📅 Monday, 22-12-25

I have a gift for you..

1 - the realisation

I was flying over the Alps when I did the maths.

A fully packed Airbus A320 - the plane I was on - holds about 180 people.

This year over 2,000 people subscribed to this newsletter.

That's 11 planes !! 🤯

This stunned me even more than the view from my window, which was epic...

2 - the problem

Everyone of you came from my YouTube channel.

Which is still a small, work in progress, channel.

I'm trying to develop my voice, my style, find my niche and understand my value.

It's a hard feat, especially considering that slop and low effort content is so prevalent.

I need to surround myself of high quality content if I want to improve on my own YouTube journey.

I only want to watch creators who treat content as an art-form to be treated with care and love for the craft.

Those are the creators I want to be influenced by, but they are hard to find...

I call them "Hidden Gems" for this reason.

So I've been working on a fix ... 🤓

3 - the struggle

First I started a note, keeping track of all these "Hidden Gems" that I discover along the way.

To be clear, a "Hidden Gem" for me is a creator that:

• has less than 100k subscribers
• treats content like it were Art
• uploads somewhat consistently

So this means they are creators that (1) haven't yet hit the masses, (2) will make what they deem worthy, not what the algorithm tells them, and (3) are here to stay for the long term, so we can witness their growth.

But still... it was not convenient to use this note.

And it's not a scalable solution.

So I started vibe coding it into a website 👨‍💻

This project became bigger than me very quickly

Why not creating a FREE home for everyone to find and share the best underrated small creators for everyone's benefit?

So I went to work... 👾

4 - the GIFT

Say hello to YouTubeGems.com​

You will find dozens of hand-picked creators with <100k subs who I deem to be true "Hidden Gems" 💎

I will continue to add new ones as I come across them

BUT... (big but)

... I also rely on YOU!

I have added a "Submit your Gem" feature for you to submit to me your favorite creators <100k to be added to the list!

When you do this it will prompt me to personally review the submission and add the channel to the list for everyone's benefit! (make sure you verify your email for the submission to come through, that's how I filter out bots)

Of course there's also dark mode, but I let you discover all its feature here!

Let me be clear: It's early days

There will be bugs, it won't be perfect...

But with your help we can build it into something great ❤️

I hope you appreciate this little Xmas gift and please Respond to this email with any feedback / feature request / bug report / or even just to say hi!

I want us all to share the love for "those who care"

Have a strong week
🫶

and if I don't hear from you earlier, Merry Christmas!

🎅

Massa

​
​P.S.
​Feel free to share YouTubeGems.com
It should be able to cope with quite some traffic before I'm capped
For who doesn't know, I'm a self taught developer, so I'm not very good... It would actually be a welcomed challenge (and a wonderful gift) to be faced with the problem of too much traffic on the site!
Love xx