems to be the best tool for this, but if anyone has any other suggestions, let me know!

1of10.com (Free & Paid)

This is a very useful tool that helps you find outlier video ideas. It’s not cheap, so it’s only worth it if you have money to spend or a big enough channel, but I do use it quite frequently. You can use my affiliate link here.

They also have a great free chrome extension which allows you to preview thumbnails directly on the YouTube homepage. It means you can see exactly what your video might look like before you post it. I use this a lot.

CreatorML Chrome Extension (Free)

I use this tool surprisingly frequently. It gives you a transcript of the whole video which you can copy or search through, an AI summary of the video, the view trajectory graph and title and thumbnail changes that have been made to the video.

It’s incredible helpful, and I actually use all 4 of those features on a semi regular basis. You can also download the thumbnail of any video by clicking on it in the sidebar.

Viewstats (Free)

This website allows you to analyse other channels and find a lot of data about other channels.

For example, on the page above (link here) you can see all the information about Ali’s channel. I can tell you personally that all the numbers, including the revenue ones, are pretty accurate (no, of course I never dream of having that kind of adsense rolling in each month, that wouldn’t be professional).

Creator Hooks Pro (Free & Paid)

Creator Hooks is mostly known for it’s great newsletter which share viral title formulas each week. But it also has a paid tool which helps you generate titles for your channel based off those formulas. I don’t use it that extensively, but it is good for title and video ideation.

Thumbnail Test (Paid)

This website allows you to A/B test your thumbnails. I won’t go too much into because I’ve written a longer post here, but it’s currently the best A/B test tool on the market.

Google Drive (Paid)

I’m only mentioning this because I did used to wonder how bigger channels managed their video files. We record onto an SD card and then upload to Google Drive, same as everyone else!

🛠️ What does this mean for you?

Right, so all these tools might seem overwhelming.

The wrong thing to do right now would be to assume that you need all of them and buy subscriptions to everything. I’m sharing them so that you feel like you know everything and there are no secrets, not because I recommend them for everyone.

If I was a YouTuber with less than 10,000 subs (I am too with this channel!) and not making much money, I’d have these tools:

1. Canva for thumbnails.

2. The 1of10 chrome extension to preview thumbnails before posting.

3. Notion for video/project management.

4. Frame.io to review videos with an editor.

5. Google Drive for file storage.

That’s it. There’s nothing more you need, and all that would cost around ~$30 per month. If you’re editing your own videos, you’ll want Premiere Pro ($20/month) or Final Cut Pro ($300 once) but for information based channels, in 99% of cases you don’t need to be doing your own editing. But more on that another time.

Let me know if this was useful and if there’s anything else you’d like to know about by replying to this email or even better, commenting on the Substack post.

Have an epic week making videos!

Tintin 🧑‍💻

The YouTube Tin

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