What is the Mayuko Inoue key to success?

Recorded January 15th 2021 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

You worked on some massive iOS projects for some big companies, you also have a CS degree, and at the same time managed to amass a YouTube channel with almost 400,000 subscribers. How do you manage it all?

Mayuko Inoue: Oh, boy. I've never had anybody tell my career in that way. And now I'm just like, I'm hyped about my own career! I think it's a mixture of luck and hard work and all the things happening in the way that I want them to. Lots of introspection, lots of therapy, lots of meeting people at the right time. It's a lot of things. Who knows what the one thing was? But yeah, I think it's a lot of things.

Paul Hudson: Well, it has obviously come together very well for you because you’ve hit remarkable success and all absolutely well-deserved on YouTube. You found your area, you found your hotspot and it's really working for you, which is amazing to see.

Mayuko Inoue: Yeah, it's been really interesting. I feel like when people think of tech YouTube, they typically think of people like MKBHD, Sara Dietschy; the gadget reviewers. And so when I came into the YouTube space, there were tech YouTubers in the sense of talking about technology and coding, but a lot of them was pretty purely educational, tutorial-based coding stuff.

"On the internet, you can find your place and your people, and it's a beautiful thing, I think, to be able to have that kind of connection with someone."

My channel is different. I don't do tutorials. I don't teach coding. I know that you are one of the people who I really look to who make really, really incredible coding content. And I look at that and I'm just like, he's doing it. So what can I bring to the table? And the thing that I brought to the table is that I've watched a lot of YouTube. Through that, one of the things that I like about YouTube is that there's a lot of lifestyle content. And by watching YouTubers you feel like you get to know who they are as a person and you get to know all their interests.

I think I was in high school when YouTube got really big and in the neighborhood of the internet and the community that I was in a big part of the YouTube community was the Asian-American YouTuber community. And until that point, I was like, where are they? How do I get to know them? I had my own cultural identity questions of my own.

So seeing these Asian American YouTubers to look up to and feeling like I can be friends with them and seeing what's on their mind, I felt a place of belonging. I carried that all throughout my career. I was just like, yeah, on the internet, you can find your place and your people, and it's a beautiful thing, I think, to be able to have that kind of connection with someone.

"I'm making YouTube content for a younger version of myself, which makes it incredibly easy to think of videos."

So that's what I brought to my YouTube channel. I talk about tech career and life. So it's a lot of lifestyle content with a hint of tech. Sometimes I talk about software engineering career advice that I wish people had told me, or people had told me through my career, going through my four-year degree of computer science and everything throughout.

A lot of it is really I'm making YouTube content for a younger version of myself, which makes it incredibly easy to think of videos because I'm like, what would I liked to have watch? It's been really fun to do. It's been really rewarding. It's very different from coding, obviously, because it requires completely different set of skills, but I've been having a lot of fun. So, and it's brought me here, I think, to this podcast and the show, and I'm endlessly grateful for everything that's happened to this point.

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