Youtube is a great way to grow your career or personal brand. However, most people who would love to be Youtubers never start their Youtube careers, and even those who do drop off and don't stick to it. Why?

Clearly, something separates those who succeed at Youtube from those who don't. To find that factor, I interviewed six content creators, scoured content creator discussion forums, and tracked down the data on when Youtubers often drop off the map.

The same pattern kept showing up. Aspiring Youtubers either dropped off early on (3-7 videos in), when Youtube began to feel like too much work for too little value-- or later on (perhaps 20+ videos in), when the ambiguity of not knowing what might be a hitleads to burnout and fatigue.

That led me to formulate two personas:

For these personas, feedback was critical. Creators often just need a tiny nudge: from fans, brands, or fellow creators who help them through a tough spot, thank them for adding value, or motivate them to keep going.

Young, naive me envisioned Swirl as an all-in-one platform for creators to get feedback on everything. To this end, I worked on my value proposition, information architecture, wireframes, and prototypes.

I was lucky -- I pitched my final output to the judges and won, probably because I had such a distinct and expansive concept.

If you want to see what a seventeen-year-old had up her sleeve within her first month of learning UX, here's the deck and pitch.

Despite the veneer of victory, I knew that Swirl wasn't battle-tested. In fact, the product was bloated with features, without adding much real value.

This project was good for a short sprint, but it had major shortcomings. In a future iteration of this product, I would do many things differently and take the following limitations of the current product into consideration.