Hey Eman, there are definitely not enough product designers on YouTube, the more the better. Here’s my two cents for what they’re worth:
Product designers are well known for being perfectionists, but as long as you get the basics, good sound and interesting imagery, story etc, YouTube is fairly forgiving. As you’ve found, getting good narration without ums and eeerrrrs is really hard, it really slows things down with take after take, or lots of editing if you try and get it perfect. So I wouldn’t worry about a few slip ups. I found I just can’t naturally say what I want to off the top of my head, I have to have it written down. If I’m doing a piece to camera, I use an iPad with the Teleprompter Pro app. I built a Teleprompter from a picture frame and black T-shirt, which works fine and cost next to nothing. There are videos on YouTube about it.
I also write all my scripts on iPad which I can copy straight into the Teleprompter app. After uploading to YouTube, I import the same script as a transcript into YouTube, so every video has subtitles, this allows YouTube to rank your videos more easily and more highly. The description is also important for searches and it’s worth putting in lots of effort on this, there is plenty of advice out there.
Good sound is really important. I started off using my cameras microphone, which was fine for a while, until I got lots of complaints, sound is really effected by the room, an empty room means the sound bounces around, so the fuller the room with soft furnishings, the better. low battery also has an effect. I bought a zoom h1 and a good microphone (rode) which set me back about 160 bucks. It was a big investment, but well worth it. So I record my image and sound separately and combine when editing. I thought it would be a real ball ache, but it’s actually fairly easy and makes much much better quality.
If you come up with an idea, you might not want to search YouTube to see if it’s been done, you will never do it in the same way and seeing other videos can put you off and really effect your output, a trap I often fall into. There are over 1000 videos on making a DIY camera stabiliser for example, but I still wanted to make one. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
One of the biggest things to grow your subscriber list and something I can’t do, is to regularly release videos, if you can consistently release a video every Friday for example, this will help increase subscribers. If you’re planning a campaign, it maybe worth having several Videos ready to go before you release the first one, unless you can make them really quickly.
I think the reason there are not many other product designers making YouTube videos is that it’s hard enough designing and making an object, but having to stop and film it, edit etc, doubles the time it takes. Stopping to frame the shot, make sure it’s in focus, press record, drill the hole or what ever action your doing, stop, move the tripod etc takes much longer, than just drilling the hole and getting on with it, so if you have a friend who’s willing to help, this will be invaluable. Adam Savage in Tested is lucky enough to have this. I recently watched him making a sword prop from hell boy, having a camera man who also asks questions saves a heap of time.
I make all my music in GarageBand on iPad, which is really easy, but there are lots of royalty free sites out there, but not many tunes that fit what I’ve made, so sometimes it’s a lot easier to find the piece of music first and edit the footage to fit than the other way around.
My final suggestion is if you don’t already have one, buy a cheap photography reflector from Amazon, it will make a huge difference to the quality of your videos by getting more light on the scene.
Looking forward to seeing what you produce. PT